Hamburg - Parents should be careful about what they plant in their garden as flowers such as brugmansia, golden chain and nightshade can all lead to serious poisoning among children, reports a German safety organization. Even the small blue berries from ivy are dangerous. Indeed, flowers and berries are especially dangerous for two and three-year- olds, since they are so prone to putting such items into their mouth.

Hamburg, Germany - Spring has arrived in the northern hemisphere - and with it, a time of suffering for those who are susceptible to hay fever. About 10 million people in Germany are allergic to pollen, said the Association of German Allergists in Hamburg, northern Germany,.

Although most sufferers try to deal with the symptoms themselves, that can have potentially dangerous consequences.

Berlin - A 32-year old woman who was attacked by a polar bear after she had jumped into the polar bear enclosure at Berlin Zoo was in intensive care Sunday, where she was being treated for bites and cuts to her arm, back and legs. The woman had climbed over an embankment then jumped into the water of the polar bears' enclosure during feeding time on Friday.

One of the bears immediately spotted her and swam across, then bit the woman several times in the arms and legs before zoo attendants were able to shoo the animal away and pull her from the water.

Berlin - The chairman of Germany's coalition Social Democrats (SPD) Franz Muentefering said Germany had not done enough to incorporate East Germans, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in an interview published Sunday. "Everything suffers from the fact that we didn't really organise a reunification in 1989-90, but added East Germany to the Federal Republic. That has not been processed," Muentefering told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Muentefering, whose SPD is in a coalition government with Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), said East Germans felt their life achievements weren't fully recognised.

Kaufbeuren, Germany - The basic version of the free office software suite, OpenOffice, packs in a lot of functionality. Yet for some users it's just not enough. Fortunately it doesn't need to be. A variety of extensions, most available for free, can be used to add even more pep to the standard version. This type of modular software construction is familiar to users of web browsers like Firefox and Opera as an effective way to integrate expanded capabilities. As with OpenOffice itself, these are free software add-ons developed by enthusiastic developers from the OpenOffice community.

Bonn - Hackers have started trying to hit people where they live by distributing e-mails with fake news of local atrocities in the hope of getting people to open a link and expose their computer to danger. One trick is to send out an e-mail with a subject line reading, "At least 18 killed in your city," according to the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

The included link as though it leads to a Reuters news article, but secretly delivers a damaging program to the system, if the user clicks on a video player. The only safe option is to delete the e-mail without opening the link.