Wellington - The New Zealand government will guarantee wholesale deposits by foreign finance institutions to local banks, Finance Minister Michael Cullen announced Saturday.

Cullen said the move would help facilitate improved access to international funding markets for New Zealand banks.

"While the New Zealand banking system is very sound, we are in an environment where international investors remain risk-averse and where many other governments have guaranteed their banks," he said.

Stuttgart, Germany - Germany's powerful metalworkers union said Friday it would launch at the weekend its biggest campaign of strikes ever for higher pay in manufacturing industry.

At 24-hour-per-day factories, hundreds of workers will skip a shift Saturday.

The union, IG Metall, said it would then ramp up the strikes late Sunday by calling out tens of thousands of workers.

That would idle manufacturing plants of Volkswagen's premium-car division Audi, with 4,000 workers expected to stop working at just one Audi plant, in Ingolstadt.

Berlin - Germany backs a call to boost the size of a European Union relief fund for nations facing balance of payments difficulties, a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel said in Berlin Friday.

A proposal to increase the fund to 20 billion euros (25 billion dollars) was originally made by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The fund exists to lend money to EU members that run short of foreign exchange.

Merkel's spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said the chancellor would back Sarkozy on the issue at an EU summit on November 7 in Brussels.

Nuremberg, Germany - German talks on boosting government spending to offset recession are to continue through the weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday.

Pump-priming is planned by a broad range of western countries as world gloom spreads.

Merkel said, "It's important that such an ambitious plan fits in with the measures by other nations."

Speaking in Nuremberg, she noted that a G20 summit she is to attend in Washington on November 15 would also review how to boost the economies of the emerging markets.

Bucharest - Teachers in Romania have called a series of strikes to press demands for a 50 per cent pay increase approved by parliament, union leaders said Friday.

The teachers plan a day-long stoppage on November 10 and an indefinite strike from November 18 if their demands are not met. Civil servants and doctors say they will join the protest action.

President Traian Basescu has urged the teachers not to go ahead with their strike, saying it could jeopardize parliamentary elections scheduled for November 30.

The president supports the teachers' pay claim, but it is opposed by his political rival, Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu.

Ankara - Turkey has revised upwards its inflation estimates for 2008, with Central Bank Governor Durmus Yilmaz saying recent falls in the Turkish lira amid the global economic crisis had contributed to the rise in inflation.

Speaking in Ankara, Yilmaz said inflation was expected to rise to 11.1 per cent by the end of 2008, an increase of 0.5 percent from mid- year forecasts, and a full 7.1 percentage points higher than the government's initial inflation target for 2008 of 4 per cent.

Yilmaz told reporters that the recent slide in the value of the lira had increased inflationary pressures.