Herat, Afghanistan - Surrounded by tight security, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived Friday in Afghanistan for a surprise visit.

Steinmeier, who is expected to stay several days in the country, arrived Friday morning in the western Afghanistan city of Herat in a German military plane.

It is Steinmeier's third visit to Afghanistan.

Germany currently has 3,500 troops stationed in the war-torn country and is under pressure from NATO allies to increase the presence by 1,000 soldiers by this autumn.

Moscow/ Tbilisi, Georgia  - German Foreign Minister Frank- Walter Steinmeier arrived in Tbilisi on Thursday in an effort to revive peace talks over simmering conflicts in Georgia's rebel regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

"We don't have any illusions about simple answers, but we cannot stand by without acting on this conflict. That would be irresponsible," Steinmeier told journalist on the flight over.

Steinmeier's task will be to align the views from Georgia with the demands of Moscow and the Russian-backed separatist regions.

Berlin- German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski handed out school-leaving certificates at the German town of Loecknitz on the border with Poland Saturday.

The school, which conducts classes in both languages, has existed since 1995 and currently has 421 pupils.

"The River Oder marking the German-Polish border no longer has a dividing function," Steinmeier said after talking to the pupils, as well as the residents from both communities.

Berlin - Speaking a day after Germa

Berlin - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier welcomed the latest developments in the Middle East on Monday, a day before Berlin hosts a ministerial conference on Palestinian security.

There were good reasons to support the positive developments of recent weeks, he said in reference to the Palestinian-Israeli truce in the Gaza Strip and peace talks between the Jewish state and Syria.

At the same time, there was a need for caution because past efforts towards achieving a Mideast solution had failed to bear fruit, Steinmeier said in a television interview.

Berlin - Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier Thursday strongly denied German involvement in flights arranged by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to transport terrorist suspects across Europe.

Speaking before appearing for the fourth time before a parliamentary commission probing the involvement of the German intelligence service in US detentions of terrorist suspects, Steinmeier described allegations that Germany had known of the flights as "crass nonsense."