London - German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy threw down the gauntlet Wednesday and challenged the Group of 20 (G20) big economic powers to agree to tough new reforms for global financial markets.

"The foundations for the new financial architecture is now," said an unusually combative Merkel at a joint press conference with Sarkozy ahead of Thursday's summit in London of the leading industrialized nations and emerging economies.

Berlin  - Ruediger Grube, 57, currently a top executive at car company Daimler, was tipped Wednesday as the German government's choice to head the state-owned railways company Deutsche Bahn.

Sources said Chancellor Angela Merkel and key ministers had agreed late Tuesday to appoint Grube to the hot-seat job, replacing Hartmut Mehdorn, 66, who quit this week after Bahn had admitted to illicit surveillance of its employees.

Hamburg  - Users of YouTube, the online video service, lost access Wednesday to a vast array of contemporary music in Europe's biggest nation after a dispute with a German fees agency escalated.

"This video is not available in your country," said a message when computers connected to the internet in Germany tried for example to open YouTube's Viva la Vida clip by British rock bank Coldplay.

Hamburg - Germany field hockey international Sebastian Draguhn has been banned for one year for a doping rule violation, the nation's hockey federation DHB announced on Wednesday.

The 2006 world champion Draguhn was sanctioned for not being available for an out-of-competition doping test in August 2008. He has the right to appeal the ruling.

Hamburg - Former officials of the now defunct Gerolsteiner cycling team said on Wednesday that Austrian rider Bernhard Kohl showed no indication of using forbidden doping substances.

Then team boss Hans-Michael Holczer said that Kohl was "not even suspicious" until he was found to have used the third generation of the blood booster EPO, known as CERA, at the 2008 Tour de France.

Frankfurt  - The European Central Bank said Wednesday it sold 33.5 tons of gold up to end of March.

At a price of around 28,600 dollars per kilo, the sale fetched an estimated 1 billion dollars.

The ECB said the sale was in full conformity with a 2004 agreement among central banks restricting their annual sales of gold.

Central bank gold stocks are part of their currency reserves.