Boston/Berlin - Women who enjoy drinking coffee may be lowering their risk of suffering a stroke, new US research suggests. Women who drank five to seven cups of coffee a week were 12 per cent less likely to have a stroke than were those who downed just one cup a month, the study among 83,000 women revealed.

The survey was carried out over a 24-year period by Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and the findings published in the March issue of the journal Circulation.

Berlin - A 32-year old woman who was attacked by a polar bear after she had jumped into the polar bear enclosure at Berlin Zoo was in intensive care Sunday, where she was being treated for bites and cuts to her arm, back and legs. The woman had climbed over an embankment then jumped into the water of the polar bears' enclosure during feeding time on Friday.

One of the bears immediately spotted her and swam across, then bit the woman several times in the arms and legs before zoo attendants were able to shoo the animal away and pull her from the water.

Berlin - The chairman of Germany's coalition Social Democrats (SPD) Franz Muentefering said Germany had not done enough to incorporate East Germans, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in an interview published Sunday. "Everything suffers from the fact that we didn't really organise a reunification in 1989-90, but added East Germany to the Federal Republic. That has not been processed," Muentefering told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Muentefering, whose SPD is in a coalition government with Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), said East Germans felt their life achievements weren't fully recognised.

Berlin - German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck warned Saturday of the threat of global inflation as a result of the economic and financial crisis. "There is so much money being pumped into the market that there could be a threat of an overloading of the capital markets and worldwide inflation when an economic recovery comes," Steinbrueck told the newspaper Bild.

Berlin - Thousands of people demonstrated against the foreign military presences in Iraq and Afghanistan on Saturday during traditional Easter peace marches held across Germany. US President Barack Obama's call for a world free of nuclear arms was also a major theme of the rallies and protest marches held in bright sunshine at 28 towns and cities.

All told there are more than 70 different events being held by the German peace movement over the four-day Easter period, ending on Monday.

Berlin, Apr. 11 : Germany's Der Speiegel magazine has claimed in one of its reports that US President Barack Obama uttered three words that amount to a US confession for causing the financial crisis and "may go down in world history as one of the greatest statements ever made."

What, pray tell, did the president say?

"I take responsibility."