Nairobi- Pirates on Thursday hijacked a German-owned tanker carrying liquified petroleum gas off the coast of Somalia, a maritime official said.

"The German-owned LPG tanker MV Longchamp was seized on Thursday morning," Andrew Mwangura, of the Kenya-based East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. "She was sailing from Europe to the Far East."

The ship, which has a capacity of 3,415 tonnes, was fully loaded when it was taken, Mwangura said.

Munich - Vice President Joseph Biden is to make a "major" speech about the new US administration's defence and foreign policy at the end of next week in Munich, the organizer of a German conference said Thursday.

Wolfgang Ischinger said the address at the annual Munich security conference would set out the position of the administration of President Barack Obama, which was why Biden was attending rather than the US defence secretary who usually represents Washington.

Augsburg, Germany - German police raided homes in Bavaria state Thursday, seizing recorded neo-Nazi music and other evidence to close down a skinhead network estimated to have 15 to 20 members.

The rightists, based in the Swabia region, styled themselves the Hate Crew of Swabia, making no secret of their racist attitudes.

Police based in the city of Augsburg had been investigating the group for months and hope to indict seven men aged 26 to 33 for spreading Nazi propaganda, sedition, glorifying violence, promoting racism, money laundering and evasion of taxes.

Wiesbaden, Germany  - Beer consumption in Germany, which once prided itself as a world champion of beer culture, has declined for yet another year as Germans reach for a glass of fizzy water instead, national statistics issued Thursday show.

Domestic sales by the German breweries fell 0.9 per cent last year to 8.7 billion litres, and exports were down even more sharply, the Federal Statistics Office said.

EU nations took 1.1 billion litres, down 1.2 per cent and non-EU nations 0.3 billion, down 4.1 per cent.