Vienna - Shares traded on the Vienna Stock Exchange fell to a three-year low Tuesday, continuing Monday's downward movement started by the news about US investor Lehman Brother's bankruptcy.

By 15:30 local time, the ATX, Vienna's main stock index, had lost 6.28 per cent of its value. The index fell below the mark of 3,000 points for the first time since June 2005.

Losses in Vienna were more pronounced than on Germany's DAX index, which was down 2.86 per cent in the afternoon, and the Euro Stoxx 50 index monitoring large European companies, which lost 3.44 per cent.

Vienna - The price for cru

Vienna - The price for crude oil produced by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (O

Vienna  - Austrian political parties introduced 50 social and welfare bills worth around two billion euros (2.8 billion dollars) in parliament on Friday, in order to sway voters ahead of the September 28 general elections.

Most of the bills were initiated by Austria's ruling Social Democratic Party (SPOe), in a bid to sharpen its social profile.

Werner Faymann, the party's new leader, has proposed an anti- inflation programme consisting of raising several government subsidies, including home care for patients and family support, as well as a bill on retirement payments for manual labourers and a cut of sales tax on food.

The SPOe also seeks to make education at public universities free.

Vienna- Before stopping its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, Libya obtained more sensitive technical information than was previously known, a confidential report by the UN nuclear agency shows.

According to the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was obtained by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, Libya had acquired design information for a nuclear reprocessing plant capable of making 10 kilogrammes of plutonium per year.

The nuclear bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 contained 6.1 kilogrammes of plutonium.

Vienna - Falling 1.51 dollars on Thursday, the price for cru