Nuremberg, Germany - Inspectors are to fan out at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in Germany this week to check if toys for tiny tots have parts that can be swallowed, German industrial safety authorities said Tuesday.

The toy trade has been shaken by a series of recalls of toys that breached safety standards for users aged three and less. Young children often suck toys and have been known to swallow magnets that have come unglued from some toys

Nuremberg, Germany - As Hong Kong girds for the recession, its toy makers are hoping sales to emerging markets will go some way to replacing losses in the United States, a trade official said Wednesday ahead of the Nuremberg Toy Fair opening.

"We are not counting on eastern Europe to replace lost sales to the United States, but at least there are some other areas where we can put in some more effort," said Winchell Cheung, who heads the Frankfurt office of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.

Nuremberg, Germany - German second division club Nuremberg

Nuremberg, Germany  - A new service, called Family DSL, has been designed to make internet surfing safe for children.

Familien DSL, as the system is marketed in Germany, consists of a DSL connection, a WLAN router and an USB stick with integrated security software, said representatives of the three firms behind the idea - Carpo, D-Link and Cybits.

Family DSL is based on lists compiled and regularly reviewed by education experts. Those lists assign positive and negative values to websites, based on the user's age, and are regularly updated to the router, which then allows or disallows access based on the rating. As the information is stored in the router, the security software does not have to be installed on every device in a home.

Nuremberg, Germany - A former top Siemens executive and a former pro-business union leader were sentenced to jail Monday as part of a scandal over illicit payments totalling more than 30 million euros (38 million dollars).

A court in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg sentenced former Siemens management board member Johannes Feldmayer to a suspended two-year sentence, while Wilhelm Schelsky, the former head of the AUB Association of Independent Employees, received a four-and-year prison term.

Prosecutors had been seeking much tougher sentences for both men who had been on trial over illicit Siemens funds which had been paid to AUB between 2001 and 2006.

Nuremberg, Germany - German talks on boosting government spending to offset recession are to continue through the weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday.

Pump-priming is planned by a broad range of western countries as world gloom spreads.

Merkel said, "It's important that such an ambitious plan fits in with the measures by other nations."

Speaking in Nuremberg, she noted that a G20 summit she is to attend in Washington on November 15 would also review how to boost the economies of the emerging markets.