Vienna - An Austrian woman who stalked David Caruso, the lead actor in the television series CSI Miami, was convicted Tuesday of making dangerous threats and was sentenced to seven months in prison. The court in Innsbruck also ruled that 41-year-old Heidi S., should be admitted to a prison for mentally abnormal offenders, Austrian press agency APA reported. She had evaded a previous hearing by fleeing to Mexico.

Her full name was not made public, in accordance with Austrian law.

Vienna- Four Austrian glaciers have increased in size in 2008, but the Austrian Alpine Club warned Friday that this was no sign of a new trend, as the majority of glaciers continued to melt in 2008. "The last time we had a larger number of growing glaciers was in 1997," the Alpine Club's lead researcher Gernot Patzelt said.

However, the group's latest study found that 83 of 94 monitored glaciers continued to melt by up to 49 metres, as temperatures lay above long-term averages by 0.4 degrees in winter and 0.9 degrees in summer.

Vienna - A court in Austria has thrown out a suit brought on behalf of a baby born with a deformed spine aimed at acknowledging his dignity of life, local media reported Thursday.

The lawsuit against the Austrian state was brought in the name of baby Emil Karg, who was born last August with an incompletely-formed spinal chord.

Vienna - An Austrian court stopped a case of motherly love gone too far by fining a 73-year-old woman for calling her son up to 49 times per day, the daily Kleine Zeitung reported Thursday.

The court in the Southern Austrian town of Klagenfurt convicted and sentenced the woman to a fine of 360 euros (476 dollars) for stalking her grown son for two and a half years.

"I just wanted to talk to him," the newspaper quoted the mother as telling the judge.

Vienna  - Austrian police and judicial authorities are plagued by "institutional racism" and treat people according to skin colour, the human rights watchdog Amnesty International concluded in a report presented on Thursday.

The problem was not only that 55 per cent of alleged victims of ill-treatment by police were foreigners or of foreign origin, according to the study.

A wider issue was racial profiling practiced by police, Heinz Patzelt, the head of Amnesty's Austrian chapter, told reporters in Vienna.