Berlin  - In the 20th anniversary year since the fall of the Berlin Wall, visitors still flock to the once divided city.

The Checkpoint Charlie museum in the city centre marks the spot where Russian and American tanks angrily squared up to one another in the crisis summer days of 1961.

In the middle of the road, a white hut marks the site of the old American control point. Two men in mock uniforms stand at the ready to satisfy tourists' requests for photographs.

Minden, Germany  - German police were holding a motorist Wednesday who admitted that he deliberately collided with a girl cyclist, 13, and raped her while she was suffering from concussion.

The 30-year-old father of five had initially claimed the crash on Monday near the northern town of Minden was an accident, but conceded after a long interrogation that he had been looking for a child to attack. The sexual attack took place inside his car.

Bonn, Germany - German authorities fined two propane companies a total of 41.4 million euros (55 million dollars) Wednesday for price-fixing, saying they colluded to stop customers obtaining cheaper prices.

Westfalen AG and Propan Rheingas GmbH & Co KG supply two thirds of the German market for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), the Federal Cartel Office in Bonn said. From 1997 until a raid in 2005, they had had a pact not to poach one another's customers.

Stuttgart - Hero Group, the Indian industrial conglomerate controlled by the Munjal family, has abandoned a project to jointly assemble Mercedes-Benz trucks with Daimler of Germany in Chennai, Daimler said Wednesday.

Left with 100 per cent of the project, Daimler said it would press ahead anyway.

Hamburg - A senior European Central Bank (ECB) warned Wednesday that cutting interest rates below 1 per cent could severely hit money markets and result in lending between banks freezing up.

In a speech delivered in Hamburg, Axel Weber, the president of Germany's influential central bank the Bundesbank, said that trimming rates in the 15-member eurozone to below 1 per cent could mean banks lending with each other would become "completely paralyzed." Weber is also a member of the ECB's governing council.