Berlin  - German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck on Sunday ruled out the creation of a "bad bank" to take toxic assets from the nation's major financial institutions.

Such a bank would need to be funded by at least 150-200 billion euros (198-260 billion dollars) of taxpayers' money, the minister told the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"How could I take such a proposal to the federal parliament," he asked. "The nation would think we've gone crazy."

Ruhpolding, Germany - Six-time biathlon world champion Magdalena Neuner of Germany won the women's pursuit over 10 kilometres for a 13th World Cup biathlon victory.

Neuner could afford four shooting errors on the way to a defeat of Russian Ekaterina Iourieva in 32 minutes 56.5 seconds.

Iourieva, who had one shooting error, crossed the line 8.9 seconds behind with German Kati Wilhelm third, 21.7 seconds behind team-mate Neuner.

Neuner, who had edged Wilhelm to victory in the women's 7.5-kilometre sprint in Ruhpolding on Friday, moves third overall on 409 points, behind Russian Svetlana Slepzova (481) and Iourieva (461).

Germering, Germany  - Logitech plans to produce a computing keyboard especially for gamers.

The G19 keyboard was designed with input from the gaming community, meaning it is designed to meet the needs of passionate computer and online gamers, said the company. The new keyboard is due out in March.

The features include 12 programmable buttons, two high-speed USB ports and a colour LCD display. The 320x340 pixel display shows information relevant to the game being played.

Munich  - It's hard to be 100 per cent consistent. Computer operating systems are no different. The Mac OS tends to be very easy to use, particularly for users who don't need to make major changes to their system. Yet, some programme types just aren't often made for the Mac. One way to circumvent this is virtualisation.

"Virtualisation involves one computer with additional virtual computers running on it, each independent of one another," explains Sven Ahnert, an IT expert and technical book author. The interesting aspect is that no additional hardware is required. With the right software, one standard Mac OS X machine can also run Windows XP.

There's a bit of a dearth of tax and finance programs like Quicken for the Mac OS, for example.

Hamburg  - WLAN USB sticks that sport the newest N transmission standard can retrieve data from the internet up to four times faster than those working with the prior G standard.

They can also broadcast across longer distances and require up to 50 per cent less energy, reports Hamburg-based Computer Bild.

While devices working with the G standard could reach an effective transfer rate of maximally 23 megabits per second, WLAN sticks with the new N standard achieve up to

Berlin  - Sony is sending a new 640 gram netbook into stores. The Vaio VGN-P11Z features power-saving LEDs, a high-resolution display, and measures only eight inches (1600 by 768 pixels).

The 24.5 x 12 centimetre casing contains a 60 GB hard drive as well as modules for UMTS and GPS. Sony has elected an Intel Atom CPU as its processor. Two gigabytes of RAM are included.