Washington  - In the latest of legal scuffles, alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk was given a reprieve Thursday until next week in his fight to stay in the United States instead of being deported to Germany to stand trial.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio asked justice officials for a medical report on the 89-year-old man, setting a deadline for April 23 for the information.

Demjanjuk's lawyer and family have argued that he is too frail and ill to stand trial in Germany.

Hamburg - A German container ship rescued 75 passengers from a sinking passenger ship off the coast of Tanzania on Thursday, a spokesman for the German ship's operators said.

He said the MS Dorian responded to an SOS from the stricken vessel after other ships in the vicinity declined to provide assistance, fearing the call was a trap set by pirates.

The incident happened in an area where pirates have often attacked commercial shipping and held their crews for ransom.

Herzogenaurach, Germany  - A French car parts factory is to close with a loss of 195 jobs, the owner, German automotive parts company Schaeffler, said Thursday at its offices in Herzogenaurach.

The site at St. Simeon de Bressieux, near the south-eastern city of Grenoble, makes timing chains for engines.

Cologne, Germany - A novelist's papers, including the scroll awarding him the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature, have been recovered from a pile of rubble in the German city of Cologne, officials said Thursday.

Manuscripts and letters by Heinrich Boell, who died in 1985, had been placed in the city archives for safekeeping. But the building collapsed, killing two people, on March 3, apparently after a pothole had formed in a construction site under the street outside.

Hamburg  - The most intense X-ray beam of its type in the world was switched on Thursday in a 2,300-metre circular tunnel under the German city of Hamburg, the Desy research institute said.

The new machine, known as a synchrotron, has been remodelled from an earlier particle accelerator at the site and is named Petra III.

Munich - Adding to the gloom in the run-up to next week's Hanover industrial fair in Germany, engineering giant Siemens warned Thursday that no end to the slump in world business was visible yet.

Heinrich Hiesinger, who heads Siemens' industrial divisions, told VDI Nachrichten, an industry newspaper, "It's difficult to predict when the recovery of the markets will kick in.

"We have to recognize that some industrial markets will not return so quickly to the record level of 2008, even after recovery."