London  - Britain's Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, will pay a visit to Germany and Italy later this month, the royal palace said Monday.

The couple will go to Berlin and Potsdam, the historic Prussian seat of power just outside the German capital. They will also visit the Neue Museum, recently-restored by a British architect, and the Allied Museum in Berlin to mark the 60th anniversary of the Berlin airlift by western wartime allies.

Berlin  - German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent her condolences to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, following Monday's devastating earthquake.

Merkel said she was shocked to learn of the disaster in central Italy that "left many dead and injured as well as rendering countless people homeless."

The chancellor extended her "deepest sympathies" to the families of the victims and wished the injured a speedy recovery.

Strasbourg, France  - Rioters set fire to a five-storey hotel and other buildings in Strasbourg Saturday as left-wing protests against a NATO summit in the French city turned violent.

Fire also gutted a pharmacy, a nearby tourist information office and a disused French customs post in the city near the German border.

Police said 10,000 people had demonstrated against NATO on the French side, most of them peacefully. But because of the mayhem, police scotched plans for another 6,000 activists from the German side to march over the border bridge and join the main rally.

Strasbourg, France  - Many demonstrators came to march for peace, but instead there was violence as masked rioters unleashed an orgy of destruction in Strasbourg on Saturday, burning a hotel, a tourist bureau and a pharmacy.

The scene, the approaches to the Pont de l'Europe road bridge, was just a couple of hundred metres away from a footbridge over the Rhine River where President Nicolas Sarkozy had welcomed the other 27 leaders of NATO to a summit Saturday.

Smiles in the morning. Grim skirmishing in the afternoon.

Strasbourg, France  - Hours of wrangling, and the crucial mediation of US President Barack Obama, allowed NATO to pick a new secretary general and prevent the alliance from suffering an embarassing blow to its image on its 60th birthday.

In the end, the summit's 28 heads of state and government agreed that Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was the right man to replace Jaap de Hoop Scheffer when he steps down at the end of July.

Strasbourg, France - At its 60th birthday celebration in France and Germany, which ended Saturday, NATO welcomed US President Barack Obama, seated two new members and took strides toward sharing the load in its war against the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

The alliance also narrowly avoided a major embarrassment when Turkey agreed, at the last moment, to the appointment of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as its new secretary general.