1. York.

Companies have a "social duty" to employ young British workers rather than better-qualified immigrants, a Conservative minister said today.

On 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall was opened, tens of thousands of East Germans introduced the West to the Trabant car as they drove over the frontier. The car rapidly became recognisable as a kind of automotive liberator. The engineer behind its invention, Werner Lang, remained largely unknown.

Gyula Horn was the last Communist Foreign Minister of Hungary, who started opening the Iron Curtain. On 27 June 1989 he joined Alois Mock, the Austrian Foreign Minister, to pull down a section of the barbed wire dividing their countries. During the following months thousands of East Germans used the route to emigrate to Austria and West Germany. It was the beginning of the end for East German Communism. In Hungary Horn is better known for a massive austerity programme when he was Prime Minister in 1995. The package sparked massive opposition.

One of the Germany's main railway routes closed

Several patients died in tests made possible by massive payoffs to Communist regime

Russian President Vladimir Putin laughed off a protest against him by topless women in Germany on Monday, joking that he liked what he had seen while sharply rebuffing German criticism of his human rights record.

Work crews backed by about 250 police removed parts of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery before dawn today to make way for an upscale building project, despite demands by protesters that the site be preserved.

In a Berlin apartment, a woman scrubs four kilos of mussels and places them in a heavy pot to cook as she and her two teenagers wait for the father to return. The meal is his favourite, and she has prepared it to celebrate his expected promotion. Written in 1989 as East Germany's communist dictatorship was unravelling, Birgit Vanderbeke's novella was first published the following year. Capturing the national mood, it won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, and is now a school text.

An Israeli investigative journalist has launched a search for nearly half-a-ton of Jewish-owned gold and platinum believed to have been stolen by the Nazis and dumped in a remote lake north of Berlin during the last days of the Second World War.

Sprint queen returns to action in Glasgow after shattering tainted record in London