Berlin  - German industrial production fell by an unexpectedly large 1.8 per cent in July, the Ministry of Economics and Technology said Friday, predicting the weak trend could continue in the months ahead.

Economists had predicted a fall of around 0.5 per cent.

The ministry also revised downwards its figure for June, saying production had risen 0.1 per cent on a price-and-seasonally adjusted basis, not 0.2 per cent as previously reported.

"Given the negative development in orders in industry and weakening business sentiment in the production sector over past months, industrial production could also show weak trends in the months ahead," the ministry said.

Karlsruhe, Germany - Three alleged Islamist terrorists, two of them Germans who had converted to Islam, planned bomb attacks on a string of German cities and the main US air base in Germany, federal prosecutors said Friday.

The prosecutors in Karlsruhe named the alleged target cities as Frankfurt, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Munich and Cologne. The US air base at Ramstein near Frankfurt was another potential target, they said.

Police, who had bugged the plotters' communications and surreptitiously confiscated the main ingredient in the explosive, arrested the men a year ago.

Berlin -

Pyongyang - North Korea said it was ready in principle to resume reconciliation talks that it broke off this year with South Korea but made such a development dependent on the South's behaviour, a German lawmaker visiting Pyongyang said Friday.

Hartmut Koschyk, chairman of the German-Korean parliamentary group, met with North Korea's second most powerful leader Friday and said Kim Yong Nam accused South Korean President Lee Myung Bak of brushing off the reconciliation efforts of the past 10 years.

South Korea must, therefore, "send a strong signal," Kim told Koschyk, the German said.

Hamburg - It was called the Embarkation City, and it certainly lived up to its reputation.

Between 1850 and 1939, some 5.2 million European emigrants left their homelands via Hamburg in search of a better life across the Atlantic.

Today, the northern German port's achievement in becoming a Gateway to the New World is remembered by a museum called "BallinStadt - Emigrant World Hamburg."

Berlin- German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed the hope that Serbia would soon make rapid progress in its attempt to join the European Union

(EU), following talks with his Serbian counterpart, Vuk Jeremic, in Berlin Thursday.

But granting EU candidate status to Serbia before the end of the year "would be a bit overambitious," Steinmeier said.