Germany on Thursday criticized Republican White House frontrunner Donald Trump's "America first" prescriptions for U.S. foreign policy as doomed to failure in today's globalized world.

In restrained diplomatic remarks, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier described Trump's radical proposed overhaul of U.S. diplomacy and defense policy presented Wednesday as "not without its contradictions".

The founder of Germany's xenophobic and anti-Islamic Pegida movement went on trial Tuesday on hate speech charges for allegedly branding refugees "cattle" and "scum" on social media.

Lutz Bachmann, founder of the far-right "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident" movement, was charged in October with inciting racial hatred through a series of widely-shared Facebook posts.

German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said Monday his country was worried by reports of mounting rights abuses in Egypt, telling reporters in Cairo that freedoms go along with economic development.

Gabriel also praised Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi after a meeting on Sunday, saying at a press conference, "I think you have an impressive president", according to German media.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition agreed Thursday on sweeping measures to spur the integration of migrants and refugees in a "historic" first for a country that long resisted embracing immigration.

The deal, hammered out in seven hours of late-night talks between Merkel's conservative Christian Union bloc and the Social Democrats (SPD), also included plans for new anti-terror legislation.

Germany deported 60 percent more migrants last year than in 2014, the government said Wednesday, with figures from January and February showing that the pace of repatriations further accelerating.

Some 22,369 people were forcibly returned to their countries of origin in 2015, up from 13,851 the previous year.

Germany put a 33-year-old Moroccan on trial for sexual assault Monday, the first man accused over a spate of such attacks at New Year's celebrations that shocked the country.

The defendant, who entered the Duesseldorf courtroom hiding his face under a blue jacket, allegedly groped a woman while he and some 15 to 20 other men encircled and also assaulted her.

Germany said Monday it was reviewing a request by Turkey to prosecute a TV satirist who crudely insulted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on air, amid a bitter row over free speech.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters that Berlin had received a "note verbale", a formal diplomatic protest, from Ankara asking for "criminal proceedings" against celebrity comedian Jan Boehmermann.

German police Friday released an Iraqi and a Nigerian man arrested a day earlier after finding no evidence for their initial suspicion that the two may have planned a jihadist attack.

Prosecutors had said Thursday the 46-year-old Iraqi and the Nigerian, 29, were being held in the Munich area on suspicion they had links with the Islamic State group and may have been planning a "major act of violence".

The first Syrians arrived in Germany from Istanbul on Monday under a controversial EU-Turkey migrant pact, an official from the German federal refugee office told AFP.

The 16 asylum seekers flew into the northern city of Hanover and were to be taken to a shelter about 140 kilometers (90 miles) away. A second group of Syrians was to arrive in Hanover in the early afternoon, the official added.

German police have arrested a 28-year-old Moroccan man whose mobile-phone text messages may link him to one of the Brussels bombers, the news weekly Der Spiegel and ARD TV channel reported Friday.

The man, who had been barred from the European Union's border-free Schengen area, was arrested in Giessen, near Frankfurt, late Wednesday by police who checked his identity at the local railway station, they said.