New analysis of oil industry contributions to members of Congress has revealed the level of the oil lobby's financial firepower that Barack Obama can expect to face in the November elections if he refuses to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Obama has until February 21 to make a decision on whether to approve the pipeline, under a compromise tax measure approved late last year. America's top oil lobbyist warned last week that the president would face "huge political consequences" if he did not sign off on the project to pump tar sands crude across the American heartland to refineries on the Texas coast.

The Canadian government is also on the offensive, with an attack this week on "jet-setting celebrities" opposed to tar sands pipelines. At the same time, TransCanada executives have embarked on a letter-writing campaign.

Now Maplight, an independent research group in Berkeley, California, that tracks the influence of money in politics, has conducted an analysis of oil industry contributions to members of Congress supporting the pipeline.

The study, which is due to be published on Wednesday, studied industry contributions to members of the House of Representatives which passed a bill last July that would have forced Obama to speed up approval of the Keystone project.

YouTube must take down copyrighted clips of music, a German court has ruled, in a move that could be a step towards forcing it to pay large sums in royalties.

The move is a fresh setback for Google's video site after a U.S. appeals court this month reopened a $1 billion (£620 million) case brought by media conglomerate Viacom, as well as the Premier League and other media companies against YouTube in the U.S. over copyrighted videos on the site.

Gema, a German royalties group, scored the victory in Hamburg on Friday, where the court ruled the website was responsible for the content its users published, a decision that could be a first step towards YouTube – and potentially other internet publishers – having to pay royalties on videos with copyrighted music embedded in the soundtrack.

The case, for allegedly infringing the copyright on seven music clips, was brought against YouTube in 2010 by Gema and several other groups handling music rights.

YouTube argued it merely provided the technical framework to publish content and was not responsible for monitoring videos and music clips for possible copyright violations.

The successful case brought by the Accountancy and Actuarial Discipline Board (AADB) is the latest sign of how regulators are taking a harder line on auditors, seen by policymakers as being too soft on banks in the run-up to the financial crisis.

The AADB said PwC, one of the world's "Big Four" auditors, which check the books of nearly all blue-chip companies, admitted it failed to obtain "sufficient appropriate evidence" to report that J.P. Morgan Securities complied with strict client money rules spanning several years.

Most of the client money from futures and options trading was being daily "swept" into interest-bearing, unsegregated accounts overnight at J.P. Morgan Chase bank, the firm's parent, said the AADB.

In June 2010 the U.K. Financial Services Authority (FSA) slapped a record 33.32 million pound fine on J.P. Morgan Securities for failing to keep client money separate at all times from the firm's money over a seven-year period to July 2009.

The oil group has filed a suit in New Orleans seeking "the amount of costs and expenses incurred by BP to clean up and remediate the oil spill, the lost profits from and/or diminution in value of the Macondo prospect, and all other costs and damages incurred by BP related to the Deepwater Horizon incident and resulting oil spill", according to the filing.

BP did not specify the amount of damages it is seeking from Halliburton, which provided cement contracting services on the well in the Gulf of Mexico. But it previously estimated the clean-up will cost $42 billion. It has spent $14 billion in the Gulf coast region cleaning up the spill with another $20 billion set aside for economic claims and restoration work.

The oil firm wants Halliburton to pay damages "equal to, or in the alternative proportional to Halliburton's fault," to cover clean-up costs and any government fines BP may face.

A Halliburton spokeswoman said: "Halliburton stands firm that we are indemnified by BP against losses resulting from the Macondo incident."

Germany's famous Bauhaus school from 1919 to 1933 forged new boundaries in the art and design world and remains highly influential today. But its brand and legacy has been under threat for five decades from a large German-Swiss home goods retailer that took the title and trademark "Bauhaus" in 1960 and now has 190 stores around Europe.

Architect Walter Gropius and his group of communal craftsmen put a radical stamp on architecture, design and art education during Germany's Weimar Period between the two world wars. He even claims he coined the term "Bauhaus" as the name for his atypical art school.

Along the way, though, he forgot an important thing: to protect the name.

As a result, up to 40 companies in Germany and myriad others abroad have taken the word "Bauhaus" as a brand or title. The imitators include a furniture label in the United States, a rumored bordello in Japan, a chocolate variety that touts its form and function, a real estate company and the early British gothic band led by Peter Murphy.

"Bauhaus sells," says Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive Museum in Berlin. "That's the point." When someone is copying you or your name in a corporate context, she says, "then you see that you really have a brand."

Shareholder activists have renewed their call for Rupert Murdoch to quit as chairman of News Corporation, as the company faces fresh turmoil with the resignation of his son James Murdoch as chairman of its British pay-TV giant.

Christian Brothers Investment Services (CBIS), which allied a massive vote against Rupert Murdoch, his sons and several of his appointed directors last year, calls for him to be replaced with an independent director.

In last year's vote, James Murdoch emerged as the least popular director with shareholders: 67% of the votes not controlled by the Murdoch family went against him.

This year's resolution, filed shortly before James Murdoch stepped down at BSkyB, says the phone-hacking scandal has placed News Corp in peril. It reads: "This pervasive and continuing scandal has led to an erosion of public confidence, helped to scuttle a critical business acquisition, and threatened the journalistic reputation and viability of News Corporation's U.K. publications. It also has made clear the need for independent board leadership to steer the company through a process of reform," says the resolution.

Julie Tanner, assistant director at CBIS, said Rupert Murdoch had to take responsibility for News Corp's continuing woes following the hacking scandal at his U.K. newspapers that has led to dozens of arrests and the closure of the News of the World.

Recent weeks have seen spectacular arrests and mounting tension between those who would like to make it harder to share copyrighted material online and those who champion Internet freedom. Controversial U.S. legislation has been shelved, but the battle continues.

It was roughly 6:30 a.m. when two police helicopters suddenly started circling over the "Dotcom mansion" northwest of Auckland, one of the most expensive estates in New Zealand. By that time, it must have been clear to the mansion's occupant that he was about to say goodbye to his sweet life, at least for a while. Although he locked himself in a safe room with a gun, the authorities eventually managed to reach Kim Dotcom, as the man currently calls himself. He is also known as Kim Tim Jim Vestor, Dr. Evil or simply Kimble. In 1974, he was born Kim Schmitz in the northern German city of Kiel.

Schmitz, probably the most colorful figure in Germany's "New Economy," had moved halfway around the world to escape his reputation. And, at least from his standpoint, he had finally achieved success. With websites like Megaupload and Megavideo, Schmitz had built an enormous Internet empire beginning roughly in the mid-1990s. At times, Megaupload was in 13th place among the most-visited sites worldwide.

According to the U.S. indictment against him, Schmitz and his associates have raked in more than $175 million (€135 million) from their activities. For more than two years, the FBI had investigated Schmitz and his associates, including German nationals Mathias O., Sven E. and Finn B., all of whom have also been indicted.

Emissions trading, the European Union hoped, would limit the release of harmful greenhouse gases. But it isn't working. The price for emissions certificates has plunged, a development that is actually making coal more attractive than renewable energy.

Photo by DPA.

In the perfect world of economic liberals, every commodity has its price. Limited supply makes goods more expensive and vice versa. That's how markets work -- at least in theory.

In practice, things often look different, and this is especially true when it comes to emissions trading, a business subject to a very different mechanism: laws dictated by the European Union.

Economists have generally praised the trading scheme as a nearly ideal instrument for reducing harmful carbon dioxide emissions. In this system, businesses purchase pollution permits, with prices determined according to supply and demand, in an efficient and self-regulating process. Companies that invest in environmentally friendly technology need to buy fewer certificates, or may even have some left over to sell.

But for the last half year, prices for CO2 certificates have dropped almost continuously, decreasing by about half, to around €8 ($10.60) per metric ton. Not even the closure of eight German nuclear power plants in 2011, and the resulting increase in demand for coal power, has done much to lastingly reverse the trend.

Michael Kröhnert, an emissions trader in Berlin, refers to the plunging prices as a slaughter. And he fully expects it to continue. "The spiral is spinning downward," he says.

The Costa Concordia disaster, which has claimed at least 13 lives, has shocked the world. But maritime experts say such a catastrophe was just a matter of time. In recent years, the cruise industry has been building ever-bigger ships in pursuit of profit -- and disregarding the dangers the giant vessels pose. This article was written by Spiegel journalists whose names are provided at the end of the article.

On the Tuscan island of Giglio, the night sky is clear and the stars are out. Three men are sitting among the cacti and lemon trees near the cliffs behind the harbor. When the weather is nice, couples come here at sunset to make out.

It's Thursday night of last week. Seven days have now passed since the Costa Concordia ran aground off the coast of Italy.

The moon is shining as the men stare at the wreckage of the capsized cruise ship, not far from the harbor entrance. Two of the men are local Italians from the island, who have spent the last few days in a desperate struggle, and who have saved many lives in the process. They are comforting the third man, an Indian from Mumbai, who is still hoping for a miracle.

The Indian, Kevin Rebello, misses his brother Russell, 33. Russell was a steward on the Concordia and had been traveling the world's oceans for the last five years. Russell had assured his family that he earned good tips in his job, and told them they shouldn't worry about him -- this type of ship couldn't sink. The brother still believes that Russell survived in an air pocket somewhere in the belly of the ship.

The shipping company flew Kevin Rebello in, as it did other relatives of victims from places like Peru, Hungary and France. He has to be close to his brother now, he says, which is why he is waiting in this spot.

Chancellor Angela Merkel wanted to use the nomination of a new presidential candidate to prepare the ground for a new coalition after the next election in 2013. But her junior coalition partner, the FDP, scuppered her plan. Now, the unthinkable has become possible: A future coalition without Merkel's party.

In the last few months, Dr. Philipp Rosler, the chairman of Germany's pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), has often seemed as if he were his own patient, standing there with drooping shoulders, smiling sadly into the cameras and trying to laugh away his poor condition, albeit a little too loudly. Rosler, who is also the country's vice chancellor and economy minister, has looked conspicuously ill at ease of late.

But then, on the Sunday before last, a miracle occurred. The patient regained his health so suddenly that even he could hardly believe it. Since then, Rosler has behaved as if he had injected himself with a combination of his own blood and fresh cells. His shoulders are suddenly straight again, he has regained his self-confidence and even his jokes have improved.

Rosler knows whom he has to thank for his sudden cure: Chancellor Angela Merkel, who holds a doctorate in physics, is currently being celebrated as the "Queen of Europe," just as she is feared as a cool power monger who won't hesitate to sweep aside potential rivals when necessary. The chancellor has a reputation for "starting at the end and working backward" when she thinks about issues, and for always being a step ahead of her adversaries.

Inhabitants of the communist bastion of Cuba have been getting a taste of the free market lately with the introduction of market reforms by President Raúl Castro. The Catholic Church is supporting his endeavor, and Pope Benedict's visit could boost efforts to open up the country.

The vehicle Juan Perez calls his Audi is a blue two-seater with seats made of imitation leather. The passenger has to do without an airbag and a seatbelt. Indeed, about the only thing it really shares in common with the German car brand are the four rings on the handlebar meant to look like the Audi logo.

"Do you like my Audi?" Perez asks, throwing his weight into the pedals of his bicycle-powered rickshaw. He dreams of owning an A4 with air-conditioning and alloy rims.

Perez has been working for himself for the last year, now that the Cuban government has granted him a license as a small business owner. He earns the equivalent of €300 ($400) a month. The only problem, he says, is that he has to pay taxes now. His stand is at the beginning of Havana's Calle Neptuno, where rickshaws, mopeds, pre-revolutionary vintage taxis and government-owned Ladas battle for every bit of asphalt amid a cacophony of horns. The smell of gasoline hangs in the air.

The "Neptuno" begins at Prado Boulevard, in the heart of the city, and leads to the university in Vedado, a formerly middle-class neighborhood. Its streets are lined with small shops, handicraft businesses, restaurants and self-serve dining establishments.

After World War II, West Germany rapidly made the transition from murderous dictatorship to model democracy. Or did it? New documents reveal just how many officials from the Nazi regime found new jobs in Bonn. A surprising number were chosen for senior government positions.

