Vienna - The price for crude oil produced by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) remained virtually unchanged, figures released by OPEC showed on Tuesday.

Berlin  - More than 11,000 people applied for asylum in Germany in the first half of this year, almost a third of them Iraqis, the Interior Ministry reported in Berlin Monday.

Berlin  - German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble signed a repatriation agreement with his Syrian counterpart Bassam Abdelmajid in Berlin Monday.

Berlin - Two runners have died during a mountain running event on Germany's highest mountain, the Zugspitze, police in the region along the Austrian border reported Monday.

Hamburg - German scientists warn that fertile parts of Vietnam's coastline would be washed away over the next few decades.

But sediment from the Mekong River might create some new land further to the west, according to the EarthTimes online science news source.

Since 2003, staff at the University of Kiel in Germany and other German and Vietnamese scientists have been studying what is happening to silt washed through the Mekong Delta and the Saigon River.

Professor Karl Stattegger of the university's Geoscience Institute said the delta was now carrying the sediment further to the west. Rising sea levels and stronger wave action were washing it out into the Gulf of Thailand.