Munich - Mini plans to extend its range with a compact SUV study featuring four doors, four-wheel drive and four single seats that will be unveiled at the Paris Motor Show in October.

Planned for production in 2010, the teaser images released by the BMW subsidiary show two conventional doors positioned on the passenger side with a third for the driver. The fourth door, for the rear passenger on the driver's side, slides back along the outside of the car for convenient access and loading.

The rear door has a frameless, retractable window and when open, swivels to one side to facilitate the loading of long items, such as skis, snowboards and surfboards.

Munich - A speed difference of only 10 kilometres an hour is the thin line between life and death, according to a crash test recently conducted by Germany's automobile association (ADAC).

At a moderate speed of 80 km/h on a country road, the driver can still bring the vehicle to a standstill within 50 metres when braking hard.

But at a speed of only 10 km/h more at 100 km/h, the vehicle would crash into the obstacle at a speed of 64 km/h, the test found.

At that speed, the crash test vehicle, a Renault Laguna, still had an intact safety cell with the dummy driver, passenger and children on the rear seat, risking no serious injury, according to the test results. The airbags still functioned.

Munich - Several of the main beer tents at Oktoberfest in Munich were declared full, with no one else allowed in, just before the annual event was ceremonially opened on Saturday.

Performing one of the great rituals required of the mayor of Munich, Christian Ude plunged a tap into the first barrel of beer on the stroke of noon, poured a stein of ale for waiting Bavarian Premier Guenther Beckstein and declared the fest open.

Munich, September 20 : New, very precise measurements, taken by the ESO (European Southern Observatory) instrument HARPS, have shown that the rotation of the Milky Way is simpler than previously thought.

A remarkable result from HARPS, shows that a much debated, apparent ‘fall’ of neighbourhood Cepheid stars towards our Sun stems from an intrinsic property of the Cepheids themselves.

The result was obtained by a group of astrophysicists led by Nicolas Nardetto.

Since Henrietta Leavitt’s discovery of their unique properties in 1912, the class of bright, pulsating stars known as Cepheids has been used as a distance indicator.

Munich - Two more German public banks, Bayern LB and NRW Bank, disclosed Friday they were exposed by the collapse this week of US investment bank Lehman Brothers.

The admissions came a day after a federally controlled German bank KfW said its exposure to Monday's Lehman failure totalled 536 million euros (772 million dollars).

In a letter to staff obtained by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, Munich-based Bayern LB, which is controlled by Bavaria state, put its risk at up to 300 million euros (432 million dollars).

Munich - The timing belt is one of the essential car parts that has to be replaced regularly and motorists are advised to strictly conform to the recommendations listed in the owners manual, according to Germany's automobile association ADAC. Most car makers list a certain amount of kilometres or the age of the vehicle when the timing belt needs replacement.