Frankfurt - Giant German carmaker Daimler AG said Tuesday it posted a 1.3-billion-euro (1.7-billion-dollar) first-quarter loss amid the global car industry crisis. The announcement came just one day after Daimler announced it was offloading its stake in the ailing US auto group Chrysler.

Daimler, which manufactures luxury Mercedes-Benz vehicles, said Monday it had forged an agreement with Chrysler's owner, the US private equity group Cerberus Capital Management and the US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp, to pull out of its 19.9-per-cent stake in the North American carmaker.

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Kassel, Germany  - Practically all the half million raccoons which infest the forests and parks of Central Europe are believed to descend from just four animals released in the woods near the German city of Kassel in the Nazi period.

Raccoons have never had a good press in Europe. Not only are they North American interlopers, there is also a persistent story that they were introduced to provide hunting pleasure for Marshal Hermann Goering, the head of Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe.

Dusseldorf - A man charged with leading the banned Kurdish Workers' Party or PKK in Germany rejected the indictment Monday as a "misunderstanding" and told the court he was a political refugee whose relations had been massacred by a Turkish mob in 1978. German prosecutors told the court he was the leader code-named Colak who ran the secretive Marxist group on German soil till April 2008. The PKK has been outlawed in Germany as a criminal gang because of its violence against renegade former members.

Hamburg - Internet giant Google said Monday it would allow German householders to complain before images of theirhomes are included in the search company's new Street View service. Street View is a feature of Google Maps which provides free panoramic photographs of city streets from eye level in the United States, Japan, Australia and European nations.

Privacy campaigners have claimed it makes it easy for snoopers to discover anyone's quality of home from afar.

Cologne, Germany - The German city of Cologne published Monday the design for a future memorial to honour the men who deserted Nazi Germany's armed forces, or paid with their lives for being conscientious objectors. The memorial will be only the second civic monument in a public space to pacifists in a country where many people who lived through the war and are now dying out still regarded deserters as traitors.

Only Berlin has a public monument, in the form of 100 mirrors in a park where 230 German men were executed by firing squad 1944-45.