Austria

By his own confession, Austrian police say, Josef Fritzl held his daughter inside a hidden, windowless cellar for nearly a quarter of a century, raping her repeatedly and forcing her to give birth to seven of his children. When two of the children were freed this week, authorities said they were seeing sunlight for the first time.

Speculation that far-right leader Joerg Haider led a double life raged after his political protege, Stefan Petzner, publicly called Haider "the man of my life" in a tearful tribute to the Freedom Party boss who died in a car crash this month. Petzner, 27, did not say explicitly that he and Haider, a married father of two, had a sexual relationship.

SPRING is not simply an in-the-air phenomenon, nor is it limited to the meadow or the flower patch -- it happens on the plate as well. As the first vegetables find their way to market -- favas, peas and their pale, graceful tendrils, pungent green garlic, artichoke and asparagus -- the mealtime flavors turn brisk, immediate and alive. Austrian white wines perfectly capture this vernal moment, none better than Gruner Veltliner.

THE business of importing Austrian wines is small and personal. If the wine makes it to the shelf of an American wine shop, it has almost always been selected with care. The wines below (with one exception) are Federspiel-weight wines or lighter, listed from light to medium body. A clue: If the wine has a screw cap, which many Austrian wineries have adopted, you've probably found something meant for early consumption. 2005 Kalmuck Wachau Gruner Veltliner.

In this city famed for its love of music, Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer's glaring involvement in who will run Vienna's flagship opera house has made him a target for criticism that he is spending too much time on affairs of the stage instead of the state. The Austrian government leader is a Socialist -- a party whose rank and file still is drawn from the European working class with a musical preference more Beyonce than Brahms.

Austria on Wednesday returned a painting by Edvard Munch, called "Summer Night on the Beach," to the granddaughter of the composer Gustav Mahler, ending a 60-year legal battle. The painting, which has hung in Vienna's Belvedere museum since 1940, was handed to Marina Fistoulari-Mahler in Vienna, the museum said in a statement. Fistoulari-Mahler, who lives in Italy, "hasn't yet said what she plans to do with the painting," a museum spokeswoman said.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to his Austrian hometown for the first time since severing ties with the city two years ago after a flap over the death penalty. The governor was welcomed at the airport by friends and current and former local politicians. He did not take questions from journalists. The spat began after the governor refused Graz authorities' calls for him to block the execution of a convicted California gang founder.

An Austrian museum, the Albertina, is trying to determine whether a prized collection of 3,600 posters, including works by Gustav Klimt, was acquired in a coerced Holocaust-era sale, according to the Art Newspaper. The Albertina, an acclaimed graphics collection in Vienna, had believed the works, which could be worth $10 million, were bought legitimately from the Catholic widow of Julius Paul, a Jewish businessman.

The sarcasm fairly dripped from Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer's voice as he pointed to the ice rink Russia has assembled to promote Sochi's bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics. "This is a good symbol of how our friends in Russia understand environment -- putting a skating facility in a country with a temperature of almost 30 degrees [86 Fahrenheit]," Gusenbauer told The Times as he walked through Guatemala City on Tuesday afternoon.

A woman looking for old crockery in a trash container in the western Austrian town of Zell am See stumbled upon a medieval cross that could be worth more than half a million dollars, Salzburg police said. The woman, who has not been identified, apparently did not know what she had found in 2004, but last month, a neighbor took it to a museum in the village of Leogang. It's unclear whether the woman will get any money.