Hanover, Germany - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was picking up signs of hope Monday as she toured booths at the Hanover Fair, a trade show for the world engineering and machinery industry.

"Perhaps the Hanover Fair is a tiny sign that it is bottoming out," said Merkel in reference to the worldwide recession.

VDMA, Germany's federation of machinery makers, said Monday that world sales of machinery were likely to decline 10 per cent this year.

Hanover, Germany - Energy efficiency will be the dominant theme of this year's Hanover Trade Fair, organizers Deutsche Messe AG said on Tuesday.

South Korea is the partner nation of exhibition, which runs from April 20-24, Deutsche Messe board chairman Wolfram von Fritsch said.

The fair, the biggest of its kind in the world, has attracted 6,150 exhibitors this year, well above the 5,100 who attended the 2008 event.

Hanover  - External burners in the slim line format are well suited for any laptop's travel bag. Yet it's important to give some consideration to how the external drives will draw their power, says the Hanover-based computer magazine c't.

The magazine recently tested six slim line models priced between 60 and 110 dollars. Five of them required no separate power supply and were able to run using the computer's U. S. B port.

Hanover, Germany  - Bundeslig

Hanover, Germany  - A plane bringing 122 Iraqi refugees to a new life in Germany arrived in the northern city of Hanover on Thursday.

They are the first batch of 2,500 that Germany has agreed to accept under an agreement by the European Union to grant a sanctuary to 10,000 Iraqi refugees.

Britain, France and the Netherlands have already given new homes to some of the refugees, most of them from Christian minorities that suffered persecution in the turmoil following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Hanover, Germany  - One of the top annual fairs in the technology industry, CeBIT, drew to a close on Sunday after suffering a dramatic decline in the number of visitors.

Some 400,000 persons streamed into the six-day event in the German city of Hanover, about 20 per cent less than last year, organizers Deutsche Messe AG said.

CeBIT exhibits computers, software and communications products, mainly for corporate and manufacturing buyers, but is also a showcase for personal computers, laptops and the new ultra-portable netbooks.