German Chancellor Angela Merkel still plans to meet Egypt's president when he visits next month, her spokesman said Wednesday, after Germany's parliament speaker called off his talks citing rights violations.

The parliament speaker, Norbert Lammert, said on Tuesday that he had written to the Egyptian ambassador in Berlin canceling his meeting with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi due to human rights abuses.

Germany's nearly 1,800 banks are being forced to rethink their business models in the face of  persistently low level of interest rates and weak profitability. 

"It's an incontrovertible fact that the German banking sector is not profitable enough by international standards," Michael Kemmer, head of the BdB federation for private sector banks, told Agence France Presse. 

German prosecutors are investigating a police officer who allegedly abused two refugees, strangling an Afghan man and forcing a Moroccan to eat rotten pork off the floor.

The police officer has been accused of bragging about the brutal assaults in text messages and photos he sent via instant messaging service WhatsApp to his colleagues in the western city of Hanover.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is to visit the site of Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen during her state visit to Germany next month, Buckingham Palace said Sunday.

The 89-year-old queen and her husband Prince Philip will visit what remains of the camp and see a memorial to Anne Frank, the teenage Jewish diarist who died of typhus there in 1945.

Germany's foreign intelligence agency helped the CIA track down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan where U.S. special forces killed the al-Qaida leader, according to a German news report published Sunday.

The BND spy service provided a tip-off that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, with the knowledge of Pakistani security services, according to the Bild am Sonntag report, which was published as the agency is battling heavy criticism in a spy scandal.

Two people were killed and 20 others injured Saturday when a passenger train collided with a tractor trailer carrying manure in northwest Germany, police said. 

The accident happened in the late morning, near Ibbenburen, about 150 kilometers (93 miles) west of Hanover, when the train, which was coming from the northwest city of Osnabruck, struck the trailer at a railway crossing. 

Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil held talks on Friday with visiting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Lebanon's efforts to support the burden of Syrian refugees and the ongoing conflict in the neighboring country.

Bassil said in a press conference after meeting his German counterpart: “Stability in Lebanon lies in lowering the number of Syrian refugees, backing the army, and holding presidential and parliamentary elections.”

The presidents of Israel and Germany warned Tuesday of growing anti-Semitism as they marked half a century of diplomatic ties, 70 years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust.

"I am very worried. Worldwide anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish slogans are on the rise," said Israel's President Reuven Rivlin, who was on a state visit to Berlin to mark the anniversary of bilateral relations.

Israel on Monday signed a deal to buy four navy patrol boats from Germany's ThyssenKrupp to protect its offshore gas installations, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said.

The deal, valued at 430 million euros ($480 million), will significantly improve the navy's ability to protect natural gas fields in the Mediterranean.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday rallied thousands of supporters in Germany, weeks before his Islamic-rooted party will contest June parliamentary elections.

"The ballot box is your weapon," Erdogan told the crowd of over 14,000, who waved Turkish flags and shouted "We love you Erdogan, we are proud of you!" national news agency DPA reported.