Munich  - Horst Seehofer, who is expected to be appointed premier of Bavaria on Monday, has promised his party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), he will exert heavy pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel.

He was speaking Saturday to a party congress in Munich of the Bavaria-only CSU, which elected him party leader. He was the sole candidate. Of the 939 delegates, 786 voted in his favour and 84 against, with the rest not voting or spoiling their ballots.

Munich - The chief of the Munich-based BayernLB is to step down in the wake of the financial crisis that has engulfed the state lender, sources told the Deutsche Presse Agentur dpa.

The expected announcement that Michael Kemmer had decided to leave his post comes just one day after Bavarian Finance Minister Erwin Huber said he was resigning in the face of the financial problems confronting BayernLB.

A BayernLB spokesman declined to comment on the reports of Kemmer's possible departure from the Bavarian state-owned bank.

Munich - Enlisted men in a German Army unit were appalled at having to massacre Italian villagers in 1944, an 84-year-old former serviceman told the war crimes trial of their former lieutenant in Munich Thursday.

The lieutenant, 90, is accused of 14 murders in the Tuscan village of Falzano in 1944. He allegedly ordered the reprisal killings.

None of the company of Battalion 818 of the German Army mountain combat engineers approved of the reprisal, said the witness.

Munich  - Troubled German state bank BayernLB announced Wednesday a review of all its costs just one day after it said was tapping the government's financial rescue plan for 5.4 billion euros (7.1 billion dollars).

"We will be looking at all positions," said a spokesman of the Munich-based bank, which has been badly hit by the global financial crisis and which became the first German financial house to apply for financial support from Berlin's 480 billion-euro bank rescue package.

The cost review includes the 19,000 BayernLB's world-wide labour force with the bank having already warned that it might not be able to avoid job cuts.

The Bavarian state bank is planning a 400-million saving project in the next three years.

Munich, Oct 22: The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has captured an image that shows a vast stellar nursery, in the centre of which is a small cluster of stars that has been found to be the home of one of the most massive double star systems known to astronomers.

Known by the name of Gum 29, it is a huge region of hydrogen gas that has been stripped of its electrons (ionised) by the intense radiation of the hot young stars located at its centre.

Astronomers call this an HII (pronounced “H-two”) region, and this particularly stunning example stretches out across space for over
200 light-years.

Munich - Posting the details of one's doings on the Internet for the world to see is all the rage right now. Micro-blogging is one recent form of short online messages that is particularly well-suited to letting other people have permanent access to the details of one's daily life. Experts expect that this type of exchange will soon become an integral component of digital communication.

Micro-blogging combines characteristics from various communications worlds. As with traditional web-based diaries or blogs, micro-bloggers create a profile with a blog service and use it to post short entries. These posts are not normally more than 140 keystrokes long - shorter than a standard text message.