Berlin- The Moselle River, a waterway used for cargo transport, was closed

Berlin - German unemployment fell in September to 3.177 million despite the bleak outlook on the world's financial markets, the nation's labour office said Tuesday.

That marked a drop by 29,000 in the seasonally adjusted tally from the previous month.

Labour office chief Frank-Juergen Weise said the labour market had yet to be feel the effects of the downturn and the market turmoil.

The politically more important unadjusted tally was 3.081 million, down 115,000 from August as hirings increased after Germany's summer vacations.

That brought the unadjusted joblessness rate down 0.2 of a percentage point to 7.4 per cent.

Berlin - Six tourists arrived in Berlin Tuesday, 11 days after being kidnapped during a holiday in Egypt.

Berlin - Germany's government and top banks were injecting billions of euros Monday into a troubled mortgage lender, Hypo Real Estate (HRE), as it teetered on the brink of collapse. 

The German Finance Ministry in Berlin said HRE would need a guarantee totalling 35 billion euros (50 billion dollars). 

A ministry spokesman said the commitment was needed so that banks could bail out HRE, but the actual losses were not that high. 

Sources said the commitment could potentially strain Chancellor Angela Merkel's federal budget. Germany's parliament would have to vote on the bailout package. HRE is the first major German casualty of the current worldwide financial crisis. 

Berlin - KfW, a bank run by Germany's federal government, has sacked two of its seven executive board members because of a blunder that cost the bank hundreds of millions of euros.

The supervisory board of the bank had met Sunday to decide the fate of Detlef Leinberger and Peter Fleischer, who had earlier been suspended from their duties after the Black Monday error, costing 350 million euros (504 million dollars), was disclosed.

KfW staff failed to unwind a swap with Lehman Brothers on the day the US investment bank failed.

London, Sept 28 : Ever wondered how easy it would be if we could shop for clothes without having to try them on? Well, that vision could soon become a reality, thanks to the ‘magic mirror" developed by researchers in Berlin.

Scientists at Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI) in Berlin said that this mirror-like display enables shoppers to see themselves wearing different items of clothing without having to undo a single button.

The computerized mirror takes a life-size 3-D image of customers’ bodies and “dresses” them in a picture of the outfits they have chosen. 

At this pioneering stage, shoppers can navigate around a control panel at the side of the mirror to change the colour and pattern of the clothes they have tried on.