Amazon workers in Germany stage strike

BERLIN (AP) — A union representing workers at Amazon in Germany says members are striking in a push for higher wages from the online retailer.

The ver.di union said Tuesday it is urging Amazon to adopt wage agreements similar to those governing retail and mail-order workers. The union says those agreements include Christmas bonuses and extra pay for working nights, Sundays and holidays and could mean as much as 9,000 euros ($11,700) more annually for Amazon workers.

Amazon says its distribution warehouses in Germany are logistical centers, and employees are already paid on the upper end of what workers in the logistical industry earn.

Ver.di represents some 3,300 employees at Amazon's Bad Hersfeld center and another 2,000 in Leipzig and says both sites will take part in the one-day warning strike.

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Germany riveted at start of neo-Nazi murder trial

By Alexandra Hudson

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - The surviving member of a neo-Nazi cell blamed for a series of racist murders that scandalized Germany and shamed its authorities goes on trial on Monday in one of the most anticipated court cases in recent German history.

The chance discovery of the gang, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which had gone undetected for more than a decade, has forced Germany to acknowledge it has a more militant and dangerous neo-Nazi fringe than previously thought, and exposed staggering intelligence failings.

The trial in Munich will focus on 38-year-old Beate Zschaepe, who is charged with complicity in the murder of eight Turks, a Greek and a policewoman between 2000-2007, as well as two bombings in immigrant areas of Cologne, and 15 bank robberies.

"With its historical, social and political dimensions the NSU trial is one of the most significant of post-war German history," lawyers for the family of the first victim, flower seller Enver Simsek, said in a statement.

The case has profoundly shaken a country that believed it had learned the lessons of its past, and has reopened an uncomfortable debate about whether Germany must do more to tackle the far-right and lingering racist attitudes.

Four others charged with assisting the NSU will sit with Zschaepe on the bench.

DOUBLE SUICIDE

The existence of the gang only came to light in November 2011 when the two men believed to have founded the NSU with Zschaepe, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, committed suicide after a botched bank robbery and set their caravan ablaze in the eastern town of Eisenach.

In the charred vehicle, police found the gun used to murder all 10 victims. They also found a grotesque DVD presenting the NSU and claiming responsibility for the killings. In it the bodies of the murder victims are pictured while a cartoon Pink Panther tots up the number of dead.

After her companions' suicides, Zschaepe is believed to have set fire to a flat she shared with the men in Zwickau, 180 km (110 miles) away, and gone on the run. Four days later she turned herself in to police in her hometown of Jena, saying "I'm the one you are looking for."

For the victims' families the trial will be the first chance to come face to face with Zschaepe, a woman whose troubling, blank expression and resolute silence since her arrest has left people struggling to make sense of her motives.

The trial offers a chance for the woman dubbed "Nazi bride" in the media to break her silence, but few think she will.

Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, wrote to Zschaepe in May 2012, addressing her as "Dear Sister" and urging her to use the trial to spread far-right ideology, according to German media.

Hearings are scheduled into early 2014, and witnesses due to appear include Zschaepe's estranged relatives and the parents of Mundlos and Boehnhardt.

FAMILIES' GRIEF

Prosecutors say the gang chose people running small businesses or shops as easy, vulnerable targets, in an attempt to terrify migrants and hound them out of Germany.

Some of the relatives even came under suspicion themselves because police simply did not consider a far-right motive.

"All the relatives have the huge problem that they were never treated as victims. During the investigations they were either considered suspects, or as relatives of criminals," said lawyer Angelika Lex.

The start of the trial comes as a relief to families, after it was postponed by a fortnight due to the court's poor handling of media access. It initially did not guarantee any Turkish media a courtroom seat, despite the number of Turkish victims.

This prompted a successful complaint by a Turkish newspaper and the Munich court was ordered to redistribute seats, which it did via a lottery.

While judges try Zschaepe and the NSU's suspected accomplices, Germany's lower house of parliament is conducting its own inquiry into the institutional failings.

Germany's patchwork of intelligence agencies are set to undergo reforms, after the inquiry found they failed to share information and neglected the far-right threat. The head of domestic intelligence resigned last July.

The trio had been known to authorities during their teenage years in Jena, for their racist hate crimes and bomb making, but had managed to escape arrest and assume new identities.

(Additional reporting by Reuters television in Munich; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

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Greece, Germany bicker over war reparations issue

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A long-standing debate over whether Germany still owes Greece war reparations stemming from the Nazi occupation erupted anew Thursday in a spat between Greece's foreign minister and Germany's finance minister.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was quoted by German media as suggesting that Greece should focus on reforming its economy and that the issue of war reparations was definitively closed years ago.

"I consider such comments irresponsible. Much more important than misleading people with such stories would be to explain and spell out the reform path," the Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung quoted him as saying in its Thursday edition. "Greece has already accomplished a lot but also still has a longer way ahead of it. One should not divert attention from that."

In an immediate riposte, Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos said the reparations issue was one for international law to determine, stressing it was completely unrelated to Greece's international financial bailout.