Ten days before Christmas, the German Interior Ministry acquitted itself of an embarrassing duty. It published a list of all former members of the German government with a Nazi past.

The Left Party's parliamentary group had forced the government to come clean about Germany's past by submitting a parliamentary inquiry. Bundestag document 17/8134 officially announced, for the first time, something which had been treated as a taboo in the halls of government for decades: A total of 25 cabinet ministers, one president and one chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany -- as postwar Germany is officially known -- had been members of Nazi organizations.

The document revealed that Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who governed Germany from 1966 to 1969, had been a member of the Nazi Party ever since Adolf Hitler seized power. According to the Interior Ministry list, German President Walter Scheel, a member of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) who was in office from 1974 to 1979, had been a Nazi Party member "from 1941 or 1942."

The list names ministers of all political stripes and from a wide range of social backgrounds. Some, like leftist Social Democratic Party (SPD) mastermind Erhard Eppler (Minister of Economic Cooperation), did not become Nazi Party members until the end (at 17, in Eppler's case). Others, like conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) agitator Richard Jaeger (Minister of Justice), had been part of Hitler's paramilitary organization, the SA (since 1933, in Jaeger's case). Even FDP luminary Hans-Dietrich Genscher (first Interior Minister and later Foreign Minister), who denies to this day that he knowingly joined the Nazi Party, is listed as a Nazi Party member.

According to the government list, former SPD Finance Minister Karl Schiller was in the SA, while his fellow cabinet minister Horst Ehmke was a Nazi Party member, as were ("presumably," the list notes) former SPD Labor Minister Herbert Ehrenberg and Hans Leussink, a former education minister with no party affiliation. On the conservative side, the report names several former Nazi Party members, including former CDU Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroder and former CDU Minister for Displaced Persons Theodor Oberländer, as well as former CSU Post and Communication Minister Richard Stücklen and former CSU Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann.

Germany's Dark Past   

None of this information is new. It isn't just since the 1968 student revolts that critical citizens, intellectuals and the media have broadcast new details on the contemporary relevance of Germany's dark past. For years, the notion that partisans of the Nazi regimes were able to manipulate their way into the top levels of government in the young federal republic, and that former Nazi Party members set the tone in a country governed by the postwar constitution in the 1950s and 60s has been a subject for historians.

Q: How important is Hawking really within physics? How does he fit into the canon?

KF: He fits in as a person who dares to go out on the leading edge. One of the scientists today at this conference said, thank you Stephen for making life so difficult for us. What he meant by that was coming up with theories that send everybody scurrying, it just throws a spanner into the works. It challenges everybody all the time and that's one of his greatest contributions.

Also the fact that he's been willing, all through his career, to pull the rug out from under his discoveries. He's done this again and again – he's discovered something, then he's discovered the opposite.

He's always flipping around. It's the willingness to do that that is very impressive. He wants the general public to know that scientists change their minds, that scientists can admit they're wrong. It's very important. So many people among non-scientists see science as an unassailable monolith of truth, and it's not. It's an ongoing self-correcting process and that's the way he does it and that's the way he presents it.

That's tremendously valuable, especially to young people who are thinking of going into science or anyone who is thinking of basing their religious or philosophical beliefs on science. And that is an important legacy he has taught and continues to live out.

-- Michael Green, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge  

MG: In a sense, were it not for my predecessor, it would have felt no different from being any other professor.

But the name carries a certain weight with it and it's extremely difficult to imagine one would live up to, not just Stephen but, for example, Paul Dirac, who had the chair in the last century, and all sorts of people before including Isaac Newton.

The collapse of the Dutch government, the prospect of Socialist Francois Hollande as next French president and the surging popularity of far-right parties shows that budget discipline is out of fashion in Europe. Chancellor Angela Merkel is looking increasingly lonely in her fight to save the euro through painful austerity measures, write German commentators.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is running out of allies in her drive to solve the euro debt crisis through strict austerity programs.

French Socialist Francois Hollande looks on course to oust President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been Merkel's most important partner in the fight to overcome the debt crisis, in a run-off vote on May 6 after beating him into second place in the first round on Sunday.

And Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose minority government has been lecturing Greece and other high-debt countries about the need for strict spending cuts, resigned on Monday after the far-right Freedom Party of populist Geert Wilders refused to back budget cuts for the Netherlands, regarded as one of the most stable economies in Europe.

Across Europe, right-wing populists are on the rise, winning votes from ordinary people disenchanted with cuts that have been making their lives harder. In France, the National Front of Marine Le Pen won 17.9 percent on Sunday, the highest result a far-right candidate has ever managed in France.

There are growing divisions among European Central Bank leadership about how to handle the euro crisis, not to mention between the ECB and the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank. While ECB head Mario Draghi is pleased with his recent decision to flood the markets with cheap money, Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann warns of the dangers.

By the time European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi made his appearance at the most recent G-20 meeting in Mexico City, most participants were already thinking about the long trip home, but he still had no trouble spreading a bit of good cheer. "Super Mario" casually sat on a dark chair and, with an impish smile on his face, explained in a gentle voice why his loose monetary policy -- which he himself has dubbed "Big Bertha" -- is precisely what's needed. "The euro is now a safer place than it was at the time of the last G-20 summit in Cannes," he said.

Shortly after he returned home, Draghi used his wonder weapon again. Last week, the ECB pumped more than half a trillion euros into the markets to maintain the money flow in the monetary zone. Europe has experienced a painful lack of liquidity ever since a large number of northern European banks reacted to the euro crisis by severing nearly all lines of credit to financial institutions in the south. Now, with the help of Draghi's second cash injection within just a few weeks, ailing southern European banks were once again able to grant loans and purchase sovereign bonds from their home countries.

Although this has eased the ongoing debt crisis on the Continent, and made Draghi into "Europe's rescuer" in the eyes of many politicians and financial managers, one of his leading partners views this approach with growing concern. Only two days before Draghi made his G-20 presentation, Jens Weidmann, president of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, spoke at the Mexico summit, and he had an entirely different message for his listeners. "The crisis cannot be resolved solely by throwing money at it," he said.

There is a rift among top-ranking officials at the ECB, and it also extends between the majority of the ECB's Governing Council and the Bundesbank. First, two leading German ECB officials -- chief economist Jurgen Stark and Bundesbank President Axel Weber -- resigned because the monetary authority was buying up sovereign bonds from Greece and Portugal. Then Weber's successor Weidmann objected to the ECB's purchase of government bonds from heavily indebted Italy.

Mitt Romney was left looking to Mississippi to achieve a feat he hadn’t yet accomplished this cycle – win in one of the Republican Party’s conservative strongholds – as results from the twin primaries in Republican Party strongholds trickled in Tuesday evening.

Almost two hours after polls closed, the race in Mississippi was too close to call.

“We did it again,” Santorum said to wild applause from supporters in Louisiana.

A week after Super Tuesday, the Alabama and Mississippi primaries could determine whether Romney was able to finally win in one of the Republican Party's identifiably conservative corners.

Any such victory would come, in part, due to a split conservative vote between former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. The two men have battled Romney – and each other – in a week’s worth campaigning in two states where the electorate closely mirrors some of the modern Republican Party’s core constituencies.

When Rick Santorum gave his victory speech following Tuesday's unexpected triumphs in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri, he was flanked by his wife Karen – and by Foster Friess, a Christian billionaire who has been the prime bank-roller of his resurgent campaign.

Friess, a 71-year-old mutual fund manager, presents himself as a preserver of traditional "founding father" values.

The small-government, anti-tax investment manager from Wyoming – Man Atop The Horse, as he is called on the website promoting his views and picturing him, saddled up, in a rain slicker against a mountain landscape – set up the Red, White and Blue Super Pac (political action committee) which has so far spent $2.2 million (£1.4 million) in promoting Santorum's cause, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Friess was born in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, in 1940, to a mother who dropped out of school in the eighth grade to pick cotton to save her family's farm in Texas, and a father who dealt in cattle and horses. He grew up on the family ranch.

A degree in business administration at Wisconsin University, and then marriage, two sons, two daughters and 10 grandchildren followed.

A linguistics professor in Bamberg is considered the most powerful member of Germany's burgeoning Pirate Party, even though he holds no office. Martin Haase engages in politics almost exclusively through the Internet using the party's Liquid Feedback software. The platform is flattening the political hierarchy and is unique among German political parties.

Martin Haase doesn't have to give any hard-hitting speeches at party conferences, nor does he spend time at board meetings or in back rooms to hone his power. When the 49-year-old professor wants to engage in politics, he just opens his laptop and logs in to Liquid Feedback, the Pirate Party's online platform for discussing and voting on political proposals.

For hours at a time, the political newcomers (the Pirates first formed in Germany in 2006) discuss their party's goals, and each member has the opportunity to use Liquid Feedback as a platform to promote his or her positions -- which can range from the Pirate Party fielding its own presidential candidate to the appeal to deescalate the conflict with Iran. It isn't always easy to secure a majority for a given cause on the site.

Until Haase intervenes, that is. The linguistics professor has a sort of virtual alliance backing him on Liquid Feedback. Up to 167 fellow party members have periodically delegated their vote to him on the site, which is more than any other Pirate Party member can claim. When members recently argued against extending the term of their national leadership by two years, Haase intervened. Annual elections of the executive committee would mean the members would have to spend too much time dealing with getting reelected rather than devoting their attention to the real issues. "We need more time for political work," he said. Haase's vote was like a decree.

Seven Percent Support Nationwide  

Polls show the Pirate Party enjoying the support of up to 7 percent of voters nationwide. It has secured seats in the parliament of the city-state of Berlin, and in a few weeks it could also enter the parliaments of two other states, Saarland in the west and Schleswig-Holstein in the north.

Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a "great moral issue" on a par with slavery, according to the leading NASA climate scientist Professor James Hansen.

He argues that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for society in future is an "injustice of one generation to others".

Hansen, who will next Tuesday be awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for his contribution to science, will also in his acceptance speech call for a worldwide tax on all carbon emission.

In his lecture, Hansen will argue that the challenge facing future generations from climate change is so urgent that a flat-rate global tax is needed to force immediate cuts in fossil fuel use. Ahead of receiving the award – which has previously been given to Sir David Attenborough, the ecologist James Lovelock, and the economist Amartya Sen – Hansen told the Guardian newspaper that the latest climate models had shown the planet was on the brink of an emergency. He said humanity faces repeated natural disasters from extreme weather events which would affect large areas of the planet.

"The situation we're creating for young people and future generations is that we're handing them a climate system which is potentially out of their control," he said. "We're in an emergency: you can see what's on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction."  

For years, foreign automobile companies have reaped most of the profits to be had in the enormous Chinese market. But in a largely unnoticed change, Beijing is now ending their preferential treatment of car makers from abroad to focus more on developing domestic technology and brands.

The sea change is coming slowly, as if to protect those affected from being startled out of their festive mood. At the end of last year, the Chinese government's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) approved a new industrial plan that could have a devastating effect on German car manufacturers like Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes once it takes effect in late January.

These companies have worked to make China one of their most important and successful foreign markets, while Beijing industrial planning officials looked on in frustration. In the first 11 months of last year, VW alone sold more than 2 million vehicles in there -- up more than 15 percent from 2010.

But this kind of growth could now be over. To protect the "healthy development" of their domestic auto industry, the NDRC said it would remove car manufacturing from the list of industries where it encourages foreign investment. The goal of the change is clear: Beijing wants to help its own car makers break into the market.

Domestic Manufacturers Suffering  

When compared to foreign manufacturers, domestic Chinese car makers such as BYD ("Build Your Dreams") are suffering from the current slow-down in the market there. After Beijing cut state benefits for car purchases, the entire Chinese auto market grew by only about 3 percent in 2011 -- compared to 30 percent the previous year.

An attempt by BP to offload a major part of its Gulf of Mexico oil-spill compensation bill on to the U.S. rig-operator Transocean has been thrown out by a U.S. court.

The setback comes in the run-up to the main legal case against BP and its partners on February 27 in New Orleans, which will rule over who is to blame for the Deepwater Horizon accident, in which 11 workers died.

Shares in the oil group fell 2.7% after a federal judge upheld a clause in the drilling contract that shielded Transocean from having to pay compensation for livelihoods damaged by the Macondo blowout in 2010.

