President Obama is scheduled to meet Merkel, new French President Francois Hollande, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and British Prime Minister David Cameron at Camp David on Friday evening.

Foreign affairs analysts said that Obama's leverage with the European leaders is minimal on this issue. Although the U.S. has the economic muscle to help Europe out of its mess, the Obama administration took the strategic decision not to become involved directly.

Instead, President Obama is to use the Camp David summit for some quiet diplomacy, hoping to sway Merkel to endorse some immediate actions to help growth. The problem for Obama is that most of the initiatives being discussed in Europe are medium-term or longer, too late to help him if the European crisis impacts on the U.S. economy in the fall, just ahead of the election in November.

In a television interview on Tuesday, the U.S. President acknowledged that the crisis could hurt America. "Europe is still weak and that is creating uncertainty for the business community here," said Obama.

The cost of modernizing U.S. nuclear weapons, including those stationed in Germany, has risen sharply, according to estimates. Several independent experts told Spiegel Online that the bill for renewing the B61 atomic bomb will rise to $6 billion. The project will also upset Russia, they say.

The B61 is the last remnant of the Cold War in Germany. An estimated 10 to 20 of the atomic bombs are thought to remain in storage at a German Air Force base in Büchel, a village in the Eifel mountains of western Germany. Should war break out, the Tornado aircraft belonging to the German Air Force could immediately be armed with the weapons for sorties under U.S. control.

The fact that such a scenario is considered extremely unlikely has not prevented the U.S. from embarking on an effort to upgrade the stockpile, as it is doing with much of its nuclear arsenal. The Life Extension Program (LEP) for the B61 -- of which there are between 160 and 200 in Europe -- is considered to be the most difficult and expensive of all. In 2010, the Department of Energy requested almost $2 billion (€1.6 billion) for the project, to be spent over four years. Later, the number rose to $4 billion.

Now, the total is expected to by closer to $6 billion, as several experts have reported independently. The first to write of the exploding costs was Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). Other experts are not surprised. "The $6 billion estimate for B61 LEP is consistent with our estimates," wrote executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, Daryl Kimball, in an email.

Just hours after his rain-soaked inauguration, new French President François Hollande flew to Berlin to meet with the German chancellor. The pair did all they could to exude amiability, but with Hollande now intent on fulfilling his myriad campaign promises, it remains to be seen how long the congeniality will last.

For a brief moment, it almost looked as if the meeting in Berlin wouldn't happen. The weather gods seemed to have it in for the new French president on Tuesday. Immediately following his swearing in, François Hollande was soaked through by a heavy shower as he stood at the Arc de Triomphe. Then, on his way to the German capital not long later, his plane was struck by lightning, forcing the pilot to turn around.

Hollande transferred to a second plane and made it to Berlin in the early evening, only to be dampened by yet another shower as Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed him with military honors at the Chancellery.

In the end, though, symbolism trumped the weather. Hollande's choice to fly to Berlin just hours after he was sworn in as Nicolas Sarkozy's successor in the Élysée Palace was nothing short of a statement: Good relations between the two largest countries in the European Union are vital. The importance of the meeting could be measured by the swarms of journalists who found their way to the Chancellery on Tuesday evening -- only visits by U.S. presidents tend to draw more attention. Each gesture was closely watched: Merkel welcomed Hollande with a handshake instead of the kisses she reserved for Sarkozy. But it is still early in the relationship.

Tuesday evening in Berlin was not focused on making decisions. It was about psychology, about atmosphere -- and about initial efforts to determine exactly where France now stands on the vital issues facing the E.U. Merkel and Hollande met for more than an hour before sitting down to dinner. They communicated via interpreters, both preferring to stick to their native tongues and only making brief forays into English.

The man fled when witnesses confronted him Monday morning, but police recovered the rifle and notebook at the scene in a subdivision south of Atlanta.

A witness saw the man pointing the rifle at a passing school bus, said Clayton County Police Officer Phong Nguyen.

The notebook was found with the weapon, said David Waller, a spokesman with the Clayton County school system.

Facing 11 charges including two counts of genocide, the 70 year-old former general appeared unrepentant on Wednesday. When he entered the courtroom at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague, he gave a sarcastic thumbs-up and a slow hand-clap to the public gallery. At one point, he looked directly at a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre and drew his finger across his throat.

