Bonn, Germany - The United States and interior ministers from six European countries called Saturday for greater cooperation to combat international terrorism.

A common approach and an effective strategy to prevent terrorist attacks was necessary, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said after a day-long meeting in Bonn.

To achieve this goal, close cooperation with the United States was indispensable, Schaeuble said.

US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was present at the gathering, along with Schaeuble and representatives from Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Poland.

Bonn - There comes a time when teddy bear wallpaper, toy boxes and colourful furniture no longer seem right in a child's room. That's when most teenagers feel the desire to have a clear-out and redesign their surroundings.

Transforming a room can be expensive and a total revamp may not be necessary because with a little handy work and some creative ideas, a boring nursery can be transformed into a stylish room.

Flea markets are good sources of inspiration. "The retro style is very in at the moment," says Silke Schoen, an interior designer from Berlin.

Bonn, Germany - Microsoft has released a series of new updates for closing security gaps this month as part of its monthly Patch Day event.

According to Germany's BSI Federal Office for Information Security, the security gaps were present in Windows system components responsible for rendering graphics. Other applications included Windows Media Player, Windows Media Encoder and Microsoft Office.

Bonn, Germany - Following the example of the United States and Britain, Germany prohibited Saturday short selling of shares in banks till the end of this year.

Short selling, a form of futures trading where investors assume a stock will decline in value, has been seen as causing the steep fall in market capitalization that wiped out three of the world's most powerful banks.

Bonn, Germany - It's fairly normal nowadays to install virus scanners on a computer and use a firewall when surfing the web to block possible attacks. So why is e-mail encryption still so uncommon?

Only about 5 per cent of users take steps to protect their e-mail from third parties, said Christopher Wolf of Bochum's Ruhr University, adding, it's a question of habit.

"If e-mail had been encrypted from the start, this would have never been an issue."

Bonn, Germany - The German Federal Agency for Security in Information Technology (BSI) in Bonn is warning about a new and especially tricky security hole affecting internet users. The hole is related to the Domain Name System (DNS) and hence potentially affects all web users.

The DNS translates the names typed by the user into a numeric-based IP address. It's has been no secret for some time that hackers can manipulate DNS servers to redirect users to different sites without the users' knowledge.

"But now there are malicious programs that actually exploit this hole in the DNS," says BSI's Matthias Gaertner. "And unfortunately, not all providers have patched the hole on their DNS servers."