But the district judge, Carl Barbier, left open the possibility that Transocean might still have to pay punitive damages or civil penalties imposed by the U.S. government under the federal Clean Water Act.

Computers dominate how we live, work and think. For some, the technology is a boon and promises even better things to come. But others warn that there could be bizarre consequences and that humans may be on the losing end of progress.  

Federico Faggin has lived in the United States for more than 40 years, but he's still living la dolce vita in classic Italian style in his magnificent house on the edge of Silicon Valley. The elderly Faggin answers the phone with a loud "pronto" and serves wine and antipasti to guests. Everything about him is authentic. The only artificial thing in Faggin's world is what he calls his "baby." It has 16 feet -- eight on each side -- and sits wrapped in cotton in a cigarette case.

About four decades ago, Faggin was one of the first employees at Intel when he and his team developed the world's first mass-produced microprocessor, the component that would become the heart of the modern era. Computer systems are ubiquitous today. They control everything, from mobile phones to Airbus aircraft to nuclear power plants. Faggin's tiny creation made new industries possible, and he has played a key role in the progress of the last few decades. But even the man who triggered this massive revolution is slowly beginning to question its consequences.

"We are experiencing the dawn of a new age," Faggin says. "Companies like Google and Facebook are nothing but a series of microprocessors, while man is becoming a marginal figure."

The Worrying Speed Of Progress  

This week, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Google chairman Eric Schmidt opened CeBIT -- the digital industry's most important annual trade fair -- in the northern German city of Hanover, there was a lot of talk of the mobile Internet once again, of "cloud computing," of "consumer electronics" and of "connected products." The overarching motto of this convention is "Trust" -- in the safety of technology, in progress and in the pace at which progress unfolds.

Israel has been doing everything in its power to stop Iran's atomic program, from targeted killings to computer worms. Now, a bombing raid on Iran's nuclear facilities may be just months away. But an Israeli attack could have the effect of strengthening the regime -- and make it more determined than ever to build the bomb. This article was written by SPIEGEL journalists; their names are listed at the end of this article.

Twelve hours is an agonizingly long time for endurance athletes as they punish their bodies, pushing themselves to the ultimate limit in events like triathlons or mountain bike races.

Twelve hours is also an agonizingly long time for politicians, acting under the pressure of an ultimatum, to prevent a war that would mean the inevitable deaths of large numbers of people.

In 1914, the German Reich gave the Russians 12 hours to stop mobilizing their troops. In 1956, the French and the British gave then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser the same amount of time to withdraw his troops from the Suez Canal, which he had just nationalized, and allow Israel to use the waterway again. A war ensued in both cases, partly because those who had threatened to use military force knew that it would hardly be possible to comply with their demands so quickly. In other words, they wanted the situation to escalate.

An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would apparently also involve a 12-hour lead time. According to intelligence sources in Tel Aviv, Israeli politicians told Martin Dempsey, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Israeli leadership intends to give the White House only half a day's notice once it has decided to proceed with a military strike. In other words, Israel wants to be sure of two things: on the one hand, that U.S. President Barack Obama is not taken completely by surprise by a possible attack, and on the other that he is not in a position to seriously question his ally's decision and undermine it with diplomatic efforts.

Is this how a country should treat its most important ally? Is this the way it should pressure the very power on whose goodwill it depends?

In one of Germany's greatest art scandals, former hippie and talented artist Wolfgang Beltracchi forged dozens of paintings over a period of 35 years, earning millions and fooling top collectors and museums. Now he's about to go to jail. In a Spiegel  interview, he reveals how he did it and why he eventually got caught.

At some point during the two-day interview, Wolfgang Beltracchi talked about a friend in Freiburg, a pathology professor. The two men know each other well. Beltracchi, sounding almost proud of himself, said: "He would like to examine my brain. He believes that he would find something completely different there."

There are many people who would like to take a look inside Beltracchi's head. First there are the collectors, the gallery owners, appraisers and museum officials who fell for his forgeries. Then there are the investigators with the Berlin State Office of Criminal Investigation, who hunted him down but with whom Beltracchi refused to speak. Finally, there are the enlightened art lovers who admired this hippie-like desperado, because he pulled the wool over the eyes of the art world and, in doing so, exposed a system in which millions are paid for paintings whose authenticity is very difficult to determine -- a system that makes erratic decisions about which art is worth a lot and which is worth nothing at all, and that doesn't even seem to know exactly what art is.

The meeting with Beltracchi and his wife Helene took place in a suburb in the south of Cologne, in the house of attorney Reinhard Birkenstock, which looks out over the meadows along the Rhine River. In late October, a Cologne court sentenced the couple to prison terms of six and four years. The investigators, specialists in art forgeries, had zeroed in on 55 dubious paintings that had appeared in the art market since the early 1990s.

In the end, the court case involved 14 paintings, which allegedly brought the couple a total of about €16 million ($21 million) in earnings. The total loss, calculated on the basis of all subsequent sales of the works, amounts to €34 million. If the judge had not agreed to a deal with the attorneys, the court would have had to determine whether Beltracchi painted each individual work, a difficult task given the lack of direct evidence. The agreement also required the Beltracchis to make a detailed confession before the court.

More cases of an exotic virus that has caused deformed and stillborn lambs across England are "inevitable", with the disease potentially spreading across the entire U.K., scientists said on Thursday. They blamed climate change for bringing the virus to the country and said other new viruses could follow.

Since the Schmallenberg virus was first detected in England in January it has been confirmed on 83 farms from Norfolk to Cornwall, and has left thousands of lambs dead. Across Europe, 1,129 sheep, cattle and goat farms have been confirmed as infected.  Germany, where the illness was first detected in August 2011 in the small town that gives the virus its name, has been worst affected. There are also hundred of infected farms in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

"It is inevitable we will detect more and more cases [in the U.K.]," said Professor Matthew Baylis, a veterinary epidermiologist at Liverpool University. The birth deformities are the end result of mothers being infected with the virus earlier in their pregnancy so, with the lambing season in its early stages and calving not beginning until April, further infections are certain to be revealed. Scientists say there is no evidence that people are affected by the virus.

The virus is believed to have been brought into the U.K. by biting midges, blown from mainland Europe in the autumn 2011 and infecting pregnant ewes and cows. "This really is last year's story, all from infections in 2011. There is nothing that can be done about the malformed lambs we see now," said Baylis.

Very little is yet known about the virus, so whether a fresh outbreak will occur in 2012 is unknown. But Professor Peter Mertens, who leads the vector-borne diseases program  at the U.K.'s Institure for Animal Health in Surrey, said: "This virus has the potential to spread across the entire country. It is likely the virus will not go away in a year. I think that would be almost too good to be true." Similar diseases have become endemic in other countries, he noted.

Many in northern Italy have long wanted to secede. Now, the euro crisis is giving the separatist movement new momentum, with the rich north unwilling to pony up for the poor south. Prime Minister Monti's efforts to exert control may be making matters worse.

The governor loves to hunt -- geese, rabbits, fox, whatever happens to cross his path. Luis Durnwalder, the top hunter in South Tyrol, grants hunting licenses as if he were the lord of the manor, and when farmers in Vinschgau complain that the deer are ruining their fields, he issues a direct order to his hunters: Shoot seven deer, right away!

The Italian government could have guessed that it would only make enemies in Bolzano when it filed a complaint against the state hunting law in South Tyrol before the Italian Constitutional Court. Rome doesn't like the fact South Tyrol doesn't adhere to the hunting season mandated for all Italian provinces.

None of Rome's business, says Durnwalder. He points out that Sicily and South Tyrol are so different in terms of flora and fauna that it isn't possible "to apply the same law from the Brenner Pass to Sicily."

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti disagrees. He wants to prove that Europe can rely on Italy. To that end, his cabinet of technocrats has assembled a package of reforms that also makes additional demands on the five Italian regions with semi-autonomous status -- even down to legal details regulating the damage done by wildlife.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of the bank which was praised for its handling of the 2008 banking crisis, cited "sloppiness" "bad judgment" and "many errors".

During a hastily arranged conference call, he described the mistakes as "egregious". The bank expects to take an additional $1 billion in losses in the second quarter and said the losses occurred in its chief investment office, a part of the bank intended to manage risks. The trading position causing the losses involved credit default swaps, which insure against losses when companies or governments collapse.

In after-hours trading, JP Morgan Chase shares fell almost 7% and dragged other banks such as Citigroup and Bank of America lower.

Dimon said: "The portfolio has proved to be riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than we thought. There were many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment."

As the number of obese Germans rises, the funeral industry is scrambling to make adjustments in how larger bodies with more fat can be safely incinerated. A number of crematoriums have suffered severe damage when burning fat overwhelmed their emergency measures.

The crematorium employee in the western German town of Hamelin took a last look at the coffin before pushing it inside the furnace. This was the third coffin he had processed on the morning of January 13, and the body itself weighed over 200 kilograms (440 pounds). Of that, only two kilograms of ashes were supposed to remain after cremation. But, 15 minutes later, flames shot out of the crematorium's 10-meter-high (33-foot-high) stainless-steel chimney, and parts of it began to melt.

Unable to bring the fire under control, the employee called the fire department. Firemen determined that the smoking chimney was glowing at 600 degrees Celsius (1,100 degrees Fahrenheit). They cooled it from the side and used an infrared camera to track the spread of heat through the building. It took four hours to reduce the body in the furnace to ash.

Cremations in Germany are becoming more complicated owing to an increase in obesity. At the moment, around half of the country's deceased are cremated. Likewise, roughly 15 percent of Germans are obese, and the figures are climbing.

The funeral industry has adapted to these new conditions with plus-size coffins and crematorium furnaces outfitted with larger doors. But one problem remains: Due to their high fat content, obese bodies often burn so hot that they overtax crematorium facilities. The cause of the chimney fire in Hamelin appears to have been "extreme heat due to burning a high amount of fat," according to Carl Schmidt, the crematorium's manager.

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum easily won the Kansas caucuses to consolidate his status as the main challenger to front-runner Mitt Romney and to dispel any lingering hopes of an early conclusion to the race.

The scale of his victory highlighted his hold on the party's conservative base, especially in the Midwest, and its lack of enthusiasm for Romney.

The victory boosts Santorum going into next Tuesday's contests in Mississippi and Alabama.

Romney had hoped the contest would be over by now but Santorum is stubbornly clinging on and, as long as he keeps picking up states such as Kansas, there is no incentive for him to quit. Santorum adds Kansas to wins in Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado, Tennessee, Oklahoma and North Dakota and is almost certain to take Missouri next Saturday.

With half the votes counted, the Associated Press called the result for Santorum.

Eighty-two children with another 10 on the way: That is the prodigious output of Netherlands native Ed Houben, a private sperm donor. He is active around the world and says his goal is to make would-be mothers happy. A bit of pleasure for himself comes with the territory.

On the way to fathering his 83rd child, Ed Houben walks into Arrivals Hall D at Berlin's Schonefeld Airport. He's wearing hiking pants with pocket flaps and a fleece sweater, and he's carrying a backpack with a bottle of water in one of the side pockets. "Hallo," he says, overemphasizing the letter "l" in his Dutch accent. He walks straight toward the bus stop. He's in a hurry because the would-be mother goes to bed early and they still have plans for the evening.

Houben hasn't actually traveled to meet women in a long time. Nowadays, they usually come to him. But there are emergencies like this one: The would-be mother is in the 11th day of her cycle -- that is, two days before ovulation -- and she doesn't have anyone to take care of her cats.

She is waiting in a small apartment at the other end of the city. She has inflated the air mattress in the living room and is wearing attractive lingerie.

Houben takes a seat on the upper deck of the double-decker bus. He already has three children in Berlin. The remaining 79 live in other cities and countries, including Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain. Houben has entered their names, dates of birth and genders into an Excel table at home. The oldest child is almost nine, while the youngest is only 2 months old. He pops another mint into his mouth and yawns. "My sleep hormones are starting to kick in," he says, "but I can't go to sleep just yet."

