The U.S. ambassador to Berlin said Thursday that he is unaware of any illegal activity linked to U.S. espionage operations that have sparked a major rift in transatlantic ties.

John Emerson was asked by German public broadcaster ZDF about reports that the National Security Agency conducted mass surveillance of German communications including tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone over several years.

Consumer confidence in Germany appears to be holding up, even though retail sales in Europe's top economy fell for the second month in a row, data showed on Thursday.

"The first survey after the parliamentary elections paints a calm picture," market research company GfK said in a statement.

The head of German foreign intelligence denied Wednesday that Berlin was carrying out bugging operations from its embassy in the United States in a deepening espionage row.

"No telecommunication-intelligence is conducted from the German embassy in Washington," Gerhard Schindler, head of the BND agency, was quoted by Zeit online news site as saying.

Germany on Friday will become the first European country to allow babies born with characteristics of both sexes to be registered as neither male nor female.

Parents will be allowed to leave the field for gender blank on birth certificates, effectively creating a category for indeterminate sex in the public register.

U.S. espionage chiefs turned the tables on European allies in the transatlantic spat over intercepted phone records, saying in many cases it was European agencies -- not the NSA -- that gathered and shared them with America.

They dismissed as "completely false" allegations that American spy agencies had swept up data on millions of phone calls, and said European newspapers that had made those claims did not understand the data they were using to make the allegations.

Countries in northern Europe lashed by a storm that killed 16 people were on Tuesday still struggling with power outages and travel disruptions a day after the tempest.

After gusting winds and heavy rain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and northern Germany began weighing up the damage left in the storm's wake.

Germany should protect former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the former Guardian reporter who broke many of the recent stories about secret U.S. surveillance programs said Monday.

"Germany is precisely one of the countries that has benefited most from Snowden's revelations, from the start," Glenn Greenwald said on ARD public TV, according to a statement.

Decades of mutual trust have been breached and will need repair as a result of mass U.S. eavesdropping on allies, European parliamentarians told a U.S. lawmaker Monday amid a swirling espionage scandal.

U.S. House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers emerged from the one-hour talks to pledge that U.S. lawmakers will travel to Brussels "very, very soon" for another round of meetings.

The German parliament will hold a special session next month to assess the impact of mass U.S. surveillance including the alleged tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel phone, deputies said Monday.

The heads of the parliamentary groups of Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats, the two parties in talks on forming the next German government, agreed to call the debate on November 18, a CDU spokesman said.

The National Security Agency stopped spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders after the White House learned of the snooping, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

President Barack Obama learned of the electronic surveillance in an internal review he ordered at mid-year, the Journal reported, citing unnamed U.S. officials.