Munich - Uigur emigrant leaders in Germany charged Monday that China was stepping up a crackdown against militants of the Turkic-language minority in advance of this summer's Olympic Games.

China has described the Uigur autonomy movement and Rabiya Kadeer, leader of the Uigur World Congress, as terrorist.

In Munich, where there is a permanent Uigur community of 600, Kadeer said recent violence had included the shooting deaths of five Uigur students on July 9 during the search of homes in the town of Urumqi, and the public execution the same day of two Uigur.

He said armed troops compelled 10,000 people to witness the execution by gunshot.

Berlin - Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the
US presidency, will have a one-hour, get-to-know-you chat this week in
Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of her spokesmen said
Monday.

Both will appear for a photo call but will not answer questions
from the media after the Thursday meeting, deputy government spokesman
Thomas Steg told reporters.

Steg said she would brief him on closer US-German business ties and hoped to have a "very frank, comprehensive" talk.

"Ultimately it's about them getting to know one another," he said.

Ankara - Three German climbers who were held hostage for 12 days after being abducted by Kurdish rebels in eastern Turkey arrived in the capital Ankara Monday ahead of a flight home to Germany, the Anadolu news agency reported.

Lars Holger Renne, 33, Martin Georg S., 47, and Helmut Johann H., 65, all from Bavaria, were abducted on July 8 by five Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) guerrillas who raided a 3,200-metre camp on Mount Ararat.

The three were released on Sunday and after spending the night at a police guest house in Agri, the mountaineers flew to Ankara from the eastern city of Erzurum on Monday morning.

Berlin - Germany thanked Turkey on Monday for its help, a day after three German mountaineers were freed at the end of nearly two weeks in the hands of Kurdish rebels.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Jens Ploetner said Turkish officials had played a major role in resolving the crisis, with the interaction between the two nations' officials "characterized by high trust."

The three men were expected in Germany late Monday afternoon after spending the night in a Turkish government guest-house at Agri. Militants in the Kurdish rebel group PKK kidnapped them July 8. They were freed on Sunday.

Berlin - Despite rising gas prices, Europe's biggest carmaker Volkswagen AG's global sales climbed by 5.8 per cent in the first six months of the year, powered ahead by surging demand in emerging markets.

The rise in VW's worldwide deliveries to 3.27 million was the highest figure reached by the carmaker during the first six months of the year but warned world car markets were facing tougher conditions.

The increase during the first six months of the year followed a 23.2-per-cent jump in sales in China along with a 21.8-per-cent rise in Brazil and an 18.7-per-cent increase in Central and Eastern Europe's booming car markets.

Leipzig, Germany - The world's oldest surviving semi-complete copy of the bible, a 4th-century manuscript in ancient Greek that was discovered in a waste-paper bin by a German scholar, is set to go online on Thursday, the University of Leipzig Library says. 

The Codex Sinaiticus, rediscovered in a monastery in the Sinai peninsula by Konstantin von Tischendorf in 1844, contains half the Jewish Old Testament and most of the Christian New Testament, the library said Monday. 

Another manuscript, the Codex Vaticanus, is about as old, while fragments of both parts of the Bible in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Egyptina papyri are older. But the Sinai bible offers unique evidence of what Greek-speaking Christians read around the year 350.