Drivers may hate rising gas prices, but some companies are delighted as they watch the oil price soar. Firms like BMW and Airbus which are leaders in fuel efficiency actually benefit from expensive oil. They are just two of a growing number of companies that are already developing technologies for a post-fossil-fuel world. This article was written by SPIEGEL journalists; their names are listed at the end of the article.

A few cents more and a liter of super unleaded gasoline will cost German drivers €1.80 (around $9 a gallon). That means that someone driving a BMW 3 Series will have to pay over €110 ($150) to fill up the tank, with its 63 liter (17 gallon) capacity.

But Norbert Reithofer, the CEO of BMW, seems surprisingly relaxed for an executive whose company's products depend on gasoline and diesel. "One could see this as a threat," Reithofer says. But the auto executive actually views the rising price of fuel as "an opportunity." He is convinced that his company will in fact "derive a benefit from this."

The Munich-based automaker has invested billions of euros in fuel-saving technologies, such as efficient engines, brake energy recovery and ultra-lightweight carbon fiber car bodies. BMW is now considered a leader in the field, and the company's record sales in 2011 suggest that this is something its customers are willing to pay for. And that, Reithofer believes, is why the company will ultimately benefit from high prices at the pump.

Airbus CEO Tom Enders uses a similar argument. He ought to be upset about high kerosene prices. They have sharply affected his customers, the airlines, whose profits are shrinking and who are investing less money in buying new planes as a result. Nevertheless, Airbus has never had as many orders on its books as it does today.

Gold surged 2.5 per cent to above $1,700 (U.S.) an ounce on Wednesday, as the U.S. Federal Reserve extended its promise of near-zero interest rates through 2014, much longer than its previous forecast.

Bullion’s rally dwarfed the size of the slight gains in equities and other commodities as the U.S. central bank affirmed a view that the pace of U.S. economic recovery remained sluggish.

Silver also rose nearly 4 per cent on gold’s coattails, while U.S. equities measured by the S&P 500 index and the euro – which gold had traded in lockstep in late 2011 – climbed less than 1 per cent.

“From an equity standpoint, it’s not a good story as the Fed was anticipating a much slower rate of growth than the market was,” said Frank McGhee, head precious metals trader at Integrated Brokerage Services LLC.

“Gold was reacting to the Fed’s guidance of historically low rates all the way until 2014, which suggests that there will be plenty of investment money around for an extended period of time,” he said.

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul opened the battle for second place in the New Hampshire primary with an attack on his main rival, the rising star of the party right, Rick Santorum.

Paul, after a couple of days of holiday back in Texas after the Iowa caucuses, returned to the fray Friday, making Nashua his first campaign stop.

Demonstrating his drawing power, hundreds of supporters turned out in the unlikely and awkward setting of an aircraft hanger.

Such was demand to see him that cars quickly filled the parking spaces, and vehicles were left by the side of the highway, with lines running back at least a mile.

Paul, a maverick candidate on the libertarian wing of the Republican party, has a passionate, devoted, and largely young following. His arrival was greeted with chants of "President Paul".

Santorum vowed to defy pressure from what he described as "the Republican establishment and aristocracy" to drop out of the race by saying he would go on to fight the crucial battle in his home state of Pennsylvania on April 24 and beyond.

Romney beat Santorum in Wisconsin, the tightest of the three contests. The Republican frontrunner had an easy win in Maryland where he took about half the vote. Romney also won in Washington, D.C. , where Santorum was not on the ballot because he failed to gather enough signatures.

The combined victories push Romney past the halfway mark in his pursuit of delegates for the nominating contest and considerably widens the gap with Santorum. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul remain in the race but are no longer considered contenders.

Without directly acknowledging Tuesday's defeats, Santorum noted that half of the delegates to choose the Republican presidential candidate are now assigned but said that left the other half up for grabs.

"Who's ready to charge out the locker room in Pennsylvania for a strong second half?" he said. "Pennsylvania and half the other people in this country have yet to be heard and we're going to go out and campaign here and across this nation to make sure that their voices are heard in the next few months."

Santorum represented Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate for 12 years and if he loses in the state then the growing pressure on him from the Republican leadership to withdraw from the race will intensify. Earlier on Tuesday Romney implicitly called on his rivals to pull out by saying that the party needs "to get a nominee as soon as we can and be able to focus on Barack Obama".

Yet Santorum remained defiant. He said it would be a mistake to allow the Republican leadership to impose a candidate like Romney who is regarded as a relative moderate and therefore acceptable to more voters.

"If we're going to win this race we can't have little differences between our nominee and President Obama. We have to have clear contrasting colors," said Santorum.

The Jews had significant competition in antiquity when it came to worshiping Yahweh. Archeologists have discovered a second great temple not far from Jerusalem that predates its better known cousin. It belonged to the Samaritans, and may have been edited out of the Bible once the rivalry had been decided.

Clad in gray coat, Aharon ben Ab-Chisda ben Yaacob, 85, is sitting in the dim light of his house. He strikes up a throaty chant, a litany in ancient Hebrew. He has a full beard and is wearing a red kippah on his head.

The man is a high priest -- and his family tree goes back 132 generations. He says: "I am a direct descendent of Aaron, the brother of the prophet Moses" -- who lived perhaps over 3,000 years ago.

Ab-Chisda is the spiritual leader of the Samaritans, a sect that is so strict that its members are not even allowed to turn on the heat on the Sabbath. They never eat shrimp and only marry among themselves. Their women are said to be so impure during menstruation that they are secluded in special rooms for seven days.

Outside, on the streets of Kiryat Luza, near Nablus, a cold wind is blowing. The village lies just below the summit of Mount Gerizim. There's a school, two shops and a site for sacrifices. This is home to 367 Samaritans. It's a small community.

Everyone here is required to attend religious services in the synagogue on Saturdays. "Every baby boy has to be circumcised precisely on the eighth day," says the high priest -- not beforehand, and not afterwards.

Most important of all: the sect only believes in the written legacy of Moses, the five books of the Pentateuch, also commonly known as the Torah. They reject all other scripture from the Bible.

A snap election in North Rhine-Westphalia will put Chancellor Angela Merkel's government under intense strain this spring. Her junior partner, the FDP, is putting its own survival above coalition unity. And an early tactical error by her party's candidate, Norbert Rottgen, could wreck its chance of winning the vote.

In December 1972, the American meteorologist Edward Lorenz gave a presentation to scientists in Washington, D.C. He said that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. His metaphor entered the scientific history books as the butterfly effect. At its core, it posits that under certain circumstances, even tiny changes can destabilize an entire system.

The butterfly effect entered the realm of German politics at 9:30 a.m. last Monday, when six employees of the parliamentary administration arrived at the office of Peter Jeromin, the director of the parliament in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, for a routine meeting. Before long, one of the attendees speculated over what might happen if the small, pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) decided to reject the proposed budget of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Green Party minority government in a second reading.

Hans-Josef Thesling, the official in charge of parliamentary services, said he wanted to examine the legal ramifications of the issue. Shortly after he submitted his conclusions the next day, the state parliament in Dusseldorf dissolved itself. Soon politicians throughout Germany were transfixed by the developments in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Because Thesling and his colleagues concluded that a no vote in the second reading would result in the collapse of the state budget, a snap election has now been scheduled for North Rhine-Westphalia on May 13. For Chancellor Angela Merkel and other top German politicians, this date is now more important than the euro crisis. Their focus will now shift to local towns like Wanne-Eickel and Gummersbach, and away from Brussels and the hot spots in the Middle East.

One year after the Arab Spring, SPIEGEL correspondent Alexander Smolzczyk set out on a journey through the Maghreb to assess the region's transformation. On the second leg of his journey, he travels through post-revolution Libya and finds a country marked by a mixture of hope, desperation and the will to build a new democracy.

On Dec. 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young man in rural Tunisia, poured gasoline on himself -- and ignited an entire region. One by one, the people of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya toppled their rulers. One year after Bouazizi's self-immolation, much has changed in the Maghreb. But a lot has remained the same. In places where secular rulers prevailed for decades, Islamists are now trying to seize the reins of power. And many people there are just as poor and hopeless as they were before the revolutions.

This is the second article in a series by SPIEGEL correspondent Alexander Smoltczyk as he travels along the Transmaghrébine highway from Morocco to Egypt together with a photographer. On the second leg of his journey, he travels through Libya and finds people who have freed themselves from dictator Moammar Gadhafi, but not from the demons he left behind. Be sure to also read the first part of the series. 

Ben Gardane, the last town before Tunisia's border with Libya, is a hive of smuggling and contraband -- a transit zone consisting of a jumble of unpainted concrete shops, storage sheds, barbecue stands and dirty hotels. Every few hundred meters, illegally imported gasoline is sold in bright red, blue and green bottles. Everyone in Ben Gardane is involved in smuggling, from young children to old men.

After it passes Djerba, the Transmaghrébine, the highway of the revolutions, extends along the flat Mediterranean coast. Youngsters hold up dried fish and crabs. Plastic toys and gutted sheep swing in the gusts of wind from the trucks roaring down the highway.

There they are, behind a bulwark of sand, the camps of those who fled Libya, shortly before the last checkpoint in Tunisia, under the flags of organizations like UNHCR and Islamic Relief. The men here come from countries like Somalia, Niger and Sudan. There are reportedly some 1,400 of them still here.

Abraham came here from Eritrea. "Eighteen days without seeing a tree," he says, describing his journey. The 36-year-old is a teacher and a computer specialist. He purchased his passage through the desert for $1,600 (€1,230) and worked for the Japanese Embassy in the Libyan capital Tripoli. Then the revolution began, in the guise of a civil war.

The refugees say that they are afraid of being beaten to death in the new, liberated Libya because they are black. They can't return to their countries or go back to Tripoli, and they don't want to stay in Tunisia either. "They don't like us," says Abraham. "No matter how well you speak Arabic." The camps are slated to be cleared in early January. Only 600 of them have received official refugee status. What can they do but hope for asylum in Canada, Australia or the E.U.? Their only way out is north across the sea.

The beach is just 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) away.

Mark Lewis, the English lawyer who has been a driving force behind phone-hacking revelations in the U.K., and his American legal partner Norman Siegel, have revealed that they have been approached by at least 10 people bearing complaints relating to Murdoch's News Corporation.

The complaints relate largely to alleged hacking by News of the World journalists into phones in the U.S., but also extend to other News Corp holdings including Fox News.

Lewis said that he had been contacted by a number of people since he arrived in the U.S. last weekend "raising issues against other [News Corp] titles or Fox News, not necessarily about hacking but about other untoward dark arts to obtain information that should be private." He added that the new complaints were unproven allegations.

Lewis told reporters that he had taken on a fourth case of alleged phone hacking in the U.S. Previously, it had been known that he was representing three individuals, one of whom is an American citizen and two of whom are Europeans who believe their phones were hacked while visiting America.

Prices at German gas pumps oscillate wildly, sometimes changing several times a day. The rises and falls are far from random, however. Studies and market observers say it is an attempt by big oil to ratchet up the cost of a fill-up as high as possible.

It's Easter weekend and, if all goes as usual, motorists will be hopping mad during the holiday. Their frustration will boil over when the needle reaches the red zone and they pull into the nearest filling station: first at the pump, then at the cash register.

That's where they'll note with dismay that the oil companies never tire of playing the same old game in the run-up to Easter. As in previous years, gas prices soared in the days leading up to the Friday before Easter -- just when millions of Germans head off on vacation.

In 2009, prices jumped by as much as 11 euro cents per liter ($0.54 per gallon) compared to weeks prior, as was documented in the Cologne area by a report released last year by Germany's Federal Cartel Office. At the time, the Bonn-based anti-trust agency said it was "plausible" that the oil industry was "purposely raising prices."

The study generated a great deal of attention, but failed to impact business practices in the sector because the Cartel Office was unable to prove that the companies had engaged in illegal price-fixing. Now, one year after the report's release, the profiteering practices of the oil companies have reached such a dimension that it would actually warrant a new official investigation.

Prices have never fluctuated as wildly as they have over the past few months. Last week, the price of premium gasoline reached €1.70 per liter ($8.41 per gallon) nationwide -- a new record for Germany. Sometimes, prices at the pump spike upwards by over 10 euro cents per liter in the space of just minutes, usually followed by a gradual decline.

