Berlin - Watch out for geo-tagging. A previously nerdy hobby that aims to map and describe every spot on the Planet Earth may be about to go mainstream, thanks to a rash of new, easy-to-use gadgets.

All the devices use the Global Positioning System (GPS), the network of orbiting satellites which issue signals that are currently best known for guiding satellite navigation (sat-nav) devices in cars.

GPS can also be used to calculate the exact latitude and longitude of a place - a "point of interest" in geo-tagging jargon - or of a route, which simply consists of a series of fixes known as "waypoints."

Berlin  - Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, accused the West on Monday of major blunders in its dealings with Russia and charged that these had led to the crisis with Georgia.

In remarks during a speech in Berlin to a trade-union poor-relief organization, the AWO, he contended it had been a blunder for the United States to train Georgia's military and establish anti-missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Schroeder said it had also been an error for Western nations to recognize Kosovo as independent.

Berlin  - Russia will shut down its Yamal natural-gas pipeline supplying Western Europe for more than a day this week for "routine maintenance," a Berlin newspaper said Monday evening.

The report emerged just after the European Union froze partnership talks with Russia in protest at its military operations in Georgia.

Morgenpost Online, the website of the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper in the German capital, said Gazprom had informed customers that 30 hours of maintenance would begin on the Yamal-Europe pipeline on Tuesday, to be followed by 24 hours of flows reduced by half.

Berlin - German retail sales fell for the second consecutive month in July falling by a bigger-than-forecast 1.5 per cent amid concerns about high inflation and deepening economic uncertainty, data released Monday showed.

Analysts had expected monthly seasonally adjusted retail sales data, which was drawn up by the nation's statistics office, to drop by a more modest 0.3 per cent in July. On a yearly basis, retail sales in Europe's biggest economy were unchanged.

The July fall in retail sales was despite a continuing improvement in the German labour market.

Berlin - Duplicated data is often little more than dead weight on your hard drive.

To solve that problem, specialized programs are available to track them down and remove them. Nevertheless, experts advise using caution and security when using them, otherwise you might accidentally send some of your cherished family photos into digital limbo.

Digital photos are notorious for accumulating duplicates on a hard drive.

"It's easy to build up extra data if you make copies and then forget to delete the original," said Peter Knaak, a technology expert at Stiftung Warentest, a consumer reports organization.

"It's worth cleaning up the hard drive occasionally to free up memory space."

Berlin  - German customs agents have seized five vanloads of products from dozens of booths at the IFA consumer-electronics fair in Berlin, in an apparent anti-piracy operation, customs authorities announced on Saturday.

Norbert Scheithauer, a spokesman for Berlin-area customs investigators, said the electrical devices included 170 television sets, 140 MP3 players and 43 car radios that were being exhibited by manufacturers as well as large quantities of brochures.