The German government will increase this year's growth forecast to 3 percent, up from the previous 1.4 percent, due a stronger than expected recovery, according to the Neue Osnabrucker Zeitung on Saturday.
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) has vowed to fight the Greens should they challenge Klaus Wowereit for the office of Berlin mayor in the election scheduled for next autumn.
The willingness of German states to send policemen to Afghanistan to train locals is dropping, with Brandenburg the first to refuse to send any more people, according to a report in Der Spiegel magazine on Saturday.
The weekly protest against the Stuttgart 21 railway redevelopment programme attracted up to 65,000 people on Friday evening, the biggest demonstration against the €4.1-billion project so far.
The German football team managed to squeeze a 1:0 victory over Belgium on Friday night with a goal in the 51st minute, after a performance which seemed creaky when compared with the stellar performance in the World Cup.
A German fifth division football match was called off on Friday after a pitch invasion by a group of wild boars left the surface in an unusable condition.