The threat of fresh economic turmoil and social upheaval could put at risk the gains produced by globalization, the World Economic Forum said on Wednesday.

In its annual assessment of the outlook for the global economy, the WEF set the scene for its meeting in Davos, Switzerland, later this month by warning that the "seeds of dystopia" are being sown.

The growing number of young people with little chance of finding a job, the increasing number of elderly people dependent on states deeply in debt and the expanding gap between rich and poor were all fueling resentment worldwide, the forum said in its Global Risks 2012 report on Wednesday.

"For the first time in generations, many people no longer believe that their children will grow up to enjoy a higher standard of living than theirs," said Lee Howell, the WEF managing director responsible for the report. "This new malaise is particularly acute in the industrialized countries that historically have been a source of great confidence and bold ideas."

The survey of 469 global experts identified chronic problems with government finances and severe income inequality as the most prevalent risks over the next decade.

The Florida police chief in charge of the investigation into the fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin has stepped down from his post "temporarily".

Martin's father, Tracy, described Bill Lee's decision to step aside as Sanford police chief as "nothing" and said: "We want an arrest, we want a conviction, we want justice for our son."

Lee's announcement came after a vote of no confidence in the Sanford police department by the city commission, and follows demands from civil rights leaders that he resign over the handling of Martin's killing. Nearly a month after Martin's death, no arrests have been made, despite George Zimmerman admitting to the killing.

At a brief press conference in Sanford on Thursday afternoon, Lee said that his presence had become a "distraction from the investigation".

"Therefore, I have come to the decision that I must temporarily relieve myself from the position as police chief for the city of Sanford," he said.

His announcement was greeted with applause.

Last spring, Chancellor Angela Merkel set Germany on course to eliminate nuclear power in favor of renewable energy sources. Now, though, several industries are suffering as electricity prices rapidly rise. Many companies are having to close factories or move abroad.

Photo: DPA.

The red signs are still hanging in front of the gate to the steel mill on Oberschlesienstrasse. "Hands off!" they read, or "The Krefeld steel mill must stay!"

But now it's all over. Despite the signs, protests and pickets, ThyssenKrupp, Germany's largest steelmaker, sold its Krefeld stainless steel mill to Finnish competitor Outukumpu two weeks ago. The new owner plans to shut down production by the end of next year, leaving more than 400 workers without a job. The economic loss to this stricken city on the lower Rhine will be significant.

The closing of the Krefeld mill cannot be blamed on low-wage competition from the Far East or mismanagement at ThyssenKrupp's Essen headquarters, but rather on the misguided policies of the German government. That, at least, is the view held by those affected by the closing. Since Chancellor Angela Merkel's government abruptly decided to phase out nuclear energy last spring in the wake of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, the situation for industries that consume a lot of electricity has become much more tenuous.

Energy prices are rising and the risk of power outages is growing. But the urgently needed expansion of the grid, as well as the development of replacement power plants and renewable energy sources is progressing very slowly. A growing number of economic experts, business executives and union leaders are putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of Merkel's coalition, which pairs her conservatives with the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP). The government, they say, has expedited de-industrialization.

Sydney, Australia, has been warned to prepare for localized flash flooding and traffic issues this week as heavy rain is forecast to hit the New South Wales coast.

Sydney is likely to pick up its monthly rainfall average of 126mm during the next four days, with most of the rain falling tomorrow and Wednesday, said Weatherzone meteorologist team leader Alex Zadnik.

When 100mm falls in less than two days, low-lying roads tend to go under water and cause traffic issues around the city.

Rainfall rates of 15mm an hour or greater are possible for the city and suburbs, said Zadnik.

These rates are sufficient to cause flash flooding.

The rain may continue into Thursday as well, although this will depend on the precise position of a low pressure trough near the coast, he said.

The fierce in-fighting among Republican presidential challengers intensified ahead of Tuesday's Illinois primary with Rick Santorum unleashing one of his most personal attacks yet on frontrunner Mitt Romney.

Santorum, scrambling for votes as the latest poll showed Romney with an overwhelming lead, claimed Romney had "no core", was being bankrolled by Wall Street and would be unelectable against President Barack Obama.

Such outbursts play into the hands of the Democrats, providing material they can use during the White House race between Obama and the eventual Republican contender, almost certainly Romney. Polls also show that the in-fighting is turning off independent voters, the key to the general election.

Illinois looks to be a pivotal point in the campaign, the state in which Romney stops the momentum Santorum has been building since his surprise wins in Minnesota and Colorado in early February. Santorum last week won both Mississippi and Alabama, following victories in North Dakota, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Mitt Romney was supposed to waltz to the Republican nomination this year. That script, though, has long since been discarded with arch-conservative challenger Rick Santorum refusing to go away. Indeed, the underdog has become a dangerous opponent -- and that isn't necessarily good news for the Republicans.

It stinks in Steubenville, where the oppressive odor of sulphur hangs in the air. Thick plumes of smog surround the coking plant. The dilapidated houses give the city of 20,000 a desolate feeling, and the community in eastern Ohio has seen better days. The steel industry once brought prosperity, but now only rusty industrial skeletons bear eerie witness to that past.

That's exactly why arch-conservative Rick Santorum and around 300 of his supporters were there. "Not too many presidential candidates come to Steubenville, Ohio, much less hold their victory party in Steubenville, Ohio," he said at a local high school gymnasium, an over-sized American flag in the background.

Santorum won in three states in the latest round of Republican primary voting: Oklahoma, Tennessee and North Dakota. And he nearly won in Ohio, considered the Super Tuesday jackpot.

Underestimated Candidate In A Forgotten City  

Ohio is seen as the first prize because it's where normal Americans live. It's a state characterized by blue collar workers and industry. And it's a swing state, sometimes voting Republican and sometimes Democratic, meaning that it will be decisive in November's presidential election. In the end, 38 percent went to Romney with Santorum netting 37 percent, just 12,000 votes behind. Santorum, in other words, fought Romney -- a multi-millionaire with a glittering multi-million dollar campaign -- to a standstill. For hours as the ballots were counted, Santorum was actually ahead.

The Pirate Party, which made international headlines after its success in state parliamentary elections in Berlin last year, stands to make gains in two other German states this spring. The party's pledge to foster transparency and participation is resonating with voters who are fed up with local corruption. 

Dennis is 21 and has a chubby, boyish face. According to the information he provided on "Pirate Wiki," the "information and coordination platform" of the Pirate Party, he is 35 percent "cosmopolitan," 72 percent "secular" and 57 percent "visionary." He claims to have had his "first pirate thought" on the day he was born.

Dennis, a web designer, is sitting with other Pirates at the Hemingway Restaurant in Norderstedt on the outskirts of Hamburg, where they hold regular informal gatherings. He and his fellow party members and guests will discuss how the Pirates in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein intend to replace the "backroom politics" of the established parties with transparency and civic participation. When a journalist asks him what sort of pirate thoughts he had shortly after birth, he smiles and says: "That was just lighthearted nonsense, I should really change that sometime. The way it looks now, things are gradually getting serious."

Pollsters predict that the Pirate Party will capture between 5 and 7 percent of the vote in Schleswig-Holstein's state parliamentary election on May 6. In the western state of Saarland, the Pirates, who describe themselves as the "party of the information society," was taken by surprise by the recent collapse of the coalition of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Greens. With new elections set for March 25, its entry into the state parliament is seen as likely. The party is polling at around 5 percent, which is impressive for a party that didn't even have a state-level platform in early March.

Gingrich came second, with Romney third and Ron Paul a distant fourth. Although Gingrich vowed to carry on, if he cannot win Mississippi or Alabama, he has little chance of winning anywhere else. He goes to Chicago for a fund-raising event on Wednesday and is likely also to hold a postmortem with his backers to discuss the viability of fighting on.

If Gingrich bows out and the conservative vote rallies around Santorum, he would be well placed to take on Romney in Illinois, one of the biggest states in contention.

Santorum, at an election party in Louisiana, one of the upcoming contests, said there was nothing inevitable about Romney winning the Republican nomination to take on Barack Obama in November, even with all the millions of dollars behind him.

"For someone who thinks this race is inevitable, he spent a whole lot of money against me for someone who is inevitable," said Santorum.

Invoking his faith right at the start of his speech, he said: "I want to thank God for giving us the strength every day to go out there."

Israel declared Gunter Grass "persona non grata" on Sunday for calling the country a threat to world peace.  Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai went further, saying the author should have his Nobel Prize withdrawn. Politicians in Germany, though critical of Grass, say the ban on visiting Israel is exaggerated.

The Israeli government has responded sharply to the controversial poem "What Must Be Said" by Nobel Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass, declaring him a "persona non grata" on Sunday and thereby barring him from entering the country.

Interior Minister Eli Yishai said in a statement that Grass, a former Waffen SS soldier who described the Jewish state as a threat to world peace in a poem published last week, could no longer visit Israel because of his "attempt to inflame hatred against the State of Israel and people of Israel, and thus to advance the idea to which he was publicly affiliated in his past donning of the SS uniform."

Yishai, who heads an ultra-Orthodox Jewish party in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conservative coalition government, told Israeli radio that Grass should have his Nobel Prize withdrawn, and likened his comments to the anti-Semitic incitement that ultimately led to the Holocaust. He said Grass was an "anti-Semitic person" and a "man who wore an SS uniform."

Grass qualified his comments in an interview at the weekend, saying that in retrospect, he would have phrased his poem differently to "make it clearer that I am primarily talking about the (Netanyahu) government."

When the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, few people imagined that it would take another decade before the Iraqi oil industry was rebuilt. Now, progress is finally being made, and the country's massive reserves could bring untold wealth. But before that happens, Baghdad needs to improve security and get corruption under control.

There's a fine line between being snubbed and humiliated -- and no one in Iraq knows this better than Hussein al-Shahristani.

Two executives from the world's largest private energy company, ExxonMobil, are sitting and waiting in the outer office of Baghdad's most powerful government oil official. For the first 10 minutes, they sit at attention, ready to jump up as soon as Shahristani asks them in. But Shahristani doesn't ask. They sink down further into their deep armchairs and start playing with their smartphones.

After half an hour, they ask their Iraqi escort if something is wrong. The secretary takes pity on them and calls a staff member to sit with the visitors. They tell him about their flight in from Dubai, about the Qatar professional soccer league -- and they eventually venture a cautious question: Is it perhaps conceivable that an oil company could one day sponsor a football club in Iraq? FC Exxon Samarra? Mobil Basra United? It's a bold idea.

Then, nearly an hour after their 12 o'clock appointment at Adnan Palace in Baghdad's maximum-security zone, the phone finally rings and the secretary asks the two Americans to follow her. Doctor Shahristani now has time for them, she says.

Police are still waiting for the results of forensic tests, but investigators think the early Friday morning shootings are linked because they happened around the same time within a three-mile span and all five victims were out walking when they were shot.

Officer Jason Willingham said Saturday that police are searching for a white man driving a white pickup, which was spotted in the area of three of the shootings. At least two dozen officers are investigating the case, along with the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service, said Willingham.

"We don't have one definitive way where this investigation is headed," Willingham said. "Right now, that's the only thing we have to go on."

Police don't believe the victims knew one another and are trying to determine the circumstances behind the killings. All five victims are black, and black community leaders met Friday evening in an effort to calm unrest and promote safety.

The Italian captain, Francesco Schettino, was being interviewed by investigators in Porto Santo Stefano on what happened when the 4,200-passenger Costa Concordia, owned by Genoa-based Costa Cruises, struck shallow water off Italy's western coast, said officer Emilio Del Santo of the Coastal Authorities of Livorno.

Authorities are looking at why the ship didn't hail a mayday during the accident near the Italian island of Giglio on Friday night, officials said.

"At the moment we can't exclude that the ship had some kind of technical problem, and for this reason moved towards the coast in order to save the passengers, the crew and the ship. But they didn't send a mayday. The ship got in contact with us once the evacuation procedures were already ongoing," said Del Santo.

"Fear and panic are comprehensible in a ship long over 300 meters with over 4000 passengers," said Del Santo. "We can confirm that the ship has a breach on the hull of about 90 meters, and that the right side of it is completely under water."

