Beijing  - A German journalist was picked up by police Friday while talking to families of the victims of May's earthquake in the southern Chinese province of Sichuan and ordered out of the quake zone.

"I was instructed that I'm not allowed to be here," Henrik Bork, a correspondent for the Munich-based Sueddeutsche Zeitung, said by telephone from Yingxiu, which was destroyed by the May 12 quake.

Washington  - Asylum seekers in the United States normally come from places like Iran, Myanmar or Africa. But Uwe Romeike is an unusual case.

The 37-year-old's home is in an idyllic German village of 3,000 outside Stuttgart, more known for its peaceful surroundings than political persecution.

"I feel politically persecuted," he said in an interview in German from his new home in Tennessee, where he fled to several months ago with his wife and five children, aged 3 to 11.

Kleve, Germany - German police charged Thursday that the grisly death of a 20-year-old ethnic Kurdish woman had been an "honour killing," and that her brother had confessed to the crime.

Germans have been outraged at a recent series of execution-style honour killings of young women by immigrant families.

Berlin - Dignitaries gathered Thursday evening in Berlin for the formal handover of a valuable collection of traditional Japanese art to the German capital's Museum of Asian Art.

Berlin-born collector Klaus F Naumann, who lives in Tokyo, has agreed to donate 100 paintings and ceramic art items dating from the 6th to the 19th centuries to the museum, which has been exhibiting them as loans since 2000.

In addition, he is selling the museum 55 East Asian lacquerware items from his collection.

Lausanne, Switzerland  - A German equestrian team rider whose horse was tested positive for a banned substance at the Beijing Olympics has had his ban increased from four to eight months by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The Lausanne-based CAS upheld an appeal by the German equestrian federation to increase the suspension on Christian Ahlmann after the international equestrian federation FEI had banned the rider for four months.

Ahlmann had appealed for the ban to be reduced to three months.