Berlin - Berlin is locked in art fever, with four powerful exhibitions going ahead including work by Jeff Koons and Paul Klee.

At the Mies van der Rohe-designed New National Gallery, US contemporary artist Koons is parading a glittering array of huge sculptures and paintings.

On a lower floor is a superb selection of work by the late German expressionist painter Klee, garnered from both private and international collections.

Simultaneously, the 13th Art Forum - Berlin's International Fair for Contemporary Art - is being staged at the city's Funkturm trade fair grounds.

Berlin - Efforts by Russia and other other countries to form an OPEC-style cartel for natural gas have run into difficulties, the German newspaper Die Welt said Saturday.

A spokesman for Russia's state-controlled energy company Gazprom told the daily a meeting of natural gas exporting countries planned for Moscow this month, had been postponed until 2009.

All members of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum had agreed to the delay, Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kuprianov was quoted as saying.

Berlin- Thousands of workers in Germany's engineering sector staged a series of token strikes on Saturday to press demands for more pay.

More than 6,000 workers took part in stoppages across the country, following the end of a legal restraint on strikes during the current round of wage bargaining.

The manufacturing plant of Volkswagen's premium car division Audi was idled for two hours in the southern city of Ingolstadt when 4,000 night shift workers walked off their jobs.

Berlin - Ultrasound checks have discovered a second axle in Germany's bullet-train fleet contains a tiny crack that some safety experts fear could have widened into a break and caused a rail disaster.

The Deutsche Bahn company, which has halted operations by dozens of ICE high-speed trains for checks, disclosed the discovery Friday after the company's chief executive, Hartmut Mehdorn, said an "anomaly" had been found.

The first such crack deeper than the safety limit of 2 millimetres was discovered in a drive axle in mid-October.

Berlin  - Three veteran aircraft were stranded Friday at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport, a day after it officially closed at the end of 85 years of operations.

With most airport staff gone, the pilots of the two Antonov biplanes and the Cessna are not allowed to just take off when they felt like it from the airport, which is surrounded on all sides by multi-storey buildings.

The three fragile old planes had been scheduled to leave during closing ceremonies Thursday, but were left parked on the apron because of steady rain and cold.

A Berlin Airports spokesman said Friday they would probably have to have their wings taken off and be removed by road to some other airfield. He said no date had been set for trucks to pick them up.

Berlin - Germany's new agriculture and consumer affairs minister, Ilse Aigner, 43, was formally appointed Friday as part of a shake-up in Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative camp.

She received her commission from German President Horst Koehler.

Aigner was nominated by her predecessor, Horst Seehofer, who has moved to Bavaria state to become its premier and leader of the Bavaria-only party Christian Social Union (CSU).

Aigner has been a CSU member of federal parliament in Berlin since 1998.