Berlin - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier phoned his Afghan counterpart Saturday to voice concern at a new marriage law applying to Afghanistan's Shiite Muslim minority.

The German Foreign Ministry said Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta replied that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had suspended the gazetting of the law and ordered a legal review of it.

Critics say the law legalizes rape within marriage, because a Shiite woman would not be allowed to refuse her husband sex without a valid reason.

Hamburg - Skype, the company which provides free phone services via the internet, slammed German wireless company T-Mobile on Saturday over its announced ban on skyping with the Apple iPhone.

The ban, put in place this month, has raised hackles in the technology media round the world.

Jean-Jacques Sahel, Skype's senior executive for regulation issues in Europe, said the ban had come as a surprise. He accused T-Mobile's parent, Deutsche Telekom, of suppressing competition.

Skype is a subsidiary of the US-based internet auction service eBay.

Munich - German officials are increasingly reluctant to arrange a separate rescue deal for the German subsidiary of General Motors (GM) after concluding that it has no assets, a news magazine reported Saturday.

At the same time, both German labour leaders and the chief executive of GM Europe insisted serious talks were still being pursued to bring in an outside investor at the Opel volume carmaking unit.

The magazine Focus quoted an unnamed German minister saying Opel's patents, plant and real estate had already been mortgaged to the US government and US banks as security for loans, and could thus not be acquired by a new investor.

Kehl, Germany  - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Saturday snubbed a ceremonial walk by NATO leaders on a bridge across the Rhine River because he was busy on the phone.

Televised images of the event showed Berlusconi getting out of his car while intent on a conversation on his mobile phone. He then gestured to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that he would salute her later, and continued with his call while other leaders gathered on the bridge for a group photo.

Berlusconi later rejoined the group for a second photo and apparently apologised to Merkel.

Strasbourg, France/Baden-Baden, Germany  - Police used teargas to contain hundreds of demonstrators who tried early Saturday to reach central Strasbourg as the NATO summit was set to resume.

Leaders of the protesters said several thousand of them would be mobilised to try to disrupt the meeting, which is celebrating the alliance's 60th anniversary.

A major demonstration was planned for later Saturday in Strasbourg, where already Friday French police used teargas to drive back demonstrators who tried to push through a police cordon.

Berlin, April 4 : A new research has suggested that a sharp bend in the middle of the Hawaii `necklace' of islands is a result of a rapid drift of the region's `hotspot' in a southward direction between 80 and 40 million years ago before it came to a complete halt.

More than 80 undersea volcanoes and a multitude of islands are dotted along the Hawaii-Emperor seamount chain like pearls on a necklace.

A sharp bend in the middle is the only blemish.

This characteristic bend in the trail of the 5000-kilometer long Hawaii-Emperor seamount chain is one of the most striking topographical features of the earth, and is an identifying feature in representations of the Pacific Ocean floor.