Berlin - A group of artists has refused to participate in an ambitious project to restore the original artwork on the longest remaining strip of the Berlin Wall in a dispute over payment and the way the work is being carried out.

At least 15 of the 86 artists who have been invited to re-paint the images they drew two decades ago are boycotting the project, their spokesman, Bodo Sperling, said Thursday.

Dusseldorf - One of the four men accused of a major Islamist terrorist plot in Germany was sentenced Thursday to two weeks' imprisonment for contempt of court after he refused to stand up when the judges entered the courtroom.

Adem Yilmaz, 30, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany, called out sarcastically, "Thank you very much," when prosecutors applied for the penalty, and he said the same thing when presiding judge Ottmar Breidling threatened to remove him from the court room.

Berlin - An elaborate study of genes from Ice Age and modern horses has shown that the horse was domesticated at least 5,000 years ago in a region known as the Ponto-Caspian steppe, scientists said Thursday.

That region spreads from modern-day Romania through Russia to Kazakhstan.

Ueberlingen, Germany - A lost musical work by composer Robert Schumann has been discovered in a public library in Germany, officials in Ueberlingen near the Swiss border said Thursday.

The single sheet contains a piano composition with the title Ahnung (intuition) which Schumann (1810-1856) probably wrote about 1838 and gave to a friend as a present. It had been known from a list kept by his wife, Clara, but was thought to be gone forever.

Berlin - German doctors have successfully removed an 18-kilogram cancerous tumour from a Saudi woman patient, leaving her weighing only 37 kilograms as she goes into rehabilitation.

Capital Health Hospital Group, a Berlin clinic operator, said Thursday it believed the chondrosarcoma, a tumour growing in the bone of the pelvis, was the biggest ever taken from a patient. It had amounted to almost one third of her body weight.

Rome/Berlin - Investigators in Italy and Germany were worried Thursday about the whereabouts of a German couple who had abandoned three children at a pizza restaurant in northern Italy.

Police continued their search for the 26-year-old mother and her 24-year-old male companion, who have not been seen since telling the children Sunday that they were going outside to smoke a cigarette.