Munich - German prosecutors searched the offices Wednesday of troubled mortgage lender Hypo Real Estate, which has emerged as one of the nation's most prominent victims of the US subprime housing crisis.

Munich prosecutors said they searched Hypo Real Estate's premises as well as property linked to the lender's former board members.

The investigations relate to suspicions of market manipulation.

Munich - An Italian restaurant operator won a lawsuit Tuesday against a German book author who claimed he was a mid-level boss in the 'Ndrangheta organized-crime network in Calabria.

Journalist Petra Reski said she was told by a senior Rome policeman that the Italian, who used to run a pizza bar in the central German city of Erfurt, was under suspicion as a mobster.

But the court in Munich said this could not be proved.

Munich - Germany midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger has renewed his contract at Bayern Munich until 2012, the Bundesliga champions announced on Monday.

Bayern said on their website that Schweinsteiger, 24, signed a new three-year deal on the weekend. His current contract expires after the season amid reported interest from European top clubs including Real Madrid and Juventus Turin.

Munich chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge said the club was "very happy" to have settled this important issue.

Munich  - Officially named Core i7, Intel's latest quadcore processor, developed under the codename Nehalem, has arrived and already met with lots of praise.

This is Intel's first quadcore with four individual processor cores - the Core 2 Quads, which have been available since 2006, work with a pair of dual core chips and Computer Bild magazine has already tested the new chip.

The report hailed the top-of-the-line Core i7-965, with a speed of 3.2 gigahertz (GHz), "the fastest processor, by far" of all the processors it has ever tested.

Munich, Dec 13: Astronomers have used the ESO’s (European Southern Observatory’s) Very Large Telescope, along with a double natural “magnifying glass” known as the “Einstein Cross”, to scrutinize the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light years away.

The “Einstein Cross”, a famous cosmic mirage, is a cross-shaped configuration consisting of four images of a single very distant source.

The multiple images are a result of gravitational lensing by a foreground galaxy, an effect that was predicted by Albert Einstein as a consequence of his theory of general relativity.