"We visited him before the trial and tried to persuade him to be quiet, not to say anything at all," said Branko Lukic, his defense lawyer. "He told me he made that sign at a woman in the gallery who provoked him by showing him the middle finger. He is like that. He does the same to me."

After the break, Mladic complained about gestures from the public gallery. The judge told him to focus on the trial while warning the gallery he would put up a screen up around the court if there was any further "interaction".

For more than four hours, the prosecution at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, outlined its case. Dermot Groome, one of the two senior prosecutors, said that the evidence would show that Mladic, as the head of the Bosnian Serb general staff, was directly responsible for the atrocities committed. More than 100,000 people died in the conflict, mostly Muslims and Croats, including tens of thousands of civilians.

"The prosecution will present evidence that will show beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr. Mladic in each of these crimes," said Groome. In his statement, he drew on the defendant's published directives to his troops during the war, as well his war-time notebooks seized by Serbian police in a Belgrade flat where he had been hiding during his 16 years on the run.

A debate about violent Salafists has erupted in Germany after radical Muslims clashed with supporters of the anti-Islamic Pro NRW party during its recent election campaign. Three young Muslims who took part in a demonstration against the party in Cologne described their pious worldview to Spiegel.

After the water cannons have withdrawn and the Muhammad cartoons have been stowed away, three young men get into a car in front of Cologne's main train station. They are bearded and have the look of religious men. They seem somewhat dissatisfied.

Malik says: "It's sad and humiliating that so few people came."

Martin says: "Brother, it's Tuesday afternoon. Many of us work."

Koray shrugs his shoulders. He took the day off, he says, so why shouldn't other people do the same?

Furious And Speechless

Malik, Martin and Koray had left Hamburg in the morning to protest in Cologne against the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that members of the right-wing extremist party Pro NRW intended to display in front of a mosque. Against the will of the police, the Cologne Administrative Court had approved the display of the drawings made by the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. One of his drawings was among a series of cartoons published by Danish newspapers in 2005 that led to worldwide protests by Muslims, who were offended by the pictures. Many Muslims believe that visual depictions of Muhammad should be prohibited.

Berlin had hoped to gain worldwide recognition for its futuristic new international airport. After the announcement that the facility won't open on time due to massive safety problems, the city is embarrassed and the hunt for who to blame has begun. This article was written by Spiegel journalists; their names are provided at the end of the article. 

Not long ago, Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit toured the tower of the city's new international airport, Berlin Brandenburg Airport Willy Brandt. At 72 meters (236 feet), the tower is 1 meter higher than the one at Frankfurt's airport, currently Germany's most important airport. It's a subtle symbol of Berlin's new-found confidence.

The window-surrounded control center offers a magnificent view. In the distance, Wowereit could make out the new high-rises in his booming city and, below him, the glass-encased terminal that is supposedly the most advanced in Europe. The website of the airport's operating company proudly proclaims: "The future lies in Schoenefeld."

However, when the 58-year-old mayor had seen enough and gotten into the elevator to go down, it got stuck. The affronted mayor and his entourage had to be carefully cranked down by hand from the high-tech tower to the troubled reality below.

Since Tuesday of last week, it has been clear that the broken elevator isn't the only problem with what its operators call "Europe's most modern airport". For starters, massive safety concerns are spoiling Wowereit's "vision of a strong, internationally networked business location with a high-capacity airport."

Hopes that Chancellor Angela Merkel will back down from her strict insistence on austerity are likely to be dashed despite mounting European criticism of her policy and a crushing state election defeat for her party on Sunday. Most Germans like how she has handled the crisis, say analysts.

When the going gets tough, Chancellor Angela Merkel is prone to making a quick U-turn. Last year's departure from nuclear energy weeks after the Fukushima accident is a prime example.

Europeans hoping that mounting international opposition will make her drop her austerity plan to save the euro -- a policy that is causing so much pain in ailing economies like Greece and Spain -- are likely to be disappointed, say analysts in Germany.

The chancellor's personal approval ratings remain high, and opinion polls show the majority of Germans support her European strategy, which they see as the best way to limit the impact of the crisis on their personal finances.

An opinion poll for Stern magazine published last week showed that 59 percent of Germans are opposed to stimulating growth through new borrowing, and 61 believe that Merkel should stick to her position.

