Stockholm - The consortium that plans to build an underwater Baltic Sea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany on Monday released an overview of the project to date.

The report said the Nord Stream AG consortium had considered various routes and concluded that "the off-shore route turns out to be the more environmental friendly," citing that a land-based route would "cross ecologically sensitive areas on land and possibly conflict with alternative land use."

Berlin - German childcare authorities said Monday they had taken into care the 12-year-old son of Christiane F, whose tale of drug abuse and prostitution as a
14-year-old in Berlin found an international audience 30 years ago.

"She can no longer fulfil her parental and care duties," a spokeswoman for the Youth Department in Potsdam near Berlin said.

Berlin- Germany called Monday for an immediate ceasefire in Georgia and the withdrawal of troops by both sides in the widening conflict centred on the breakaway South Ossetia region.

Chancellor Angela Merkel had telephoned Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to call for all hostilities to be halted, official spokesman Thomas Steg said in Berlin.

Georgia's territorial integrity should be respected, he added.

Berlin  - German wholesale prices soared in July, rising 9.9 per cent on the year on the back of higher fuel costs, the official statistics office reported from Wiesbaden.

The rise was the strongest in the indicator since November 1981. Over the month, wholesale prices rose 1.4 per cent.

German wholesale prices have been rising sharply in recent months. The indicator showed an annual increase of 8.9 per cent in June and 8.1 per cent in May.

Fuels and mineral oil products saw a price rise of 30.8 per cent on the year and as much as 6.2 per cent on the month of August.

Hamburg  - A tiny beer-swilling, rodent-like jungle creature which drinks the equivalent of a case of 3.8 per cent beer every night and never gets inebriated may hold the clue to the ultimate hangover cure for humans, according to German scientists.

The Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrew drinks the beer-like fermented nectar of the flowers of the bertram's palm in such quantities that the equivalent amount of alcohol would cause a human to collapse in a drunken stupor, say the scientists from Bayreuth University in Germany.

Striped designs: External hard drives from Toshiba

Toshiba has announced plans to introduce three new external hard drives in late August. The 2.5 inch devices offer up to 160, 250, and 320 gigabytes of storage space respectively, connected via U. S. B 2.0. The hard drives stand out for their unusual design: each casing is black with either green, red or grey stripes. The manufacturer has yet to name a price.

Quiet runner from Leipzig: Business laptop from Schenker