Berlin - An action thriller about the often dark and crooked world of global banking opens the Berlin Film Festival on Thursday.

German director Tom Twyker's The International stars Clive Owen as an Interpol agent, Louis Salinger, and Naomi Watts as a New York attorney, Eleanor Whitman, who go after world's biggest bank to try to expose its business in financing wars and terror.

"Anyone who has moved against this bank has ended up dead", warns Louis as he and Eleanor attempt to track down the flow of funds in a high-risk-filled chase around the world.

Nuremberg, Germany - Barbie, the original fashion doll, turns an ageless 50 next month and must fight off a string of equally skinny challengers vying for attention from the world's little girls.

Mattel Inc, the world's biggest toy company, is planning celebrations all year marking the anniversary of the March 9, 1959 appearance at the New York Toy Fair of Barbie, who has since developed separate African-American and Hispanic identities and dozens of doll friends.

Berlin - German troops are to be based on French soil for the first time since World War II, a government spokesman confirmed Wednesday.

Details of how many troops are involved and where they will be stationed still have to be worked out, government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said.

The troops form part of a 5,400-strong Franco-German brigade whose continued existence was called into doubt recently when French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced plans to reduce the size of the French army.

The news magazine Der Spiegel reported that 500 German troops would be based in the southern French town of Colmar, close to the German border.

Berlin - Struggling German model railway maker Maerklin filed for insolvency on Wednesday after failing to obtain a credit extension from banks, the company said.

Managing director Dietmar Mundil said the company would continue to operate normally while insolvency proceedings continued.

"We are determined to reorganize our long-established company in cooperation with the temporary insolvency administrator and to establish it as a market force on a permanent basis," Mundil said.

Berlin - The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, has called for a drastic cut in atomic weapons, in an article published Wednesday.

Writing in German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the Nobel peace laureate appealed to the US and Russia to "verifiably reduce their arsenals to 1000 or even 500 warheads."

In parallel, he called for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty to be put into effect, a move he said was "long overdue," and for negotiations to begin over a treaty to verifiably end the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.

Berlin  - A major German car parts maker, Schaeffler, said Tuesday it was putting 20,000 workers on short time because of a dramatic fall-off in orders.

The company, which recently acquired German tyre maker Continental AG in a controversial takeover, said nearly two-thirds of its total workforce would be affected by the move.

The Schaeffler Group employees about 31,000 workers at 25 plants in Germany where the car industry has been particularly hard-hit by the global economic crisis.