Berlin - German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck has warned that financial markets face a long crisis, and some German politicians stepped up calls Saturday for pump priming to avert an economic slump.

In remarks to appear Sunday in the newspaper Bild am Sonntag, Steinbrueck said, "The danger of a collapse is still not gone. Any all-clear signal would be wrong."

Moscow - Russian President Dimitry Medvedev met outside Moscow on Saturday with his Belarus counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, for talks focusing on the financial crisis.

A spokeswoman for Medvedev said the two leaders discussed the world financial crisis, with the talks coming a few days after Russia promised a loan of 2 billion dollars to Belarus.

Belarus needs the financial support in order to be able to finance purchases of Russian gas in the coming winter months.

In another development in Minsk, Lukashenko's chancellery office has welcomed a move by the European Union to lift for six months a temporary travel ban which the EU had imposed on Lukashenko and other members of the Belarus government.

Copenhagen - Danish police fired teargas Saturday to disperse hundreds of protesters who tried to break through police cordons at an asylum centre, 25 kilometres north of Copenhagen.

Kabul - Two foreign nationals, a South African and a British, and an Afghan guard were shot dead in the centre of the capital Kabul on Saturday, police said.

Munich - A former foreign minister of Somalia called in an interview published Saturday for foreign navies to crack down on piracy and lock the pirates up.

"They should set up internment camps under extra-territorial jurisdiction," said Abdullahi Sheikh Ismael in an interview with the German news magazine website Focus Online.

He said the camps could be on Somali soil, but the judges would not have to be from Somalia. Navies which caught pirates could decide themselves where to try them.

Ismael, who was speaking in Djibouti, belongs to the legislature of Somalia's interim government and previously held the foreign portfolio.