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.

Bonn, Germany - Germany's competition regulator said Friday it was extending a review of the planned takeover by a German company of a Danish sugar maker.

Nordzucker of Braunschweig, Germany, said months ago that it had agreed to purchase the sugar division of Danisco A/S of Denmark, a move that would boost its European sugar market share from 9 to 16 per cent.

Most European sugar production is derived from sugar beets.

Islamabad - Around 30 people, including a suspected al-Qaeda operative, were killed Friday in airstikes carried out by US drones in two districts of Pakistan's tribal region bordering Afghanistan, security officials said.

"A US pilotless aircraft fired two guided missiles on the house of a person named Amanullah in the village of Asori in the Mir Ali sub- district of North Waziristan," said an intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Washington - As US presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama geared up for a final weekend of campaigning, volunteering and television advertisements, voters turned out in droves to cast their ballots early in states across the country.

Both campaigns claimed an edge in the early voting stakes in key battlegrounds including Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and North Carolina, as well as absentee ballots cast in other states.

Prague - A senior US defence official said Friday that plans for placing a US missile defence system in Europe would not slow down even if Czech lawmakers postpone their final decision on the project until after a new US president takes office.

"This threat is going to continue to emerge. That is going to cause the next president, whoever that may be, to have to address that," said US Missile Defence Agency's head, General Henry Obering.

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.