China, Germany | featured news

Yong-Hee Kim still can't believe that in a prosperous country like Germany, powdered baby formula would ever be rationed and that she would have to scour shops in the German capital to find the right brand for her 13-month-old son.

An air of cautious optimism hung over Almaty, Kazakstan, on Friday as Western and Iranian negotiators began another round of nuclear talks. The six powers – the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany – met Iranian officials with the aim of settling a decade-long tussle over Tehran's nuclear program.

Germany and France clashed on Wednesday over whether the ECB should take bolder steps to stem the euro zone debt crisis, with Chancellor Angela Merkel issuing one of her starkest warnings yet against fiddling with the central bank's strict inflation-fighting mandate.

An outspoken Chinese writer and government critic has left his homeland for Germany after police repeatedly threatened him with imprisonment to prevent him from publishing any more of his controversial works overseas. Liao Yiwu arrived in Berlin two days ago at the end of a secretive journey that included transfers in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi and Warsaw, Poland, the writer said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

Any accord is unlikely to require the most powerful surplus economies, China and Germany, to make substantial policy changes in the short term.

China has become the world's third-largest economy, surpassing Germany and closing rapidly on Japan, according to government and World Bank figures.