BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel asked Greek President Karolos Papoulias what he thought of the idea of holding a referendum on Greek membership in the euro but did not push it, a journalist who said he overheard their conversation wrote on Saturday.

A Greek government spokesman said Merkel raised the idea in a telephone call on Friday but Berlin swiftly denied that.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Political spouses sometimes provide a spot of glamour. Then there is Joachim Sauer, a professor of theoretical chemistry.

Sauer is the husband of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, arguably the world’s most powerful woman. He never speaks to the media and only rarely appears in public with his wife. He skipped her inauguration in 2005, drawing media wrath for watching the event on TV at his Berlin university. A German newspaper once said he was as “invisible as a molecule.” His surname means “angry” or “sour.”

BERLIN, May 6 (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
conservatives were in danger of being ousted from power in
another German state on Sunday after the opposition Social
Democrats (SPD) said they wanted to form a three-way coalition
with two smaller centre-left parties.

The Christian Democrats’ (CDU) vote fell to 31 percent,
their worst result in the state since 1950, but they were still
just the largest party in the rural region between the Baltic
and North Seas, a projection by Germany’s ARD TV network showed.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Angela Merkel is against economic stimulus programmes to boost growth in Europe but is open to the idea of strengthening the European Investment Bank (EIB), the German chancellor was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

In an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper to appear on Wednesday, Merkel said that she did not believe growth could only be spurred by costly government stimulus measures.

BERLIN (Reuters) – German labor leaders urged May Day demonstrators on Tuesday to fight for big pay rises after a decade of restraint that had seen wages in crisis-hit southern Euro zone nations soar.

The head of the powerful IG-Metall union, demanding a 6.5 percent rise, described an offer of 3 percent over 14 months as a farce. From Hamburg in the north to Stuttgaqrt in the south, the mood of members rallying in sunny weather under red union flags, banging drums and blowing whistles, was combative.

MARATHON, Greece (Reuters) – Georgios Pasayannis was a Greek civil servant for 40 years, and the 73-year-old pensioner voted faithfully for New Democracy throughout, confident his future was safe in the hands of the conservative party.

Now he says he will never cast his ballot again for “those crooks” or their coalition partners, the centre-left PASOK party, since they cut his 1,500 euro per month pension by a third while pushing through tax increases.

ATHENS, April 28 (Reuters) – On Monday, a 38-year-old
geology lecturer hanged himself from a lamp post in Athens and
on the same day a 35-year-old priest jumped to his death off his
balcony in northern Greece. On Wednesday, a 23-year-old student
shot himself in the head.

In a country that has had one of the lowest suicide rates in
the world, a surge in the number of suicides in the wake of an
economic crisis has shocked and gripped the Mediterranean nation
- and its media – before a May 6 election.

CORINTH, Greece (Reuters) – German tourists are in short supply in Greece these days, frightened away by reports of visceral anti-German sentiment in some places, fears of being stranded by strikes and television images of fiery anti-austerity riots.

Who in their right mind, after all, would want to go on holiday to a place where they might be called a Nazi?

CORINTH, Greece, April 24 (Reuters) – German tourists are in
short supply in Greece these days, frightened away by reports of
visceral anti-German sentiment in some places, fears of being
stranded by strikes and television images of fiery
anti-austerity riots.

Who in their right mind, after all, would want to go on
holiday to a place where they might be called a Nazi?

BERLIN/KIEV (Reuters) – A German shipping company ordered its vessel Atlantic Cruiser to turn its transponder back on Monday after the ship suspected of smuggling Iranian arms to Syria switched off the tracking system because its crew feared attack, the firm said on Monday.

The W. Bockstiegel shipping company also said in a statement it had no information about any weapons on board the ship which was originally destined for Syria. Sending weapons to Syria would be in violation of a European Union arms embargo.