Munich  - Several leading Italian clubs are interested in signing Bayern Munich's Bastian Schweinsteiger, but club manager Uli Hoeness said Thursday he was confident of keeping the midfielder at the German champions.

The 24-year-old Germany international's current contract expires at the end of the season and Hoeness said Inter Milan, AC Milan and Juventus had shown an interest in the player.

However Hoeness said Bayern "would come up with something" to keep Schweinsteiger at the club he has played for since joining as a youth team player.

Hoeness said Bayern would also be offering midfielder Ze Roberto a new contract although the 34-year-old Brazilian has said he wants to leave at the end of the season.

Munich - The ski pistes this year again will be lit up by colour. Skiers and snowboarders wearing the latest fashion will be sporting bright colours and their outfits will include elements borrowed from street clothing. 

In addition to striking, ski suits in uniform solid colours, patterns in plaid, comic strip design and photographs that dot the snow scene colourfully are set to hit stores this season. The designers seem to be looking back; for some, they are reminiscent of the 1980s. 

Munich - A Catholic archbishop in Germany published a book Wednesday attacking capitalistic excesses.

Not only is the book called Das Kapital, but the author's name is Marx.

Archbishop Reinhard Marx of Munich is not related to 19th-century communist founding father Karl Marx, but the most reverend clergyman's surname draws wonderment and wisecracks wherever he goes.

The archbishop is also the most outspoken of Germany's 27 diocesan leaders in his criticism of big business.

Munich - The annual "Medientage Munich 2008" kicked off Wednesday in the Bavarian capital with the country's top media executives focusing on their rapidly changing industry and its impact on the entertainment industry and society.

Under the motto "Media Summit: The World of Advertising is Changing - Value and Effectiveness in the Glut of Digital Media," top-level managers and over 600 experts at the three-day congress were set to take part in some 90 panels to review trends and developments, backgrounded by the current financial situation.

Munich - Hypo Real Estate (HRE), the German finance company which nearly collapsed last month, applied Wednesday for additional equity funds from the German government's new bail-out plan.

Germany's first big casualty of the current crisis, HRE won 50 billion euros in guarantees earlier this month from the government and German banks.

It said at its head office in Munich it had now applied for a cash injection of 15 billion euros (19 billion dollars) from new federal fund.

It is the first German commercial bank to see help from Soffin, a new government agency created by parliament on October 17.

Previously, three state-owned banks had said they would seek help from Soffin.

Munich  - Legislators in the German state of Bavaria elected a new premier, Horst Seehofer, 59, on Monday after the party he leads, the Christian Social Union (CSU), lost its absolute majority at the polls.

He comfortably won the vote by a 104-71 margin, though four members of the new state coalition, comprising the CSU and the small pro-business Free Democrat Party
(FDP), did not vote for him.

The election marks the end of a 46-year era when the CSU, sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, ruled the prosperous southern state alone.