German Chancellor Angela Merkel will hold talks next week with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on bilateral ties and the crisis in Syria, her spokesman said here on Friday.

Erdogan will arrive in Berlin Tuesday to open a new Turkish embassy building with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his German counterpart Guido Westerwelle.

Germany became the fourth country Thursday to ban sales of flu vaccines made by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, following embargoes by Italy, Switzerland and Austria.

Announcing the latest ban, German health authorities said four batches of the Begripal flu vaccine -- also marketed as Agrippal -- and one batch of the Fluad vaccine were no longer for sale.

Germany is planning to warn Britain that an upcoming European summit may be canceled if London insists on vetoing any deal that does not freeze EU spending, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is trying to persuade her British counterpart, Prime Minister David Cameron, to support a compromise capping European Union spending at 1.0 percent of European gross domestic product, the newspaper reported without revealing its sources.

The German economy, Europe's biggest, will see a sharp slowdown in growth at the end of the year, the finance ministry wrote in its monthly report published Monday.

Germany has so far held up to Europe's long-running sovereign debt crisis much better than its eurozone neighbors.

International credit rating agency Moody's said Friday that the outlook for Germany's banking system remains negative owing to intense competition, low interest rates and a weaker environment.

"The outlook for Germany's banking system remains negative," Moody's said in a new Banking System Outlook.

Investor sentiment is cautiously improving in Germany, as fears about a break-up of the euro have eased somewhat in recent weeks, data showed on Tuesday.

Nevertheless, investors' assessment of the current situation in Europe's top economy is worse than it has been since June 2010, the data showed.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Tuesday that Germany is "ready in principle" to host Syrians who have fled the civil war there, but added that it must be done under an international framework.

"Germany is ready in principle to welcome Syrian refugees," he told regional newspaper Rheinische Post.

Europe's foreign ministers will sharply ramp up the pressure on Iran and Syria at talks Monday, while taking a "big step" in Africa by agreeing to assist Mali reconquer its north from rebels and Islamist extremists.

Meeting days before a European Union summit, the bloc's 27 foreign ministers are tipped to agree what a diplomatic source dubbed "one of the toughest packages of sanctions" yet against Tehran over its disputed nuclear program.

Germany is poised to reduce significantly the number of troops it contributes to the NATO-led force in Afghanistan next year, according to a report published on Sunday in Der Spiegel newsweekly.

The current upper limit of 4,900 troops will be slashed to "comfortably under 4,000" when the German government asks parliament in January for a new mandate for the force, Spiegel said.

Germany's foreign minister called Sunday for tougher European Union sanctions against Iran, on the eve of a meeting to decide on harsher measures against Tehran over its disputed nuclear drive.

"Iran has not moved on any of the important questions over the past few months. Therefore, we must increase the sanctions pressure," Guido Westerwelle said in a statement.