Vienna - Disgraced Austrian cross-country ski coach Walter Mayer has been arrested on doping charges, the Austrian Press Agency APA reported on Monday.

Citing prosecutors, APA said that Mayer is under investigation for buying the blood booster EPO at a Vienna pharmacist and distributing it to athletes.

The pharmacist is suspected of having sold doping substances to Mayer and an Austrian cyclist. The pharmacist and cyclist, who have not been identified, have also been arrested over the affair.

Vienna - The price for OPEC-produced oil was inching toward the 50-dollar mark Monday, reaching 48.77 dollars for one barrel (159 litres) of OPEC crude, the group announced Tuesday.

The price had been 47.39 dollars for a barrel a day earlier.

Energy consultant JBC attributed the rising price to cutbacks in OPEC production and lingering concerns about the state of global financial markets. Overall, oil prices rose by about 10 per cent worldwide in the last week.

Vienna - A member of an autistic persons' self-help group shot a woman member dead and then turned the gun on himself in a Viennese self-help centre, police said Saturday.

A spokeswoman said the shooting happened at a weekly meeting of the five-strong group late Friday, when the man suddenly produced the gun and shot the woman without any warning or obvious reason.

As other group members scattered to safety, the gunman killed himself.

Berlin  - Elisabeth Fritzl suffered an unimaginable ordeal, held for 24 years in a cramped, windowless cellar, behind a secret door locked with a code only her father Josef knew.

From the age of 18, when Fritzl lured her into the dungeon he had meticulously prepared, Elisabeth was raped around 3,000 times by her father, and gave birth to seven children.

Washington  - The United States has deported to Austria an accused Nazi war criminal who settled in Wisconsin following World War II, the US Justice Department announced Thursday.

Josias Kumpf, 83, allegedly served as as guard as a member of the SS-Death Head division and participated in the November 3, 1943 massacre of 8,000 Jews at the Trawniki labour camp in Poland. He was also a guard at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Germany.

St Poelten, Austria - Josef Fritzl was found guilty Thursday of murder through neglect and sentenced to lifelong imprisonment, for the death of a baby he fathered with his daughter Elisabeth, in a windowless dungeon below his house.

The 73-year-old Austrian was also found guilty on all other counts of slavery, rape, incest and false imprisonment, charges he had confessed to Wednesday.

An eight-member jury unanimously reached the guilty verdict on the fourth day of the trial that was held in the town of St Poelten in the province of Lower Austria.