Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has postponed an official visit to France this week, the French presidency said Tuesday, as days of deadly clashes brought his rule to the brink of collapse.

Morsi had been due to meet French President Francois Hollande on Friday to discuss France's military intervention in Mali, which he has criticized.

The prospect of a British exit from the European Union appears to have led British tabloid The Sun and its German rival Bild to call a brief truce in their sparring.

Europe's two top-selling newspapers have for years traded largely playful abuse in a bid to keep alive a historic enmity that most of their readers have long since buried.

Commerzbank, Germany's second-biggest bank, said on Thursday it is looking to axe 4,000-6,000 jobs -- or about 10 percent of its workforce -- by 2016.

"As part of our strategic agenda announced in November, Commerzbank is planning to invest more than 2.0 billion euros ($2.7 billion) in core operations, as well as cost savings," a bank spokeswoman told Agence France Presse.

A group of around 150 people gathered in front of the German embassy in Ankara on Tuesday, protesting against the deployment of Patriot missiles near the Syrian border.

Demonstrators chanted slogans, including "Germany, take your Patriots and get out of Turkey!"

Germany and France will seek to paper over tensions from the euro crisis which has propelled Berlin into Europe's driving seat when their leaders meet Monday to mark 50 years since a landmark treaty forged closer ties.

French President Francois Hollande arrived in a snow-bedecked Berlin, officials traveling with him said, and was first due to hold a brief meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel before the two launch into events to fete the Elysee Treaty.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday called a knife-edge defeat in a state poll "painful" and said her party had work to do to shore up support ahead of the September general election.

Merkel's ruling center-right camp lost its decade-long hold on the northeastern state of Lower Saxony by just one seat to the opposition Social Democrats and Greens on Sunday in one of the tightest races in recent memory.

Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday pledged two German Transall military transport planes for the mission against Islamist rebels in Mali, warning that allowing "terrorism" there would endanger Europe.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting with Ivory Coast President and ECOWAS chairman Alassane Ouattara, Merkel said Berlin would make two planes available "in a short timeframe" to ferry African troops into the capital Bamako.

Some 50,000 CDs of Christmas carols sent to households in Germany by a children's charity actually contained the words to pro-Nazi songs sung by the Hitler Youth movement, German public radio NDR reported Sunday.

Spokesman for the SOS Children's Villages charity, Roger Damm, told NDR the CDs could have been hacked by a far-right group.

Germany's foreign minister on Sunday ruled out sending German troops to fight Islamists in Mali and called for a political solution to the violence as French forces joined attacks on the rebels.

Guido Westerwelle said he welcomed "the fact that the Malian army, with the support of France and African states, has managed to stop the Islamists' advance."

A German minister has told a news magazine that youngsters should learn in school more about how to manage their finances to avoid running up debt.

In a country that strongly advocated stepping up national budgetary discipline to fight the eurozone debt crisis, Germany's Consumer Affairs Minister Ilse Aigner told Focus news weekly that the lesson should begin in the classroom.