Debt-strapped Greece is receiving billions of euros in rescue loans from other European countries and the International Monetary Fund. Germany, the single largest contributor to the bailout, has pressed Greece to take increasingly tough austerity measures that have angered citizens across the country.

"There is no relation, nor can there be, between the (financial) reforms being carried out in Greece and the issue of German reparations," Avramopoulos said in a statement. "Besides, German reparations are an issue that the Greek state brought up many years ago. Whether or not this case is closed is determined by international justice."

The issue of war reparations has been a contentious and legally complicated one for decades. Nazi Germany, which occupied Greece from 1941-44, forced Athens to extend it loans and give up gold reserves. There was also the question of the destruction of infrastructure and compensation claims filed by individuals who survived Nazi atrocities.

Germany in 1960 paid Greece 115 million German marks ($330 million at today's value) and soundly rejects any further calls for reparations, insisting that payment definitively settled all claims.

"Under different agreements, Germany has made reparation and damage payments on a high level. On that backdrop, the government therefore assumes that the question has lost its relevance," Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said Wednesday.

Athens has disputed that German stance for decades but has been reluctant to pursue the matter further in recent years, with Greek-German relations strained due to increasing public frustration over repeated Greek bailouts.

In early 2010, as Greece slid further into its debt morass, then-Prime Minister George Papandreou, a socialist, said while the issue of German World War II reparations had not been definitively resolved, Athens would not raise it during talks to tackle the country's debt crisis.

Late last year, Greece's three-party coalition government, now led by conservative Antonis Samaras, ordered a special state accounting panel to investigate whether Germany still owes war reparations. They finished the secret report last month, sending it to the Foreign Ministry and the state's Legal Council to determine what, if any, action should be taken.

The weekly newspaper To Vima reported the committee had gone through 190,000 pages of documents to compile the 80-page report.

In mid-2011, Greek hopes for compensation were dealt a blow when the European Court of Human Rights dismissed a lawsuit brought by four Greeks who, as children, had survived one of the worst single atrocities in occupied Greece, the killing of 218 people in the village of Distomo.

The court in Strasbourg said it dismissed the case because German courts, which had previously rejected the claim, had properly taken into account national and international law. Germany had argued that postwar agreements had settled reparation cases and that it was entitled to immunity as a state from individual claims.

____

Juergen Baetz in Brussels and David Rising in Berlin contributed.

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France, Germany at odds over lifting Syrian arms embargo

By Adrian Croft and Justyna Pawlak

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - France urged the European Union to look again at lifting an arms embargo on Syria to help rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad, putting it at odds with Germany which said such a step could spread conflict in the region.

Highlighting the different approaches of two of the European Union's heavyweights, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Monday said lifting the arms embargo would help level the playing field in the two-year-old conflict in which 70,000 people have died.

But his German counterpart, Guido Westerwelle, said after a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels that such a move could lead to a proliferation of weapons in the region and spark a proxy war.

France reopened the sensitive issue only days after EU governments had agreed a hard-fought compromise on a limited easing of the arms embargo to help Assad's opponents.

"The question of lifting the arms embargo arises increasingly because there is a clear imbalance between Bashar al-Assad who is supplied by powerful weapons from Iran and Russia and the (opposition) National Coalition which doesn't have these weapons," Fabius said.

"I think this question of the embargo, which was already raised several weeks ago here, will have to be posed again very quickly because we cannot accept such an imbalance which ends in the massacre of an entire population," he told reporters.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are widely believed to be providing weapons to the rebels. The United States says it does not wish to send arms for fear they may find their way to Islamist hardliners who might then use them against Western targets.

Within the EU, Britain, supported by France, has been pushing for easing the arms embargo to help Syrian rebels. But many other EU states have reservations.

UK INCREASES AID

After weeks of wrangling, the EU amended the arms embargo last month to permit the supply of armored vehicles, non-lethal military equipment and technical aid to the Syrian opposition, provided they were intended to protect civilians.

Britain moved quickly to expand the scope of the aid it gives the Syrian opposition, pledging to supply armored vehicles and chemical weapons testing kits.

Westerwelle and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton put the emphasis on helping rebuild rebel-held areas of Syria.

"I am convinced that it is necessary we do more for the reconstruction in the liberated zones," Westerwelle said.

"So the economic and financial embargo, which at the moment hits the whole country, should be handled in a more flexible way and maybe changed so that we can deliver goods for infrastructure, medical assistance, electricity, water," he said.

Ashton said the EU was looking at ways to work with the opposition to restore basic services, such as medical supplies, water purification, power generation and some administrative services.

EU ministers discussed the Syria crisis with U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi, who warned that Syria could end up worse than violence-torn Somalia unless a political settlement is found.

"The real choice in Syria is between a peaceful, political, consensual agreement, and a situation which resembles and is greater than the situation which Somalia knew in the last few years," he told reporters.

(Additional reporting by Luke Baker, Robert-Jan Bartunek and Dominic Evans; Editing by Erica Billingham)

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