The three persons dead were two French tourists and a crew member from Peru, said Port authorities in Livorno.

Giuseppe Orsina, a spokesman with the local civil protection agency, said 43 to 51 persons were missing, though authorities are reviewing passenger lists to confirm the exact figure.

Santorum said he could do "exceptionally well" in Michigan, where Romney grew up and where his father served as governor and expects to be in a "two-man race" with him.

The next contests take place in Michigan and Arizona on 28 February.

"We're going to spend a lot of time in Michigan and Arizona, and those are up next. And that's where we've really been focusing on," Santorum told ABC's This Week on Sunday.

Buoyed by his surprise wins in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri last week, Santorum hit back at Romney's statements that both he and Newt Gingrich were "Republicans who acted like Democrats."

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is enjoying a bump in the polls in New Hampshire as a result of his success in the Iowa caucuses.

A poll for WMUR, the New Hampshire affiliate of ABC, puts Santorum on 8%, up from only 1% when the last poll was taken in November. More significantly, Santorum – as he did in Iowa – is enjoying a surge, and the poll figures taken in the two days after Iowa show even higher support for him, at 11%.

But Santorum is still well behind the frontrunner Mitt Romney, who is almost certain to add New Hampshire to his win in Iowa. He would then be heading to South Carolina for its 21 January primary with two victories behind him.

The poll carries bad news for Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, who opted not to compete in Iowa and instead concentrate his efforts in New Hampshire. He does not appear to have benefited from that strategy, dropping 1% from November, down to 7%.

The tiny village of Feldheim, some 60 kilometers southwest of Berlin, was catapulted by chance to the forefront of the renewable energy movement. Now visitors from around the world are flocking to this otherwise unremarkable rural community to see if they can replicate its success.

Werner Frohwitter drives his white Prius into Feldheim, parking halfway down the village's one street in front of what looks like a shipping container. Behind the street is a field where 43 giant wind turbines loom over the village's 37 houses. Frohwitter works for Energiequelle Gmbh, which owns the wind park. He greets a Russian camera crew and ushers them into the chilly container, which has become Feldheim's impromptu visitor's center. It's the only sign of life in this otherwise quiet village. Inside, he uses posters on the wall to explain the town's energy transformation for the Russian crew's renewable energy documentary.

This town of 150 inhabitants, tucked away in the Brandenburg countryside some 60 kilometers (37.2 miles) southwest of Berlin seems like an unlikely tourist hotspot. It has no bars, museums or restaurants. But since the Fukushima nuclear disaster one year ago, Feldheim has become a beacon for cities across the world that want to shift their energy mix toward renewables.

Feldheim is the only town in Germany that started its own energy grid and gets all of its electricity and heating through local renewable sources, primarily wind and biogas. This mix of energy self-sufficiency and reliance on renewables attracted 3,000 visitors in 2011. Visitors came from North and South Korea, South America, Canada, Iran, Iraq and Australia. About half of the visitors are from Japan.

Eri Otsu served as a translator for a group of Japanese energy analysts and politicians who came to Germany to see Feldheim. "Feldheim is not a charming Bavarian village; it is gray and they have little," says Otsu, an organic farmer in southern Japan. Still, the group found Feldheim the most impressive of the three German villages they visited because it is energy independent and uses renewables. "They were amazed and said they had never seen anything like that," says Otsu.

In a Spiegel interview, German Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen, 46, discusses the nuclear phase-out, controversial solar power subsidies and why he believes Chancellor Angela Merkel's energy revolution -- which will see the country move to clean energies -- is still on track.

SPIEGEL: Minister Rottgen, it's been a year since the nuclear accident at Fukushima. Do you still want to phase out nuclear energy?

Rottgen: More than 90 percent of Germans want that, and they're right, because there's a better alternative.

SPIEGEL: Then why are you doing so little to ensure that the phase-out is a success?

Rottgen: Why little? In 2011, renewable energy was, for the first time, in second place after nuclear energy. Since last summer, we have been working continuously, one step at a time, to make the energy revolution a success.

SPIEGEL: But things aren't progressing. Neither new power grids nor replacement power plants or electricity storage facilities have been built yet. European Union Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger accuses you of lacking a plan. He says: "Does a German energy policy exist? Not really!"

Rottgen: Then he should take a closer look. We have approved an enormous legislative package, which we are now working on, which ranges from expanding the grid to upgrading buildings, and from promoting offshore wind energy to promoting combined heat and power generation. The energy revolution is in full swing, and it's moving along successfully.

SPIEGEL: How great is the risk that the power will go out?

Rottgen: The recent cold temperatures have highlighted how well our energy supply works. The power supply was secure at all times. We had the lowest market electricity prices in Europe and exported massive amounts of electricity. When we did approach critical situations recently, it wasn't the fault of renewable energy, but of electricity speculators.

SPIEGEL: The grid operators say that they now have to intervene again and again to prevent blackouts, and that this never happened in the past.

Rottgen: It's true that expansion of the power grid is critical. We are behind in this respect, but it's a sin of the past. For years, the major electric utilities had no real interest in investing in the grids, because grids mean competition. This is now changing, but it takes years, not months. New grids will be built bit by bit.

SPIEGEL: The Federal Network Agency warns that the system is at the limits of its capacity.

An ultra-conservative thinktank has suffered a mass exodus of corporate donors after running an ad campaign comparing climate change believers to a serial killer.

The Heartland Institute has seen a core group of big-money supporters back out as a result of the provocative billboard. Insurance companies led the corporate world in donations to Heartland.

The firms who have decided to stop funding between them gave the thinktank $1 million (£620,000) in 2010 and 2011, according to documents leaked this year.

About two dozen insurance companies, including U.S. giant State Farm, announced an end to support for Heartland because of the billboard. The ad, which ran for just a day on a Chicago expressway, featured an image of the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and the caption: "I still believe in global warming. Do you?"

The drop-off in funds could wreck Heartland's ambitious plans of increasing its fundraising by 67% in 2012, from $4.6 million  to $7.7 million.

The company, which was responding to consumer demand, says it is the first big U.K. confectioner to remove all artificial products. Concentrates of fruit, vegetables and edible plants such as carrot, hibiscus, radish, safflower and lemon are among ingredients used to provide colour. David Rennie, managing director of Nestlé Confectionery UK, described the move as a significant milestone.

"Nestlé is proud to be the only major confectionery company in the U.K. to announce it is 100% free of artificial preservatives, flavors or colors across its entire portfolio," said Rennie.

"To achieve this, Nestlé Confectionery and our suppliers have worked very hard ensuring we don't compromise and we maintain the same quality and taste of all our brands."

NBC News projected that Romney would win the Michigan primary, along with another primary that took place on Tuesday in Arizona.

The crowd here at the Suburban Collection Showplace in suburban Detroit burst into cheers as cable news on projection screens reflected the projection in Michigan.

Romney's victory in Michigan carries symbolic importance after the contest had been transformed into a key test of his strength as the campaign's frontrunner. The results follow a tumultuous three weeks that had both candidates fighting for momentum in the Republican nomination contest.  Most of the attention was focused on Michigan, where the results could prove to be a turning point in the race. 

Romney made sure to stress both his victories Tuesday night, thanking voters in Arizona and Michigan and calling it a “great victory.” Referring to Michigan, Romney said, “We didn’t win by a lot but we won by enough and that’s all that counts.”

The moves underline official anxieties ahead of this year's leadership transition, particularly since the sacking of Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai led to widespread speculation about infighting at the top.

As the mood on micro-blogs grew increasingly febrile, there were even claims of an attempted coup in the Chinese capital – complete with photographs of military vehicles that turned out to be from a parade three years ago.

State news agency Xinhua said Beijing police detained six people for spreading rumors of "military vehicles entering Beijing and something wrong going on in Beijing". Citing a spokesman for the state internet information office, it said the claims were "fabricated by some lawless people" and had been a bad influence on the public.

The office also closed 16 websites for allegedly spreading the rumors.

The spokesman said that Sina and Tencent, the organizations which operate China's most popular versions of Twitter, and which each have hundreds of millions of micro-bloggers, had pledged to strengthen their managements after being "criticized and punished". The two firms have disabled their comment functions for three days.

As Greece struggles to master its devastating debt problem, decades of mismanagement have taken their toll on the country's once-proud capital. Athens has degenerated into a hotbed of chaos and crime, where tensions between Greeks and immigrants have led to attacks on foreigners by the far-right.  

Massoud starts walking faster as the shadows lengthen. He glances at the scratched display on his mobile phone. It's 7:15 p.m.

The sun is setting behind the large apartment buildings on Patission Street, disappearing behind the few remaining classical facades where the plaster is beginning to crumble. "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs are posted on boarded-up windows or behind sheets of opaque glass.

Massoud is in a hurry. He wants to get home before dark, because that's when the people who are out to get him come out.

The gangs of right-wing thugs, sometimes up to 20 at a time, approach their victims on foot or on mopeds, carrying clubs and knives. They are masked, faceless and fast. They appear suddenly and silently before striking.

In a Spiegel interview, Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek discusses morality in the current crisis and why he believes an economic policy that only pursues growth will always lead to debt. Those who don't know how to handle it, he argues, end up in a medieval debtor's prison, as the Greeks are experiencing today.  

In his bestseller "Economics of Good and Evil," first published in the Czech Republic in 2009, 35-year-old academic and political adviser Tomáš Sedlá?ek defied the boundaries and stereotypes of his profession by exposing the roots of the economy in the cultural history of mankind.

From 2001 to 2003, Sedlá?ek was an economic adviser to then Czech President Vaclav Havel, who valued his "new view on the problems of the contemporary world, one unburdened by four decades of the totalitarian Communist regime." Until 2006, Sedlá?ek advised the Czech finance minister in a dispute over the consolidation of the budget, as well as the reform of the country's tax, pension and healthcare systems.

In the introduction to Sedlá?ek's book, Havel wrote that most politicians "consciously or unconsciously accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure." Sedlá?ek, however, turns this hierarchy on its head on his philosophical journey through cultural and economic history. For him, all of economics ultimately revolves around the question of how we ought to live. The Yale Economic Review described him as one of the promising "five hot minds in economics."

Today, Sedlá?ek is the chief macroeconomic strategist at the major Czech bank SOB, a member of the National Economic Council and a lecturer at Charles University in Prague. The German edition of his book was on the Spiegel bestseller list for weeks after it was published in February. The book was turned into a very successful play in Prague, which translates the author's parables and arguments into dialogue and engages the audience. An English translation of the book was published by Oxford University Press in July.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Sedlá?ek, in Oliver Stone's 1987 film "Wall Street," the fictional tycoon Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, pronounces the provocative motto of neoliberalism: "Greed is Good." Has the crisis in financial capitalism reduced greed to what it was once before, one of the seven deadly sins?

Sedlá?ek: Gekko succeeds with his greed, but then he falls victim to it. Mankind's oldest stories tell us that greed is always Janus-faced. It is an engine of progress, but it's also the cause of our collapse. Being constantly dissatisfied and always wanting more seems to be an innate natural phenomenon, forming the heart of our civilization. The original sin of the first human couple in the Garden of Eden was the result of greed.

SPIEGEL: Not of temptation and curiosity?

Sedlá?ek: Desire and curiosity are sisters. The snake merely awakened a desire in Eve that was already dormant inside of her. According to Genesis, the forbidden tree was a feast for the eyes.

SPIEGEL: Just like the suggestive images of modern advertising.

Sedlá?ek: Eve and Adam grab the opportunity and eat the fruit. The original sin has the character of excessive, unnecessary consumption. It is not of a sexual nature. A desire for something she doesn't need is awakened in Eve. The living conditions in paradise were complete, and yet everything God had given the two wasn't enough. In this sense, greed isn't just at the birthplace of theoretical economics, but also at the beginning of our history. Greed is the beginning of everything.

SPIEGEL: So evil is the result of insatiability?

Sedlá?ek: The demands of people are a curse of the gods. In Greek mythology, the story of Pandora, the first woman, who opens her jar out of curiosity, thereby releasing poverty, hunger and disease into the world, tells the same story as the Bible. In Babylonian culture, the Gilgamesh epic shows how desire rips man out of the harmony of nature.

