Frankfurt - A group of banks reached agreement early Friday on the details of a planned multibillion-euro bail-out for Germany's ailing mortgage lender Hypo Real Estate, sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The talks revolved around how much each participant would contribute to the 35-billion-euro (48-billion-dollar) deal to save the country's second largest mortgage lender. Details were not yet available, but were to be made public during the day on Friday.

Berlin and a group of banks and insurers had proposed a plan to save Hypo Real Estate from collapse earlier this week.

Frankfurt - A German court jailed a television journalist for 32 months Thursday for corruption.

Until his disgrace, Juergen Emig, 63, had fronted sports programmes on Hessischer Rundfunk public television and headed its sports broadcasting team.

Convicting him of misappropriation and bribe-taking, the court in Frankfurt said he obtained more than 300,000 euros
(400,000 dollars) from sponsors between 2001 and 2004 to highlight products or minor sports.

Frankfurt - World demand for machinery is slumping fast, according to Germany's VDMA federation of machinery and plant builders in Frankfurt Wednesday.

In the latest sign of recession, it said orders from abroad in August were down 19 per cent in price-neutral terms compared to one year before. Domestic orders rose 6 per cent in the same period.

The industry, a key to German prosperity, saw combined orders decline 10 per cent.

VDMA senior economist Ralph Wiechers cautioned that a few big orders had distorted the picture, but said the overall trend was clearly downwards.

Frankfurt - German shares plunged over four per cent Monday on a day when the government and German banks moved in to rescue major mortgage lender Hypo Real Estate and markets around the world also continued to lose ground amid ongoing finance sector turbulence.

The blue-chip 30-share DAX in Frankfurt closed at 5807.08 points, down more than 250 points or 4.23 per cent from the pre-weekend closing level.

Monday's final reading was the lowest in more than two years on the Frankfurt exchange.

Frankfurt - Merger talks among three small German airlines have collapsed, the Thomas Cook company said Monday. 

Thomas Cook, a German tourism group based near Frankfurt, said it had pulled out of months of talks and would continue to operate its own airline subsidiary Condor as an independent unit. 

Condor had been in talks to link up with Germanwings and TUIfly, creating an airline with more heft to compete with German flag carrier Lufthansa and the country's number-two airline, Air Berlin, on routes between Germany and foreign holiday destinations. 

Frankfurt - Leading central banks on Friday injected fresh dollars into strained financial markets, the European Central Bank (ECB) said in Frankfurt.

The ECB opened an auction of 30 billion dollars of overnight money, which it said was aimed at curing "elevated pressures in the short- term US dollar funding markets."

It said the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank were also part of the operation, using their reciprocal currency arrangements with the Federal Reserve in Washington.