The leader of Germany's opposition voiced support on Friday for Turkey's full membership of the EU, describing it as a "win-win" for Ankara and Europe.

Turkey's efforts to join the 27-member bloc have stalled in recent years, largely due to its long-running dispute with Cyprus and fierce opposition from other EU states.

French President Francois Hollande and his Russian host Vladimir Putin said Thursday they shared the same objectives on Syria, but there were few signs their talks led to any breakthrough on concrete steps to resolve the conflict.

Hollande said both Russia and France had the same goal to bring peace while avoiding the collapse of Syria but differed in particular on the role of President Bashar Assad in a power transfer.

French President Francois Hollande said Thursday on a visit to Moscow that he believed it would be possible to come to a political decision on the Syrian conflict in the coming weeks.

"I think that in the next few weeks we will manage to find a political solution that will stop the conflict from escalating," Hollande told Echo of Moscow radio station in comments translated into Russian.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday the United States and France were mulling ways to speed up political transition in war-torn Syria, which would be discussed in a "Friends of Syria" meeting in Rome.

"We are examining ways to accelerate the political transition,", Kerry said, addressing a joint press conference with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. He said this would be discussed at the Rome meeting Thursday.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met French President Francois Hollande in Paris on Wednesday to discuss the crisis in Mali on the third leg of a European tour so far dominated by the Syrian conflict.

Kerry, who has hailed France's "successful" mission in Mali, will also hold talks with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and address a joint press conference in the afternoon.

Lebanese leftist militant Georges Abdallah, who has been jailed for nearly three decades in France, on Monday declared a hunger strike in solidarity with Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons, the Lebanon-based, pan-Arab television al-Mayadeen reported on Monday.

More than 4,000 Palestinian prisoners staged a one-day hunger strike on Sunday to protest the death of Palestinian inmate Arafat Jaradat.

French warplanes attacked an Islamist base in north Mali at the weekend, wounding four members of the Arab Movement of the Azawad (MAA), after the extremists clashed with Tuareg rebels, MAA and security sources said Monday.

"Four fighters of the MAA were wounded during bombing by the French air force (on Sunday) against our base at Infara," 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the border with Algeria, Boubacar Ould Taleb, a leader of the MAA, told Agence France Presse in the capital Bamako by telephone.

Horsemeat containing a drug potentially harmful to humans has probably entered the food chain, France announced, as Italy became the latest country to be drawn into the contaminated meat scandal.

In Germany meanwhile, a minister suggested giving products mislabeled as beef products but actually containing horsemeat to the poor.

France and Germany urged the new government in Cyprus on Monday to negotiate a bailout quickly and welcomed the election of rightwinger Nicos Anastasiades as the president of the financially crippled EU state.

The leader of the right-wing Disy party won 57.5 percent of the vote in a second round run-off against communist-backed Stavros Malas, who polled 42.5 percent, to replace the only communist president in the European Union.

French freelance photographer Olivier Voisin, who was seriously wounded in Syria on Thursday, has died of his wounds after surgery in Turkey, the foreign ministry said.

"We confirm his death," a ministry spokeswoman said on Sunday. Voisin, 38, had suffered head and arm injuries from shrapnel when a shell exploded near Idlib in northern Syria.