The international community needs to "radically transform" the way it manages water, energy and land to ensure the needs of the poorest people are met and the environment is protected, according to the European Report on Development, published on Wednesday.

The flagship report, Confronting Scarcity, Managing Water, Energy and Land for inclusive sustainable growth, calls on the European Union to adopt an integrated approach to managing the three elements to achieve universal access to water and energy, and sustainable food security.

An estimated 1 billion people are still undernourished, around 0.9 billion have no access to safe water and 1.5 billion have no electricity. The demand for water and energy is expected to rise by 40% by 2030 and by 50% for food. Badly managed or scarce resources tend to hit the poorest people hardest.

"Co-ordination failures between policies on water, energy and land need to be addressed to avoid the negative impacts of these inter-linkages," said the report, which aims to "shape global action" in the run-up to next month's Rio+20 U.N. conference on sustainable development.

"A drop of water, a piece of land, or a kilojoule of renewable energy cannot be seen through the single lens of one sectoral policy or management system. What might appear to be an efficient policy in one dimension can be harmful for others," it said.

Greece is on the verge of economic collapse and yet the country's left wants to jettison austerity measures. Would this leave any alternative other than exiting the euro? Spiegel Online invited the leader of Greece's pro-business Drasi party and an anti-austerity Syriza parliamentarian to debate the issues.

Just imagine: A country finds itself mired in an existential crisis and diametrically opposed political parties are tasked with putting together a government.

This is exactly the challenge Greece currently faces. The conservative Nea Dimokratia (New Democracy) and the socialist PASOK parties have tried in vain to convince the radical left-wing Syriza to join in forming a viable government. Every attempt at negotiation with the country's second-strongest party has failed, and Greece now faces a new election in June. 

The biggest issue in the vote will be the question of whether the people of Greece want their country to continue implementing the strict austerity measures they agreed to in exchange for European Union and International Monetary Fund bailout money, or if they want to simply leave the euro zone.

Spiegel Online invited representatives from two political camps in Greece that are the polar opposite of each other to debate the issue. Stefanos Manos, who leads the pro-business Drasi (Action) party, and Despoina Charalambidou, a member of parliament with the radical left-wing Syriza party, met over Skype to express their views.

Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel sacked Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen on Wednesday, replacing him with her close aide Peter Altmaier. Röttgen, a former protege of the chancellor, lost a major election for Merkel's conservative party on Sunday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday sacked her environment minister, Norbert Röttgen, who was politically weakened following his crushing defeat in a key regional election on Sunday.

She made the announcement in a surprise press briefing at the Chancellery in Berlin on Wednesday afternoon and said she would replace Röttgen with her party's parliamentary chief whip, Peter Altmaier, a close aide of hers.

Röttgen, 46, led Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party to a dramatic defeat in the election in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state.

Cologne-based rapper Najafi has drawn the wrath of Shiite Muslims after publishing a song that appeared to make fun of the 10th imam. Following a fatwa by an Iranian ayatollah, he has received death threats, and there is a $100,000 bounty on his head. Now he is under police protection but insists he will keep making music. This article was written by SPIEGEL journalists, their names are listed at the end of the article.

It's every rapper's dream: You stick it to the world, not caring what people think or say about you. If they hate you, they should go ahead and diss you, the more the better. No one can tell you what to do. After all, isn't that what rap is all about?

That dream came true last week for an Iranian rapper living in exile in Cologne. But in the tough reality of life, the dream has turned into a nightmare for Shahin Najafi. Najafi rapped about a man who has been dead 1,143 years: the 10th imam, Ali al-Hadi al-Naqi. He implored the imam to return to modern-day Iran to sort out the regime there. Of course, to a certain extent he also poked fun at the imam -- the sort of thing a rapper does in a world that's becoming more and more difficult to provoke. Najafi also designed an image for YouTube: a dome of a mosque in the shape of a women's breast, with the nipple at the very top.

He wanted to be provocative. It was rap, after all. The song's message was hard-hitting and crass.

What he provoked, however, was not the usual outcry on the Internet, but a response from the Grand Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpayegani in the Iranian city of Qom. It was a religious opinion, one that Persian newspapers have turned into headlines, albeit with a few weeks' delay. The ayatollah expressed himself in broad terms, not even mentioning Najafi by name. But anyone who wants to can easily interpret the ayatollah's opinion as a call to murder. And that is now Najafi's problem, because there are many who want to read it that way.

