Boppard, Germany  - A party of sick British pensioners were isolated Tuesday aboard a river cruise boat, the Lady Anne, after German authorities put them under quarantine on the Rhine River.

Wuerzburg, Germany  - Conductor Jin Wang, 48, has been sacked from his post in Germany, municipal authorities said Tuesday after an allegation that he sexually harassed a young woman musician.

Chinese-born Wang, who was director of music at the Mainfranken Theatre and conducted the Wuerzburg Philharmonic Orchestra, had resisted pressure to resign after the city of Wuerzburg suspended him on full pay.

A municipal spokesman said he was sacked last Friday after fruitless efforts for a negotiated solution.

The city said that regardless of whether the harassment claim was true or not, it had an obligation as employer to act in the interests of the other 240 staff of the theatre.

Berlin - Two Italians were among eight foreigners who shared a prestigious German science prize on Tuesday.

Daniele Oriti and Cinzia Casiraghi were honoured with the Sofja Kovalesvskaja Prize for their research in physics.

The award, worth up to 1.65 million euros (2.09 million dollars), is funded by the Ministry of Research and Development with the aim of attracting young researchers to Germany.

Oriti, who has studied in Rome and Cambridge, is currently conducting research at the MPI Institute for Gravitational Physics at Potsdam, near Berlin.

Karlsruhe, Germany  - German federal police arrested two men Tuesday for operating a radical Islamist website and they are likely to face charges of supporting terrorism, prosecutors said.

The German-language website, GIMF, which stands for Global Islamic Media Front, contained videos from al-Qaeda, Mesopotamian al-Qaeda and the radical group Ansar al-Islam.

It also contained two videos made in Germany demanding the withdrawal of German and Austrian troops from Afghanistan, the prosecutor-general's office in Karlsruhe said.

Munich - Germany captain Michael Ballack has defended his recent criticism on coach Joachim Loew, naming it a wakeup call.

"Sometimes you have to go public deliberately in order to shake
things up. There were a few irritations during and after the European
championships," Ballack told German pay-TV network Premiere ahead of
the European Champions League match of his club Chelsea at Girondins
Bordeaux on Wednesday.

Ballack said "you can't discuss everything internally," insisted he
"issued his opinion in decent way" and said "I didn't want to attack
anyone."

Wuerzburg, Germany - Conductor Jin Wang, 48, has been sacked from his post in Germany after an allegation that he sexually harassed a young woman musician, municipal authorities said Tuesday.

Chinese-born Wang, who was director of music at the Mainfranken Theatre and conducted the Wuerzburg Philharmonic Orchestra, had resisted pressure to resign after the city of Wuerzburg suspended him on full pay.

A municipal spokesman said he was sacked last Friday after fruitless efforts for a negotiated solution.