Hamburg  - A German tour operator said Tuesday it was allowing passengers to disembark from one of its cruise ships before it sails through the Gulf of Aden out of fear of an attack by pirates.

Hapag-Lloyd said 246 German passengers and a large number of crew would leave the MS Columbus at a port in Yemen and fly to Dubai where they would spend three nights in a luxury hotel.

Berlin - A study which found one near-miss happens every day in the skies over Germany, and that some pilots react incorrectl in such situationsy, is to be examined by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

Academics said Tuesday they set up a listening post on the ground to see what happens when the airborne collision avoidance system (ACAS) triggers in two jets flying straight at one another. ACAS devices negotiate with one another.

Typically, one pilot is told to descend and the other to pull up so that the planes may pass one another safely.

Dusseldorf - A Lebanese man convicted of trying to blow up two German trains in 2006 reacted with an obscene hand gesture after receiving a life sentence from the High Court in Dusseldorf on Tuesday.

Youssef al-Hajj Dib displayed two middle finger to photographers after the verdict was announced. He was led from the tightly guarded courtroom to begin serving his sentence for multiple attempted murders.

The 24-year-old self-declared "holy warrior" "planned a terrible bloodbath" and was the Islamist mastermind and perpetrator of "an utterly terrorist act," the court said.

Moenchengladbach, Germany - A man who blew up his house after his girlfriend said s

Stuttgart - Mercedes motorsport chief Norbert Haug has called for plans to introduce the hybrid system KERS in Formula One to be scrapped as a cost-saving measure.

Haug, whose company is part of the McLaren-Mercedes team, told the German weekly Motorsport aktuell published Tuesday that "the time for games is over" as motorsport seeks ways to rein in costs.

From next season teams will be allowed to use KERS - Kinetic Energy Retention Systems - to harness the energy created by a car's brakes and reuse it as a source of power.

Berlin - Germany is to re-introduce billions of euros in income-tax relief after the nation's highest court ruled Tuesday that Chancellor Angela Merkel's government had unconstitutionally altered a tax exemption.

The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled that tax relief on the cost of travelling from home to work and back must be applied equally to all taxpayers.

In a major and unpopular budget-cutting move, the government had limited the exemption since the start of 2007 to people travelling to worksites 20 kilometres or more from home.