By Alexandra Hudson

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany will send its top intelligence chiefs to Washington next week to seek answers from the White House on allegations that U.S. security officials tapped the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Merkel has demanded action from President Barack Obama, not just apologetic words, following the accusations that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) accessed tens of thousands of French phone records as well as monitoring her own private phone.

"We are talking to the Americans to clear things up as quickly as possible," the German government's deputy spokesman Georg Streiter said.

"A high level delegation will travel for talks with the White House and National Security Agency to push forward the investigation into the recent allegations," he told a news conference.

Berlin will dispatch the heads of its foreign intelligence agency BND and of its domestic counterpart, the BfV. Merkel's chief of staff Ronald Pofalla, who is responsible for the intelligence services, may also join them.

Speaking at an EU summit on Thursday, Merkel said the alleged bugging had shattered trust with the United States. She demanded Washington agree a "no spying" deal with Berlin and Paris by the end of the year, saying alleged espionage against two of Washington's closest EU allies had to be stopped.

The White House has denied the United States is bugging Merkel, but Washington officials have refused to say whether it did so in the past.

Members of the European Parliament's civil liberties committee said they will also fly to Washington for talks on Monday and explore "possible legal remedies for EU citizens".

The rift over U.S. surveillance tactics first emerged earlier this year and had appeared close to resolution, but Berlin said on Wednesday it has obtained information that the United States may have monitored Merkel's phone.

Earlier this week French newspaper Le Monde reported the NSA had collected tens of thousands of French phone records between December 2012 and January this year.

Only three months ago Merkel's Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich made a similar visit to demand answers in Washington. The need for another trip has left Germany looking like it was duped and brought fierce criticism of Merkel for not taking a tough enough stance.

"In the summer, we received explanations and assurances," Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Thursday. "Whether we can trust these explanations and assurances, that must be examined again."

SENSITIVE SUBJECT

State surveillance is a highly sensitive subject in a country haunted by memories of eavesdropping by the Stasi secret police in communist East Germany, where Merkel grew up.

The European Parliament has already opened an inquiry into the effect on Europe of U.S. intelligence activities revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. It has also led a push for tougher data protection rules and the suspension of a transatlantic data-sharing deal.

The Parliament, with 766 members directly elected from the EU's 28 member states, voted this week in favor of an amended package of laws that would greatly strengthen EU data protection rules that date from 1995.

The rules would restrict how data collected in Europe by firms such as Facebook, Yahoo! and Google is shared with non-EU countries, and impose fines of 100 million euros ($138 million) or more on rule breakers.

(Additional reporting by Charlie Dunmore in Brussels; editing by Luke Baker and David Stamp)

BERLIN - Henry Kissinger once famously quipped that he wished he had a single telephone number for Europe. Apparently, the National Security Agency’s creative solution to the problem was to make it unnecessary to call at all.

This week, revelations that the NSA had tapped German chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal cell phone sparked a major diplomatic kerfuffle, spurring Merkel to call President Barack Obama to demand an explanation as Berlin summoned the American ambassador to lodge a formal protest.

As the alleged U.S. spying continued to make waves on both sides of the Atlantic on Friday, the affair was also spawning a plethora of bugged-phone jokes and general derision in Germany.

Though Obama has been getting his share of the ridicule, much scorn is being directed at Merkel and her apparent outrage over the breach of privacy. That’s because many Germans feel Merkel too blithely put aside concerns about widespread NSA surveillance, largely giving Obama a free pass on the matter during his visit to Berlin in June.

“When an entire population is spied upon, it’s OK. Only when Merkel’s cell is involved does anyone get upset,” said business consultant Philipp Ritz.

Like many Germans, Ritz expressed his contempt on the online message service Twitter, where the use of the hashtag #merkelphone has surged in recent days.

