Hanover, Germany - A senior Abu Dhabi official said Wednesday he was scouting for investment opportunities in Germany - but denied that General Motors' European operations with its flagship Opel brand was on his list.

In an interview at the Hanover Fair, a major annual industry show, Mohammed Omar Abdullah of the Abu Dhabi Economic Development Ministry said he was not aware that Abu Dhabi intended to invest in Opel, a volume carmaker based near Frankfurt.

Brussels/Frankfurt - A war of words erupted on Wednesday between the European Union's executive and the head of its largest member's central bank as officials accused one another of "surprising" acts and "misinformed" decisions.

Rome/Berlin - A hunt was on in Germany and Italy on Wednesday for a German couple who abandoned their three children at a pizzeria in northern Italy, officials said Wednesday.

Two boys, aged ten months and six years, and their four-year-old sister were found unsupervised on Sunday evening at a restaurant in the town of Aosta.

The 26-year-old mother and her 24-year-old companion told the children they were going outside to smoke a cigarette and have not been seen since.

Berlin  - German Chancellor Angela Merkel called business and labour leaders to Berlin Wednesday for an economic crisis summit amid a warning that the country could face social unrest if further steps are not taken to tackle the slump in Europe's biggest economy.

The meeting is the latest sign that the global recession is moving to centre stage in the campaign for German elections in September, with Merkel attempting to sharpen her crisis management credentials by also taking a leading role in shaping international moves to address the crisis.

Berlin  - Germany's leading mobile phone operator ruled out Wednesday paying compensation after an embarrassing outage in its network left millions of customers without a service.

T-Mobile has launched an investigation into the computer failure that brought mobile telephone services, including SMS messaging, to a halt for about 3 hours on Tuesday.

The Bonn-based offshoot of the giant German telecoms group Deutsche Telekom AG is also attempting to assess how many of its 40 million German mobile phone customers were hit by the outage.

Berlin - Europe's biggest carmaker Volkswagen AG unveiled plans Wednesday to build a new compact family vehicle in Slovakia.

German-based Volkswagen will invest about 308 million euros (400 million dollars) in building the new model, currently known by its project name, "up".

VW currently builds its Touareg, Skoda Octavia as well as its Audi Q7 in the Slovakian capital Bratislava and employs about 7,800 people in the nation, which has emerged a major hub in the global car industry. Porsche also builds its Cayenne model in Bratislava.