Hamburg - Last year's death toll in passenger aviation crashes fell to 598 worldwide, well below the average of the past decades, German analysts said Thursday in Hamburg.
The annual analysis by the private Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC) was published in the German aviation magazine Aero International. It said most of the crashes in 2008 were evidently caused by human error.
Indicating 2008 was a safer year, the analysts said the toll was 153 lower than in 2007, and 259 lower than the 10-year average of death tolls.
Vienna/Hamburg - Best-selling Austrian writer Johannes Mario Simmel died Thursday at the age of 84 in Switzerland, his lawyer said in Hamburg Friday.
With 73 million copies of his 35 novels and novellas printed, Simmel was one of the most successful German-language writers.
But critics regarded the prolific novelist and screenwriter as a popular fiction writer, rather than as a creator of serious literature.
Simmel was born in Vienna on April 24, 1924. While his Jewish father fled to Britain from the Nazis, Simmel spent the war in Austria.
After a career as a reporter, his breakthrough came in 1960 with You Don't Always Have Caviar, a spy novel set in World War II and arguably his most famous book.
Hamburg - There is space for just 160 characters on that little cell phone screen, not much space for recounting disastrous misunderstandings, sleepless nights and awful embarrassments.
Text messages are both a curse and a blessing - above all when they are used in new relationships or to flirt.
Hamburg - Madonna practices yoga and so does Courtney Love. Even the German national football team swears by it.
The word yoga translates from Sanskrit into English roughly as "union with superiors" and originated in India. Through its growing popularity in the United States, it has been making a triumphant advance around the world.
The holistic exercise promises relaxation, flexibility and stability. However, anyone who would like yoga to bring their body, spirit and soul into alignment should pay attention to a few things. This begins with the selection of the right type of yoga the practitioners of which are called yogis.
Hamburg - The unrest in Tibet took the International Olympic Committee by surprise and it could only react with crisis management to the rising tensions around the Beijing Games, IOC president Jacques Rogge said in an interview.
But the Olympic supremo also told Saturday's edition of Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the Games would have been a disaster had the International Olympic Committee openly criticised hosts China over human rights issues instead of conducting a silent diplomacy.
"We achieved the maximum. The Games would have been a fiasco if we had dealt more aggressively with China," said Rogge four months after the Olympics in the Chinese capital.
Hamburg - Despite all the reports of gloom in the car industry, niche cars remain in vogue with a host of elegant cabriolets planned for 2009 emphasizing all the fun of open-top driving with more space, technical features, lighter and efficient engines.
Among the stars are the new Audi A5 four door Roadster, the new BMW Z4 and the Mercedes E-Class Convertible that is hitting the roads later in the year.
Hamburg - Last year's death toll in passenger aviation crashes fell to 598 worldwide, well below the average of the past decades, German analysts said Thursday in Hamburg.
Hamburg - There is space for just 160 characters on that little cell phone screen, not much space for recounting disastrous misunderstandings, sleepless nights and awful embarrassments.
Hamburg - Despite all the reports of gloom in the car industry, niche cars remain in vogue with a host of elegant cabriolets planned for 2009 emphasizing all the fun of open-top driving with more space, technical features, lighter and efficient engines.