While some mocked the chancellor’s well-known fondness for sending text messages, others took aim at Merkel’s old-school cell phone. “And the chancellor is even using the most modern wireless technology,” wrote one sarcastic Twitter user above an old black-and-white photo of the German leader with a gigantic mobile.

Philipp Wittrock @philwitt Dabei nutzt die Kanzlerin nun wirklich die modernste Mobilfunk-Technik #merkelphone #NSA 3:11 AM - 24 Oct 2013

By late Thursday, the chancellor’s cell even had its own Twitter account.

Drew Portnoy , an American comic in Berlin who does standup in both English and German, said he couldn’t wait to weave the phone affair into his set.

“I was already using the NSA spying to rip on how Americans can’t really speak foreign languages, but the Merkel phone stuff is just ripe for ridicule,” he told Yahoo News. “Like how Obama stops reading the NSA transcript of Merkel’s phone when she starts sexting with [British Prime Minister] David Cameron.”

Merkel apparently opened herself up to American snooping by using an old Nokia phone rather than her official encrypted mobile because it was too slow and complicated, the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on Friday.

“She prefers simple things,” a government source told the newspaper. “She can’t stand slow.”

But the likely dull nature of most of the chancellor’s private conversations has not been lost on even Merkel, who is known for her reserved demeanor and low-key lifestyle.

Attending a European Union summit in Brussels on Thursday, Merkel seemed to wonder why anyone would even want to listen to her phone calls.

“Basically, everybody always hears the same thing from me,” she told reporters.

TOKYO (AP) — An earthquake of magnitude 7.3 struck early Saturday morning off Japan's east coast, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Japan's emergency agencies declared a tsunami warning for the region that includes the crippled Fukushima nuclear site.

Japan's Meteorological Agency issued a 1-meter (3-foot) tsunami warning for a long stretch of Japan's northeastern coast. It put the magnitude of the quake at 7.1. The U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not post warnings for the rest of the Pacific.

There were no immediate reports of damage on land. Japanese television images of harbors showed calm waters.

The quake hit at 2:10 a.m. Saturday Tokyo time (1710 GMT) about 290 kilometers (170 miles) off Fukushima. Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the Fukushima plant, ordered workers near the coast to move to higher ground. Japanese news service Kyodo said there were no signs of trouble at the plant.

The tremor was felt in Tokyo, some 300 miles (480 kilometers) away.

All but two of Japan's 50 reactors have been offline since the March 2011 magnitude-9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami triggered multiple meltdowns and massive radiation leaks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, about 250 kilometers (160 miles) northeast of Tokyo. About 19,000 people were killed.

NASA has compiled a new video showing a 200,000-mile-long “fire” as it rips across the surface of the sun in dramatic fashion.

The eruption is actually a magnetic filament of solar material that erupted across the atmosphere of the sun back in September. The resulting corona appears to be a giant canyon of flames.

NASA physicist David Hathaway explained in an interview with Space Weather that a magnetic filament actually contains cool, dense gas that is suspended above the surface of the sun.

"When you look down on top of them they appear dark because the gas inside is cool compared to the hot photosphere below,” Hathaway said. “But when we see a filament in profile against the dark sky it looks like a giant glowing loop -- these are called prominences and they can be spectacular."

As NASA explained on their Goddard Space Flight Center YouTube page, “In reality, the sun is not made of fire, but of something called plasma: particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields.”

A team of visualizers at Goddard combined two days worth of satellite data originally captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory to create the 2:16 clip. They even added some hypnotic electronic music for anyone who might be taking an early voyage into the weekend.

According to the Goddard Space Flight Center, the red images in the clip represent plasma temperatures of 90,000° F, while the yellow images rise up to 1,000,000° F. Hottest of all are the brown images, which are 1,800,000° F and create the most visible fire like images.

“By comparing this with the other colors, one sees that the two swirling ribbons moving farther away from each other are, in fact, the footprints of the giant magnetic field loops, which are growing and expanding as the filament pulls them upward.”

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