BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s parliament was set to endorse the latest Greek bailout on Monday after Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected both domestic pressure to stop throwing good money after bad and international pleas to boost Europe’s crisis defences.

The world’s leading economies in the G20 piled pressure on Berlin at the weekend to drop opposition to a bigger European bailout fund, telling Europe it must put up extra money if it wanted more help from other countries.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s parliament was almost certain to endorse a second Greek bailout on Monday but Chancellor Angela Merkel was torn between domestic pressure to stop throwing good money after bad and global calls to boost Europe’s crisis defenses.

The world’s leading economies in the G20 piled pressure on Berlin at the weekend to drop opposition to a bigger European bailout fund, telling Europe it must put up extra money if it wanted more help from other countries.

BERLIN, Feb 24 (Reuters) – In case there was any doubt
about the ideology of Germany’s Left Party, its leaders have
brought out a cookbook that includes such favourites as
“anti-Atomic waffles” and Soljanka, a feisty Russian soup that
was popular in communist East Germany.

Hardly subversive. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel admits to
“Ostalgie” (nostalgia for the German Democratic Republic, where
she grew up) when it comes to the soup.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday she would consult the centre-left opposition about a consensus candidate to replace Christian Wulff, who quit over a series of allegations about favours and his private finances.

Merkel hand-picked Wulff, a politician from her Christian Democratic Union (CDU), for the largely ceremonial post of head of state in 2010 after the former International Monetary Fund head Horst Koehler resigned as German president.

BERLIN, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Germany’s conservative
Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday she would consult the
centre-left opposition about a consensus candidate to replace
Christian Wulff, who quit over a series of allegations about
favours and his private finances.

Merkel hand-picked Wulff, a politician from her Christian
Democratic Union (CDU), for the largely ceremonial post of head
of state in 2010 after the former International Monetary Fund
head Horst Koehler resigned as German president.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany is running out of patience with throwing money into the “bottomless pit” of Greece’s debt crisis and any lingering sympathy in Berlin is being undermined by anti-German slogans on the lips of politicians and austerity protesters in Athens.

While officially hailing the Greek parliament’s approval of the savings package required for a new 130 billion-euro bailout,

MUNICH (Reuters) – For six decades, Germany heeded Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s advice to seek “not a German Europe, but a European Germany.”

The euro zone crisis appears to have swept this post-war caution aside. Two years into the debt disaster, Germany looks increasingly confident in the role of economic superpower, pushing its model of fiscal discipline on the European Union.

MUNICH (Reuters) – Arab countries and Turkey joined the West on Sunday in criticizing the Russian-Chinese veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution against President Bashar al-Assad.

Moscow and Beijing vetoed the resolution, which would have expressed the Security Council’s full support for an Arab League plan that would see Assad cede power to a deputy, withdraw troops from cities and make way for democracy.

MUNICH (Reuters) – Russia’s foreign minister demanded on Saturday that a draft U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria be amended to avoid giving the impression that the world body was taking sides in a civil war, but Washington still held out for ‘yes’ vote from Moscow.

Sergei Lavrov warned of a “scandal” if the Security Council voted on the current version on Saturday as planned. He met U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Munich for what one U.S. official called very “vigorous” talks on Syria.

BEIRUT/MUNICH (Reuters) – Syrian forces killed more than 200 people in an assault on the city of Homs, activists said, the worst day of violence in an 11-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, escalating the conflict on the eve of Saturday’s U.N. vote.

The Arab League, Europe and the United States are trying to persuade Assad’s veto-wielding ally Russia to let the Security Council pass a resolution backing an Arab call for Assad to relinquish power. Moscow said passing the resolution without amendments risked “taking sides in a civil war.”