The Next Salman Rushdie

Hardly anything can become as emotionally charged in the cultural struggle between the enlightened and the orthodox as an apostasy fatwa practically asking for somebody's execution. Hardly anything is as capable of stimulating emotions and the masses. And, for this reason, hardly anything is more likely to be used as justification for a propaganda war where both sides are convinced they are right. The West wants to defend freedom of expression, while the radical religious culture wants to defend its faith.

The U.S. Justice Department opened an investigation into how JP Morgan lost more than $2 billion in poorly managed trading at its London office as the bank's embattled boss, Jamie Dimon, saw off attempts by shareholders to strip him of his role as chairman.

The Justice Department inquiry is at a preliminary stage and as yet there appears to be no evidence of criminal wrongdoing at the bank. The Securities and Exchange Commission has already launched a separate investigation and as political pressure for greater regulation of Wall Street banks begins to mount.

President Barack Obama appeared on the daytime talk show The View on Tuesday to call for Wall Street reform. "JP Morgan is the best, or one of the best managed, banks. You could have a bank that isn't as strong, isn't as profitable making those same bets and we might have had to step in. That's exactly why Wall Street reform's so important," he said.

He said Dimon, the chairman and chief executive officer of JP Morgan, was "one of the smartest bankers we've got – and they still lost $2 billion and counting".

At the bank's annual meeting, held at a tightly secured facility seven miles outside Tampa, Florida, shareholders quizzed Dimon on what went wrong. He said the losses "never should have happened" and that "all corrective actions" were being taken.

Forty-one percent of shareholders voted for a proposal by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to appoint an independent chairman. Dimon also received 94.8% approval from shareholders on his $23 million pay package from last year.

Rebekah Brooks made a defiant attack on the "weak and unjust" decision by the prosecuting authorities to bring charges against her on Tuesday and dismissed the case as an "expensive sideshow and waste of public money".

Outside her solicitor's office in London, the former chief executive of News International said she could not express how angry she was that those close to her had been "unfairly dragged into this".

An emotional and nervous-looking Brooks, 43, spoke out after a momentous day in the phone-hacking affair saw her facing three charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice over allegations that she concealed "material, documents and computers" from detectives investigating phone hacking at the News of the World and alleged bribes to public officials by journalists at the Sun.

Her husband, Charlie Brooks, a racehorse trainer and friend of the prime minister, faces one charge of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by acting with others to "conceal documents, computer and other electronic devices" from detectives.

Speaking alongside his wife, he also condemned the decision as "an attempt to use me and others as scapegoats, the effect of which is to ratchet up the pressure on my wife, who I believe is the subject of a witch-hunt".

The couple were among six individuals – including News International's head of security, Mark Hanna – charged over allegations that they were engaged in a cover-up to hide evidence from police investigating phone hacking at the News of the World.

Greece will hold a new election in June after President Karolos Papoulias failed on Tuesday to persuade parties to form a government. The anti-austerity SYRIZA party could win next month, raising the prospect that Greece will abandon its reforms and quit the euro. Markets fell sharply on the news.

It was the final act in the tragedy surrounding the attempts to form a Greek government -- and it had a dramatic ending. Greece will hold a new election in June after politicians failed to form a government on Tuesday, nine days after a vote that produced a stalemate.

Athens now faces at least another month of political uncertainty that threatens to push Greece closer to bankruptcy and an exit form the euro.

After a third day of failed talks with political leaders, a spokesman for President Karolos Papoulias said the process of seeking a compromise had failed and a new vote must be held. Elections rules suggest it will be in mid-June, possibly June 17. A caretaker government is to be formed on Wednesday to lead the country until the new vote can be held.

"For God's sake, let's move towards something better and not something worse," Socialist party leader Evangelos Venizelos told reporters after the meeting. "Our motherland can find its way, we will fight for it to find its way."

Alexis Tsipras, the head of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), now has a key role because he looks set to win the new election. He is demanding that Greece abandon the reforms and austerity measures imposed on it by international lenders in return for aid. SYRIZA emerged as the second strongest political force in the March 6 election with 16.8 percent of the vote, and opinion polls suggest its support has since grown to 24 percent.