Berlin - Chancellor Angela Merkel is to visit Algeria next week at the head of a German business delegation, her spokesman announced Friday.

Copenhagen - Denmark-based Kurdish television station Roj TV said Friday it had nothing to do with the abduction of German climbers in Turkey.

"That has nothing in the slightest to do with us. We are also not commenting on this issue," the head of the broadcaster in exile, Manouchehr Zonoozi, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The group that abducted the three Germans late Tuesday, the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), said they were taken because the German government had banned Roj TV in Germany at the end of June.

Zonoozi said the ban in Germany was "politically motivated."

Berlin - The planned takeover of Thomas Cook's Condor airline by budget carrier Air Berlin has collapsed, both sides announced Friday, saying they had withdrawn their application to the German comp

Munich - Police said Thursday they had broken up a network of boutique factories in Ge

Berlin - The German government said Thursday it would pledge 100 million euros (157 million dollars) in development aid for Kosovo this year and next when it attends a donors' conference in Brussels on Friday.

In Berlin, the Foreign Ministry said Germany was the second biggest source of foreign aid for Kosovo after the United States, with a focus on energy generation, water supplies and sewage, reforms to public administration and improving vocational training.

It said German officials would tell Prime Minister Hashim Thaci at the meeting, which is being organized by the European Union, that it was vital to concentrate on good government, to make development the priority, and to protect minorities.