Vienna - The price for oil produced by the Organization of the Petroleum

Vienna - A lucky Austrian man won a villa on Tuesday after buying a 99-euro (131-dollar) ticket in the country's first real estate sale by lottery, but notaries and real estate brokers expressed concern about this new trend.

Traude Daniel sold 9,999 tickets for her 400-square-metre villa in Klagenfurt in southern Austria, as the house had become too big for her, she told Austrian news agency APA.

Vienna - Austrian police knew in 2008 that a Chechen refugee killed last week in Vienna had received politically motivated threats, the Interior Ministry confirmed Tuesday, while defending its decision not to protect the man.

Umar Israilov, 27, was shot dead in broad daylight on January 13. According to a statement by his father, the younger Israilov had been tortured by security forces of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and had brought his case before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Vienna- While Austria tapped into its natural gas stocks amid the recent stoppage of Russian gas supplies, engineers in the Austrian town of Guessing were busy producing an alternative: natural gas from wood.

With the help of Swiss and Austrian scientists, the European Centre for Renewable Energy Guessing produced so-called synthetic natural gas for the first time outside a laboratory in December.

Vienna - The price for oil produced by the Orga

Vienna - Austria is set to extend the humanitarian mission of its troops in Chad until the end of 2009, the foreign ministry said Monday.

Austrian troops are currently deployed as part of the European Union's peacekeeping operation which helps refugees and maintains security in the region.

In mid-March, when the mandate of the current 3,300 EU peacekeepers expires, a United Nations peacekeeping operation is set to take its place, the UN Security Council decided last week.