Berlin - Grandparents in Germany won the right to unpaid leave from work to care fo

Berlin - German experts compiling a brief for the G20 summit in Washington are to call for a revision of the way banking executives are paid and a worldwide loan registry, sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa Friday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck commissioned the experts to rapidly draft a set of proposals and report back Friday.

Led by Otmar Issing, a former chief economist of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, they said short-term performance bonuses for financial executives had been a significant cause of the global financial crisis.

Berlin, Nov 14 : The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible light snapshot of a planet circling another star.

Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter’s mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus.

Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess of dust was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by the US- UK-Dutch Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS).

Berlin  - When Gerson Liebl arrived from the West African state of Togo to press his claim for German citizenship, little did he realize he would still be battling bureaucracy 17 years later.

He was, after all, grandson of the late Dr Friedrich Karl Georg Liebl, a noted specialist in tropical diseases who before World War I was employed at the Nightingale Hospital in Lome, Togo.

Berlin  - The German government threw down a gauntlet Thursday to both luxury carmaker Porsche and the European Commission, with Parliament in Berlin passing new legislation to cement state rights over Volkswagen.

Porsche has announced it will own just under 75 per cent of the giant car manufacturer when options fall due next year. A German state, Lower Saxony, owns just over 20 per cent of Volkswagen.

Berlin - Germany's parliament Thursday extended the mandate of German troops serving in global anti-terror operations, but reduced the number from 1,400 to 800.

Legislators voted 428-130 in favour of allowing troops to continue serving in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), which was set up in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.