Frankfurt - Germany embarked on an eight-day swing on Tuesday for two friendlies in Asia which despite beach holiday temperatures at the venues is no post-Bundesliga holiday.

"We are not on holiday," said Bayern Munich midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger before the scheduled evening departure in Frankfurt.

A depleted Germany squad of 17 flies to humid Shanghai for a Friday friendly with China and then move on to hot Dubai for a match with the Emirates next Tuesday.

Frankfurt  - Dell has plans to release new notebooks with hardware encryption for solid-state drives (SSD).

Just like with standard drives, a chip will encrypt all data. According to the company's German offices, the security system will be available for the Latitude E4200, E4300, E6400 and E6500 models. (dpa)

Frankfurt  - Daimler, one of Germany's biggest industrial groups, has accepted a 200,000-euro (270,000-dollar) fine for withholding vital information from financial markets, dropping an appeal, court officials said Wednesday.

German financial markets regulator BaFin had penalized Daimler for failing to tell markets in due time that the car company's unpopular chief executive at the time, Juergen Schrempp, was stepping down.

Those with inside knowledge would have been able to acquire Daimler stock before it soared in response to the July 28, 2005 news.

Frankfurt - An annual culture award in Germany was deferred Monday after controversy erupted over the deletion of a Muslim author from the winners' list for writing that a crucifix was an idolatrous image.

The state of Hesse had planned to hand its 45,000-euro (61,000-dollar) prize on July 5 jointly to a Jew, a Muslim, a Catholic and a Lutheran to honour the cultural value of religious dialogue. But a squabble broke out among them over religion.

Frankfurt - Fiat chief executive Sergio Marchionne met Monday with General Motors Europe (GME) executives west of Frankfurt as two rival bids for the maker of Opel and Vauxhall cars awaited a decision.

Both Fiat and Magna, a Canadian-based parts maker, have drafted bids for the European factories of troubled US maker General Motors.

Berlin has demanded that both specify by Wednesday how much they would invest.

Frankfurt - Controversy erupted in Germany Friday after a Muslim author was deleted from the winners' list of an annual culture award after he wrote that a crucifix was an idolatrous image.

The state of Hesse had planned to hand its 45,000-euro (61,000-dollar) prize this July jointly to a Jew, a Muslim, a Catholic and a Lutheran to honour the cultural achievements of the monotheistic religions.

Frankfurt  - Borussia Dortmund midfielder Kevin-Prince Boateng was on Wednesday banned for four games by the German football federation DFB over a red-card offence in a Bundesliga match the previous day.

Boateng was sent off in Dortmund's 3-0 defeat at league leaders VfL Wolfsburg when he kicked Wolfsburg's Japanese player Makoto Hasebe in the face while fighting for the ball.

It appeared that the foul was not intentional, but Boateng will miss the final two top flight games of the season and the first two of the next campaign.(dpa)

Frankfurt - German football federation (DFB) Theo Zwanziger said Monday he would not enter speculation on Germany possibly stepping in as a host of 2012 European Championships matches.

Zwanziger travelled to Bucharest for a two-day UEFA executive meeting during which the venues for the 2012 tournament in Poland and Ukraine will be confirmed.

Germany has in the past been mentioned as a possible replacement if either of the host nations have difficulties fulfilling their commitments.

Frankfurt - Shares in Europe's biggest travel company TUI AG slumped Monday despite the sale of the group's shipping business allowing the firm to swing into a first-quarter profit.

The German-based group booked a net profit of 553.1 million euros (755 million dollars) in the first three months of the year compared to a 167.2-million-euro net loss in the same quarter last year.

Frankfurt  - The eye condition "wet" macular degeneration can be tested for at home using an Amsler grid, according to the Frankfurt-based Pro Retina self-help organisation and Germany's Blind and Visually Impaired Association.

The grid consists of a black and white mesh of lines with a white point in the middle. It can be found online with full instructions on how to use it at www. myvisiontest. com/amslergrid. php.

Frankfurt  - "People watching" is becoming an online art. Except instead of sitting in a cafe to watch the passers-by, online sleuths are piecing together items one clue at a time to create an entire profile of their target of interest.

Every month, millions of people use online search engines to learn more about others. Accessing information freely available online, they can track down documents a person has authored, events at which a person has appeared, pictures, contact details and sometimes, even credit card numbers.

Frankfurt/Lisbon  - Heavy turbulence during a Lufthansa flight from Munich to Lisbon injured 10 people and forced the plane to land in Switzerland.

The Airbus A321 carrying 147 passengers landed for safety reasons in Geneva after the passengers were slightly injured, Lufthansa spokeswoman Claudia Lange said.

Several of them were transferred to a hospital after the pilot decided to land so they could get treatment, she said.

The airline sent a replacement craft from Frankfurt to continue the flight to Portugal and the first plane was to be examined.

Frankfurt - FIFA president Joseph Blatter has reiterated his opposition to out-of-competition doping testing rules, saying the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has become a "police" organization.

WADA under its first president, the Canadian Richard Pound, had turned from a "service" body, particularly for those sports which couldn't finance its own doping controls, into a "police" organization, Blatter told Saturday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

Frankfurt  - A German museum is to show the work of Japanese husband-and-wife architects Takaharu and Yui Tezuka as of Sunday.

The German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt said the show, "Tezuka Architects - The Remembered Future," would run until June 28.

The couple's unconventional wooden houses, such as the Roof House and the Sky House, as well as kindergartens and museums draw some of their inspiration from Japanese tradition while employing the most modern technology. (dpa)

Frankfurt - Fiat chief executive Sergio Marchionne, who met senior Berlin officials on Monday to press his case for a takeover of General Motors Europe, is set to pay a visit Friday to Frankfurt to meet with a key German state premier, a newspaper said Thursday.

Premier Roland Koch runs Hesse, the state where GM has its main plant making Opel-brand cars.

Frankfurt  - The European Central Bank (ECB) trimmed its benchmark refinancing rate to an historic low of 1 per cent Thursday as part of its effort to combat the recession.

The 25-basis points cut in borrowing costs was in line with analysts forecasts and followed another 25 basis-points reduction announced by the bank in April. (dpa)

Frankfurt - Europe's biggest telecoms group Deutsche Telekom AG said Thursday it had posted a first-quarter net loss of 1.12 billion euros (1.47 billion dollars), as the German company's earnings had been hit by write-downs for its British mobile phone offshoot.

Deutsche Telekom said the total write-down at T-Mobile UK was about 1.8 billion euros due, the company said, to "the strong economic slowdown and more intense competition in the United Kingdom."

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.

Frankfurt - Authorities at Frankfurt international airport, Germany's biggest air hub, on Monday instructed airline crews on jets coming from swine-flu-affected areas to report any sick passengers. In the capital Berlin, Health Ministry spokesman Klaus Vater said he saw no immediate threat to Germany's populace.

Pamphlets are to be distributed to travellers at German airports advising them which symptoms to watch for and precautions they could take. Information was also being distributed to German doctors.

Frankfurt - German labour leaders voiced outrage Friday at reports that Fiat, the Italian company seeking control of Chrysler, may have an alternative plan to acquire General Motors' Opel and Vauxhall brands in Europe.

Guenter Verheugen, a German who is the European Union's top industry official, scoffed at the plan, telling a German TV channel, "I wonder where this heavily indebted enterprise is going to get the funds to tackle two such operations at the same time."