SPIEGEL: Does the human species define itself by its existential dissatisfaction?

A new study of dolphins living close to the site of North America's worst ever oil spill – the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe two years ago – has established serious health problems afflicting the marine mammals.

The report, commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA], found that many of the 32 dolphins studied were underweight, anemic and suffering from lung and liver disease, while nearly half had low levels of a hormone that helps the mammals deal with stress as well as regulating their metabolism and immune systems.

More than 200 million gallons of crude oil flowed from the well after a series of explosions on April 20, 2010, which killed 11 workers. The spill contaminated the Gulf of Mexico and its coastline in what President Barack Obama called America's worst environmental disaster.

The research follows the publication of several scientific studies into insect populations on the nearby Gulf coastline and into the health of deepwater coral  populations, which all suggest that the environmental impact of the five-month long spill may have been far worse than previously appreciated.

Another study confirmed that zooplankton – the microscopic organisms at the bottom of the ocean food chain – had also been contaminated with oil. Indeed, photographs issued last month of wetland coastal areas show continued contamination, with some areas still devoid of vegetation.

The U.S. presidential race has started in earnest after Republican primary candidate Rick Santorum bowed out, leaving Mitt Romney as the party's likely nominee to take on President Obama. German commentators on Thursday say Romney's inconsistency and divisions within the Republican party will benefit Obama.  

Following Rick Santorum's withdrawal from the Republican primary race on Tuesday, it's all but certain that Mitt Romney will now run against President Barack Obama in the upcoming United States election.

With that, a fierce two-man race for the White House began almost immediately on Wednesday, when both sides exchanged blows.

The Obama campaign released a video entitled "Mitt Romney: Memories to Last a Lifetime," which highlights some of Romney's most polarizing campaign moments. "The more the American people see of Mitt Romney, the less they like him and the less they trust him," said the president's campaign manager Jim Messina.

Meanwhile, assumed Republican nominee Romney criticized Obama for alienating women with his economic policies. "Over 92 percent of the jobs lost under this president were lost by women," he told Fox News. "His policies really have been a war on women." Likely meant to sidetrack Democrats' accusations that the Republican debate on contraception has been an attack on women, the statistic was widely questioned. Fact checking website Politifact later called it "mostly false."

The U.S. job market continues to strengthen with the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits now at a four-year low, the labor department said Thursday.

For the week ending March 17, initial jobless claims fell by 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 348,000. The four-week average of applications, a less volatile measure, dipped to 355,000.   

A drop in jobless claims has coincided with the highest rate of hiring in two years. Employers added an average of 245,000 jobs per month from December to February. Joblessness has now fallen to 8.3%, its lowest level in three years.

The latest figure will be another boost for President Barack Obama who has put the economic recovery at the center of his re-election campaign.

With the jobs market clearly improving, his Republican rivals have shifted their attack to rising gas prices. "With the economy looking like it's getting a little better on the employment front, gasoline's getting a lot worse," Mitt Romney told a crowd at a town hall meeting in Illinois this week.

President Obama sought to reassure the Jewish state that he "has its back" ahead of a meeting on Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is expected to urge the president to make an explicit threat of military action if Tehran's nuclear program advances beyond specified "red lines".

"I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff," President Obama told the Atlantic magazine. "I also don't, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say."

President Obama said that he has a "profound preference for peace over war" but that does not mean he is unwilling to use force when he believes "it is in the core national interest of the United States". He said that the "military component" is a final option in dealing with Iran but added he would try to persuade Netanyahu that the long term solution is to convince Tehran that developing nuclear weapons is not in its own interests.

"Our argument is going to be that it is important for us to see if we can solve this thing permanently, as opposed to temporarily and the only way historically that a country has ultimately decided not to get nuclear weapons without constant military intervention has been when they themselves take [nuclear weapons] off the table. That's what happened in Libya, that's what happened in South Africa," he said.

A voluntary program to get German companies to introduce gender quotas for women in management has failed to bear fruit, but divisions within the German government are also hindering progress. Now, female politicians from across the political spectrum are pushing for change, and Angela Merkel may even make it a campaign issue.

Defeat? Ursula von der Leyen isn't interested in talk of defeat. That's something that simply doesn't happen in the life of Germany's labor minister, and certainly not on March 8, International Women's Day. The country's newspapers may well be reporting that the center-right government coalition has set aside the goal of establishing a legal quota for women in businesses, but von der Leyen won't let the gloomy headlines ruin her mood.

At work in her office, she quickly finishes signing a document promoting one of her women employees to the status of a civil servant with lifetime tenure. She doesn't fail to point out that the employee in question has children, providing another example of how both are possible, family and career.

Is the gender quota dead? No, von der Leyen says. The day's headlines are undoubtedly a setback, but "the issue isn't going away anymore," she adds.

Indeed, her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is not prepared to accept the quota veto by their junior coalition partner, the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), and frustrations are running high. FDP leader Philipp Rosler was not even willing to accept the "flexi-quota" proposed by Family Minister Kristina Schroder of the CDU, which was little more than a conciliatory gesture to set a voluntary commitment by companies into law. Chancellor Angela Merkel is annoyed, and if she can't implement the quota during this legislative period, she plans to make it a campaign topic -- even against the FDP, if necessary.

The U.K. government is fighting to have nuclear power considered as a renewable form of energy in Europe, in a move that would significantly boost atomic energy in Britain but downgrade investment in renewable generation, according to a leaked document seen by the Guardian newspaper.

The move would in effect remove the most important prop from the beleaguered renewable energy sector – the Europe-wide targets that stipulate a proportion of each member state's energy must come from renewable sources.

That target should be scrapped after its current phase – requiring member states to generate 20% of energy from renewables – runs out in 2020, according to a secret submission to the European commission.

"The U.K. envisages multiple low-carbon technologies: renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and storage, all competing freely against each other in the years to come … For this reason, we cannot support a 2030 renewables target," it reads.

But the document calls for "some type of target for 2030", which a government adviser told the Guardian is likely to be a target for low-carbon energy. This would include nuclear, alongside renewables and so far unproven technology for capturing and storing carbon dioxide underground.

The issue of giving nuclear parity with renewables is likely to be controversial for the energy secretary, Ed Davey, as the Liberal Democrat Party's official position is "no to nuclear".

With tensions between Israel and Iran running sky high over the latter’s nuclear program, U.S. officials and military analysts are growing increasingly concerned that Israel will launch a multi-phase air and missile attack that could trigger waves of retaliatory missile strikes from Tehran. 

Such a shootout could quickly spiral into a regional conflict that would potentially force the U.S. to intervene to protect its interests. 

The emerging consensus among current and former U.S. officials and other experts interviewed by NBC News is that that an Israeli attack would be a multi-faceted assault on key Iranian nuclear installations, involving strikes by both warplanes and missiles. It could also include targeted attacks by Israeli special operations forces and possibly even the use of massive explosives-laden drones, they say. 

The Iranian response to such an attack is uncertain, but many experts and officials believe it is likely to include retaliatory missile strikes. Iran has more missiles in its arsenal than Israel, according to some estimates, and has the capability of striking targets in most Israeli population centers. 

“I think that it would strike Iran as a reasonable response, an eye for an eye,” said Christopher J Ferrero, a professor of diplomacy at Seton Hall University in New Jersey and an expert on Middle East missile forces.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is expected to raise the issue at a White House meeting on Monday after weeks of intense diplomacy in which Obama has dispatched senior officials – including his intelligence, national security and military chiefs – to Jerusalem to try and dampen down talk of an attack.

Diplomats say that Israel is angered by the Obama administration's public disparaging of early military action against Iran, saying that it weakens the prospect of Tehran taking the warnings from Israel seriously.

The two sides are attempting to agree a joint public statement to paper over the divide but talks will not be made easier by a deepening distrust in which the Israelis question Obama's commitment to confront Iran while the White House is frustrated by what it sees as political interference by Netanyahu to mobilize support for Israel's position in the U.S. Congress.

"They are poles apart," said one diplomatic source. "The White House believes there is time for sanctions to work and that military threats don't help. The Israelis regard this as woolly thinking.

Hopes that the U.S. can fix conditions for a long-term military presence in Afghanistan  before an unofficial May deadline are fading because Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, is not prepared to compromise on two demands that have stalled negotiations for months.

Washington and its allies want to have the U.S.-Afghan strategic partnership agreed before May, when a NATO conference in Chicago is expected to pledge long-term help to Kabul with finances and military training.

But negotiations have dragged on for over a year and Karzai is adamant he will not give ground on his two main demands – for Afghan control of jails and an end to night-time raids on Afghan homes.

Western officials say the first is not practical and the second would compromise the military effort.

"If they don't change their position there will be no strategic partnership before Chicago," said a senior Afghan official familiar with the negotiations. "We are not willing to compromise when it comes to sovereignty."

The former Pennsylvania senator figures to do well in Saturday's voting as he looks for a post-Super Tuesday victory to help him collect delegates to the party's convention and chip away at the lead built by the front-runner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Santorum enjoys strong support among abortion opponents who are a powerful constituency within the Kansas Republican Party, including leaders of Kansans for Life.

Romney received a boost when Kansas Republican Party icon Bob Dole, the 88-year-old former U.S. Senate majority leader and 1996 presidential nominee, urged fellow Kansans to support him. But Romney wasn't expected to visit before Saturday's caucuses, possibly hurting his chances of picking up some of the state's 40 delegates.

Santorum planned an event at a former Union Pacific railroad depot in Topeka, followed by a rally at a Wichita airport before leaving the state to campaign again in the South. His wife, Karen, was holding a cookies-and-coffee reception at his state headquarters in downtown Wichita.

Some tea party members were frustrated that Santorum wouldn't attend their rally. They spent $25,000 to rent the Century II arena in downtown Topeka and expected 1,000 to 3,000 people to attend.

"It seems like it is counterproductive to show up for an event that is going to have 300 people in an airplane hangar instead (of) 3,000 people in a nice setting where you can actually contact and really maybe sway somebody," said Craig Gabel, the president of Kansas For Liberty, which organized the Wichita event.

HSBC and Barclays both cut their 2012 gold price targets by over $100 an ounce after the metal posted a gain of 10 percent last year to extend its run to an 11th consecutive year. It was, however, its smallest annual gain in three years. 

HSBC's chief commodity analyst James Steel slashed his 2012 forecast to $1,850 an ounce from his previous target of $2,025, citing a weak euro, liquidation related to equities' losses and lackluster physical demand from emerging markets. 

Steel also kept its 2012 silver view unchanged at $34 an ounce but he cut his price forecasts for platinum and palladium. 

Bullion has appeared to lose its investment appeal as a safe haven after moving in almost virtual lockstep with the euro and equities in the last two months.  

Angela Merkel's euro crisis strategy is unpopular and she has lost a number of allies. Worse yet, French presidential candidate Francois Hollande has pledged a change of course from the strict austerity measures she supports. But in the end, the Paris-Berlin alliance will likely survive and austerity will continue, albeit with a few growth initiatives thrown in.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stood behind a podium at the DZ Bank at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, gazing sullenly into the cameras. She had just received the wrong prop for a photo op, and she needed to get it out of sight as quickly as possible.

To thank her for her speech marking the International Year of Cooperatives, a gray-faced official had thrust a porcelain piggy bank into her hands -- an ugly thing with a milky sheen that appeared to reflect the very coldness said to characterize her policies.

Merkel reflected momentarily, then had the gift quickly tucked away in a box. Photos of the piggy-bank chancellor are not exactly what she most urgently needs right now. In fact, for the past few days, she has endeavored to put a more friendly face on her image as the strict belt-tightening politician who is forcing Europe to adhere to Germany's budgetary discipline dictates.

She is determined to stick by her strategy. But now when she talks about the euro crisis, instead of focusing solely on "structural reforms" and "stability," she has also started to refer to "growth" and "jobs."

The man who wants to send Vladimir Putin into retirement enjoys changing roles. Sometimes he is Boris Akunin, Russia's top-selling author of crime fiction. When he wants to write from a woman's perspective, he calls himself Anna Borisova. Finally, when he wants to be perceived as a nationalist, he uses the pen name Anatoly Brusnikin.

