Cologne, Germany - Amid renewed world interest in thrifty little motor scooters, the world's biggest motorcycle trade show, Intermot, opened Wednesday in the German city of Cologne.

"There is a gigantic boom going on in scooters," said Thomas Alber, a motorcycling specialist at Germany's national motoring club ADAC. In Germany alone, new scooter registrations soared 14 per cent this year.

Buyers in Europe have tended to the more powerful models, with at least 125 cubic centimetres (cc) of cylinder capacity.

A 250-cc scooter uses only half as much fuel as a small car, according to Germany's motorcycle industry federation. Scooters also evade traffic jams better and are easier to park in crowded cities.

Cologne, Germany  - TUV Rheinland Group, a German firm that certifies compliance of products with regulations, marked 30 years of doing business in Asia on Thursday, noting that it now had laboratories at 40 places in 14 Asian nations.

The first testing laboratory opened on October 2, 1978 in Tokyo with just three staff.

Today the Cologne-based firm has an Asian payroll of more than 2,600 and last year had regional revenues of 160 million euros (230 million dollars), nearly half that sum in China.

TUV surveys industrial plant, services and products such as home appliances, solar cells, medical equipment, toys, mobile phones and tools, and certifies them as meeting quality and safety standards.

Cologne - It's a good idea to check out the fitness machines while visiting on a guest pass before joining a gym.

The quality of fitness machines and their condition should be considered and instructions for proper use should be posted on all machines, said the Cologne office of Germany's technical inspection authority.

In addition, there should be some safeguards to ensure that people who occasionally lift weights cannot injure themselves. To ensure safe training, the distance between the machines should be one metre; two metres between treadmills.

Cologne, Germany - German police formally arrested three teenagers who ambushed two policemen in Cologne earlier this week, the German authorities confirmed Friday.

However, spokesman Tino Seesko of the Cologne public prosecutor's office did not confirm media reports claiming that the attack had been motivated by Islamist violence.

Earlier, the daily Koelner Rundschau had reported that the young men, aged 15, 16, and 17 and with a background of migration, had repeatedly referred to "Jihad" (Holy War) during their interrogations.

The regional public broadcaster WDR also cited the teenagers as saying that they wanted to kill the police officers in order to send a signal of Islamist terror.

Cologne, Germany - A Fujifilm camera that uses two lenses to create three-dimensional images is among eye-catching new products at the Photokina trade show currently under way in Cologne, Germany.

The Japanese company said Wednesday the Finepix Real 3D System can take both still images and video in 3D. Every exposure comprises two images taken from slightly different angles, creating the same effect as seeing with two eyes.

Cologne, Germany  - Photography-mad families in Germany are buying children their own cameras as gifts to celebrate the first day at school, an industry group said Wednesday at the Photokina trade show in Cologne.

Rainer Schmidt, secretary of the German photo industry federation PIV, said in an interview that the days when each family had only one camera, which was used mainly by the father, were over.

German children were being given cameras of their own by the early teenage years at the latest, with surveys showing 24 per cent of girls and 18 per cent of boys under 13 in Germany already had their own cameras.