German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Friday he has hastily scheduled a visit to NATO partner Turkey in a bid to ease rising tensions with Syria.

Westerwelle, who is on a trip to China, said in a statement he would hold talks Saturday with his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu in Istanbul on "the situation in Syria and on the Turkish-Syrian border".

Authorities say a single batch of deep-frozen strawberries appears to have been behind an outbreak of gastroenteritis in eastern Germany that hit more than 11,000 people, mostly children at schools and day-care centers.

The national disease-control center, the Robert Koch Institute, said late Friday that studies showed a strong connection between eating food prepared with the strawberries and the cases of vomiting and diarrhea.

German federal prosecutors on Friday charged a 48-year-old man of dual German-Lebanese nationality alleged to have been spying for Damascus on opponents of the Syrian regime in Germany.

Prosecutors said the man, named only as Mahmoud El. A, was a Syrian secret service operative between April 2007 until his arrest in February 2012.

Germany urged the world community meeting at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Tuesday to stand together to find a way to end the war in Syria and stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.

Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Iran should face tougher economic sanctions targeting its financial, trade, transport and energy sectors to force it to engage in serious negotiations on its alleged weapons program.

German consumers are beginning to feel the pinch, a poll showed on Tuesday, the second danger sign for Europe's top economy in two days after a surprise monthly slump in business confidence.

Consumer confidence in Germany is stagnating, market research company GfK said, hard on the heels of data showing the eurozone crisis had pushed down business confidence, sparking recession alarm bells to ring.

Britain, France and Germany urged their European Union partners "to further step up the pressure" on Iran by agreeing new sanctions to undermine its nuclear drive, in a joint letter seen by Agence France Presse on Monday.

Foreign ministers of the three nations called on their EU counterparts to quickly agree punitive action in the areas of energy, finance, trade and transportation, with sanctions set to be formally adopted October 15.

Around 1,500 people staged a peaceful protest in the western German city of Dortmund Saturday against a film mocking the Prophet Mohammed that has enraged Muslims around the world, police said.

A police spokesman said the demonstrators, including many families with children, marched through the city center and ended the protest with a rally.

Spain needs less money for recapitalizing its banks than widely believed, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Thursday.

"The number is lower than what was feared initially by the European and by the Spaniards," Lagarde told the Journal.

Two masked armed thieves who robbed a shop in Germany over the weekend got away with a disappointing booty: one pink piggy bank containing 20 euro cents ($0.26) and two bars of chocolate.

Police in the western German city of Duesseldorf said the two robbers fled in panic when the alarm was raised, managing only to grab what was to hand.

A German far-right group wants to stage a Berlin screening of the provocative anti-Islamic movie that sparked violent protests across the Muslim world, a report said.

"For us, it's a question of art and freedom of expression," Manfred Rouhs, head of the small "Pro Deutschland" group told weekly news magazine Der Spiegel in its edition due out on Sunday.