German Chancellor Angela Merkel faced a social media storm Thursday after the release of a video showing her awkward interaction with a crying Palestinian girl threatened with deportation.

In a week in which Germany has confronted international criticism for a hard line on debt-mired Greece, Merkel was hit with fresh accusations of coldness, just as others leaped to her defense.

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel will lead a business delegation to Iran from Sunday, his ministry said a day after world powers and Tehran reached a historic nuclear deal.

Gabriel, who is also economy and energy minister, "will travel to Iran from July 19 to 21 with a small delegation of industry and science representatives," a ministry spokeswoman said in a statement to AFP.

Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will visit Cuba for two days from Thursday, Berlin said, following the historic thaw between the communist island-nation and the United States.

Steinmeier will be the first foreign minister of reunified Germany to visit Havana. During the Cold War, the Caribbean nation only had contacts with the former communist East Germany, and no West German foreign minister ever visited.

A German court Wednesday sentenced a former Nazi SS officer known as the "Bookkeeper of Auschwitz" to four years in jail, in what was expected to be one of the last Holocaust trials.

Oskar Groening, 94, sat impassively in the packed courtroom as judge Franz Kompisch said "the defendant is found guilty of accessory to murder in 300,000 legally connected cases" of Jews sent to the gas chambers from May to July 1944.

Iran and major powers headed into another late night of talks Monday on a deal to rein in Tehran's nuclear ambitions, as negotiators struggled to overcome the remaining few obstacles.

The White House said the marathon discussions in Vienna had "made genuine progress" but suggested they would stretch beyond a Monday night deadline.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Friday that his French counterpart Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel had pressed him to ensure partial self-rule for the pro-Russian separatist east.

The rare admission by Ukraine's Western-backed leader marked another sign of European impatience with the fighting that still engulfs the former Soviet republic five months after the signing of a broad truce deal.

Two "courageous" petrol station employees overpowered a gunman suspected of killing two elderly victims in drive-by shootings in southern Germany Friday, officials said.

The two workers stepped in when the suspect pulled over at a petrol station after allegedly gunning down an 82-year-old woman followed later by a male cyclist, 72, they said.

The speaker of the German parliament on Wednesday said the slaughter of indigenous Namibians a century ago constituted a "genocide" that stemmed from a "race war."

Norbert Lammert, writing in a guest column for news weekly Die Zeit, said the Herero and Nama peoples had been systematically targeted for massacre by German imperial troops.

Marathon Iran nuclear talks appeared to be stumbling Monday as foreign ministers grappled to resolve the last hurdles blocking a deal, amid warnings that years of negotiations may fail at the 11th hour.

Foreign ministers from the global powers leading the talks to rein in Iran's suspect nuclear program huddled for the first time with the Iranian delegation during this 10-day stretch of talks in Vienna.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tspiras has "torn down the bridges" between Greece and Europe and new negotiations are "difficult to imagine" after the apparent 'No' vote in the Greek referendum, German deputy chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said on Sunday.

Tsipras and his government are taking Greece down a path of "bitter renunciation and hopelessness," Gabriel told the Tagesspiegel newspaper in the first high-level reaction from the German government.