Akunin has been the leader of the Russian opposition for several weeks now. But this no longer has anything to do with fiction. In fact, he takes his new role in politics very seriously indeed. And it's a role that could change Russia.

Akunin has been one of the main speakers at the Moscow demonstrations against fraud in Russia's recent parliamentary elections. And among the hundreds of thousands who have been calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for weeks now, no one is more popular than Akunin.

This Sunday, Akunin and his fellow Russians will go to the polls once again, but this time they will be voting for the much more important office of the president. Putin has set the course for his return to the Kremlin, where he intends to assume the presidency for the third time.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle are at odds over Middle East policy. While Merkel avoids opposing Israel on big issues, Westerwelle would like to show the Palestinians more support. The conflict threatens to jeopardize Germany's reputation as a credible partner in the region.

Guido Westerwelle's goals sound impressive. The German foreign minister wants to encourage the Palestinians to work toward a two-state solution in negotiations, say ministry officials in Berlin, noting that this dovetails with "the efforts to support direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians." It sounds as if the German foreign minister were bringing about peace in the Middle East.

The reality will be more mundane when Westerwelle and some of his fellow cabinet members receive a group of their Palestinian counterparts for consultations in Berlin on Wednesday. At the meeting of the so-called German-Palestinian steering committee, the German government will pledge €72.5 million ($96 million) for education, police and development projects -- more of a drop in the bucket than a major diplomatic offensive.

The reason for this isn't just the difficult situation in the Middle East. It is also partly the result of disagreement between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Westerwelle over how the German government should respond to it. Their conflict, which is hardly secret anymore, weakens German foreign policy in one of the world's most dangerous regions.

The discord is also dangerous because Berlin could possibly soon find itself confronted with a more precarious situation. If Israel attacks Iran to prevent the country from gaining nuclear weapons, the German government will have to take a position quickly. If that happens, Germany will not be able to afford a feud between its chancellor and its foreign minister.

The two men visited Addis Ababa's Grand Anwar Mosque on Friday and disseminated materials and made inflammatory statements, said Shimeles Kemal, state minister of communications.

"The Ethiopian government found them to be persona non grata and they were immediately deported," he said. The men's nationalities were not made public.

The deportations come one week after security forces arrested a Muslim religious leader in the Oromia region accused of radical statements. A group of Muslims tried to free the imam and clashed with police. Four of the demonstrators were killed and 10 police were wounded, said Shimeles.

"A number of suspects are in police custody. The elders in the community there have helped contain the situation and it remains peaceful since the incident," added Shimeles.

A striking new museum opens this week in Belfast, the birthplace of the ill-fated Titanic luxury ship. Opening a century after the cruise ship slammed into an iceberg, killing 1,500, the exhibition recalls a tragedy which was long taboo in Northern Ireland's former industrial hub.

Samuel Scott was only 15 years old when he became the first of the Titanic's 1,500 dead. He perished two years before the world's largest and most luxurious ship embarked on its first and last voyage. Scott hailed from Belfast. The city, located in Northern Ireland, experienced an industrial boom a century ago. Samuel worked at the world's largest shipyard Harland & Wolff until he fell from a ladder while riveting the luxury liner, which would sink into the icy Atlantic on the night of April 15, 1912.

The boy in the shipyard would have been surrounded by a deafening cacophony of hammers, scraping saws, screeching winds and yelled instructions. He also would have experienced the smell of steel, coal and open fires. More than one hundred years later, on the same spot, the noise and smells are back again: The Titanic Belfast, a six-story exhibition building, officially opens on March 31 and aims to captivate visitors with special effects, interactive touch screens and talking holograms.

Following in the footsteps of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Belfast has gained a shimmering €116 million ($154 million) prestige building. Construction took three years to complete -- as long as it took to build the Titanic itself -- and the structure stands on the site of the shipyard where the Titanic was hammered into shape. From a seagull's perspective, it resembles the Titanic shipping company White Star Line's logo. Viewed from a fish's perspective, the building's four "hulls" soar as high as the Titanic's bow. An aluminum skin, composed of 3,000 panels, reflects the light from the water at the foot of the building.

Roller Coaster Ride   

"The Discovery Center will celebrate the heyday of shipbuilding," explains architect Paul Crowe of Todd Architects. "Back then, everything here had gigantic dimensions. Cranes, scaffolding and the ships." This industrial landscape is recreated for Titanic Belfast's visitors. The walls of the 60-feet high atrium recall rusted steel plates, the ticket office looks like it is made from keel blocks.

German police have been widely criticized for their handling of the Zwickau neo-Nazi terror cell case, but authorities have revealed they've made significant progress in tracking down other far-right fugitives since then. Conservative politicians also took a major step toward banning the far-right NPD party this week.

Germany's neo-Nazi scene has been under intense scrutiny since the murderous far-right Zwickau cell terrorist group was discovered last November, and police have been accused of making glaring mistakes in the case. But on Thursday news emerged that law enforcement in the country has had significant success in pursuing other neo-Nazi suspects this year.

According to information obtained in response to a parliamentary inquiry by the far-left Left Party, of the 160 neo-Nazis currently on wanted lists, 46 have been arrested since January, daily Suddeutsche Zeitung reported. After learning of the Zwickau cell's crimes -- which include the alleged murder of nine immigrants and one police officer -- the Federal Criminal Police Office reviewed its wanted lists nationwide, the paper reported.

Among the far-right fugitives are seven suspects who are listed on international wanted lists, but they are thought to have gone underground. And while the neo-Nazi scene is most closely associated with economically disadvantaged eastern Germany, the largest number of neo-Nazis on the run are actually from the country's large western states, the report said.

The warrants issued for the suspects are for offenses ranging from violent crimes and hate crimes to other illegal activities typical to the neo-Nazi scene, including incitement to racial hatred, the making of Hitler salutes and wearing symbols from banned organizations.

Instead, at about dinner time, the lights suddenly went out, the ship tilted to one side and an ominous scraping sound was heard.

The 1,500-cabin luxury vessel, also carrying about 1,000 crew, had run aground on a sand bar off the tiny island of Giglio.

Rosalyn Rincon, a member of the cruise ship staff who worked as a dancer, was in the middle of act when the ship ran aground. She was inside a box during a magic show when, she said, "I realized that everything stopped. The music stopped," she said.

Everything on the stage fell on top of people because the ship listed dramatically, said Rincon, 30, of Blackpool, England.

All eyes will be on Bo Xilai, the party chief of an inland metropolis who became a national figure by battling organized crime and promoting communist nostalgia, when the national legislature opens its annual session Monday.

Tall and telegenic, Bo has been a media darling at past sessions, trailed by reporters and holding forth at packed news conferences. The celebrity aura enhanced his reputation as a political up-and-comer, likely to make it into the Politburo Standing Committee, the inner sanctum of power, in a transfer of power to a younger generation of leaders expected this fall.

Now Bo is rumored to have been questioned by internal party investigators after his mob-busting police chief and one-time ally in Chongqing apparently fled the city and stayed overnight in a U.S. Consulate last month in a bizarre episode yet to be explained.

"This was a very dramatic case, and the leadership doesn't want to see any more such drama before October," said China politics experts Bo Zhiyue of the National University of Singapore, who is not related to the Chongqing party chief.

The energy-saving light bulb ends up as hazardous waste, too much insulation promotes mold and household drains are emitting a putrid odor because everyone is saving water. Many of Germany's efforts to protect the environment are a chronic failure, but that's unlikely to change.  

Germans support protecting the environment, and they have a special relationship with nature. They like animals and plants, blue skies and the ocean. They want their children to grow up in an intact environment, and try to set an example for others. It's time to save the world? The Germans are there, doing their utmost, determined conservation efforts won't fail because of them.

Germany used to declare war on its neighbors. Today we explain how they can renounce nuclear power. We've lost the title of the world's top exporter and only manage to come in third place in global soccer rankings, but no one can get the better of us when it comes recycling our waste. Acid rain and forest decline have opened our eyes to the destructive force of civilization from an early age, even though Germany's forests, contrary to expectations, have somehow survived.

Our newest goal is to minimize our ecological footprint. Thursdays are veggie days, and old-fashioned, hand-cranked washing machines are back in vogue. Websites offer environmental tips for all kinds of situations, from cosmetics based on the phases of the moon to vibrators made of plastic without toxic chemical softeners. There are urns made of cornstarch and coffins made of cardboard, so that we can embark on our final journey in an environmentally correct manner -- a final good deed before everything turns to compost.

When something benefits the environment, the need to justify it suddenly disappears. The green label eliminates all controversy. And the political parties are essentially in agreement that society cannot do enough for the environment. No progressive politician wants to expose himself to the career-ending suspicion that he lacks environmental consciousness.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has revived his flagging campaign with a trio of victories to upset frontrunner Mitt Romney's seemingly inevitable progress towards the party nomination.

Santorum achieved a clean sweep of the states being contested - Colorado, Minnesota  and the non-binding "beauty contest" primary in Missouri. It was a disastrous night for Romney, not only because he lost states that only a few days ago he had expected to win but due to the scale of the defeat, coming in a humbling third in Minnesota.

Rick Santorum celebrates in St Charles, Missouri. Photograph: Sarah
Conard/Reuters

The setback came just a week after he won the Florida primary and added a further victory on Saturday in Nevada, seemingly cruising towards the Republican nomination to take on Barack Obama for the White House in November.

Santorum ruined that, easily winning Minnesota and Missouri and finally taking Colorado after the result see-sawed back and forward during the count. Santorum won by 40.2% to Romney's 34.9%. To illustrate the enormity of the defeat, Romney had won Colorado just four years ago by 60% to his then rival John McCain's 19%.

Santorum, former senator for Pennsylvania and the most socially conservative of the candidates, won Iowa, the traditional start of the campaign, on 3 January but his campaign has been flagging since.

German Chancellor Merkel's conservatives hope to win back support in North Rhine-Westphalia in a state election this spring, but her party's top candidate there may have put their chances at risk. German commentators on Tuesday remark on Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen's unpopular resistance to state politics.

An unexpected state election is approaching in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, following the collapse of the state parliament there last week. As if that weren't enough political drama for voters to handle, this week the campaign has been overshadowed by uncertainty surrounding the conservative candidate for the state governorship, federal Environment Minister Norbert Rottgen.

As the state leader for Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Rottgen is expected to act as governor if the party wins, and lead the opposition if they lose. But Rottgen, an ambitious politician who sees himself as a future chancellor, appears to think the latter would be a step down. Rather than filling the less-prominent position of state opposition leader if his party loses the election, he reportedly wants to keep his ministerial post.

Over the weekend, mass-circulation daily Bild reported that Rottgen was resisting pressure to make the decision, telling Merkel he would keep his options open until after the election. Then on Monday, the paper cited sources close to Rottgen saying that he had expressed his desire to remain in the Environment Ministry rather than go into state politics if he loses.

Close Race Expected  

The reports have sparked widespread criticism of Rottgen within both the CDU and among its opponents. Meanwhile, the group of CDU lawmakers from North Rhine-Westphalia in the national parliament are pressuring him to stay in the state regardless of the election outcome on May 13. CDU parliamentarian Wolfgang Bosbach said at a meeting of the group that the election will be neck-and-neck, and that the CDU's chances would improve if Rottgen made clear he had no reservations about remaining in the state, an unnamed participant in the group's meeting on Monday evening told daily Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger. Bosbach's position was backed by everyone at the meeting, the paper added.

The neo-Nazi terror cell of Uwe Bohnhardt, Beate Zschape and Uwe Mundlos managed to hide from the police for almost 14 years. But between murders, attacks and bank robberies, the trio led a surprisingly normal life. They kept cats, played computer games and even went on vacation several times together. This article was written by SPIEGEL journalists whose names are listed at the end of this article. .

After 10 people were dead, two bombs had exploded and four post offices and six savings banks had been robbed, Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Bohnhardt and Beate Zschape went on a vacation together.

It was the summer of 2007. They had loaded up a van and driven north, and now they were staying at a camping site on the Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn, located near Germany's border with Denmark. A few months earlier, the two men had killed a police officer and severely wounded her partner with a shot to the head. But now they were about to spend a few relaxing weeks on the beach.

Mundlos, Bohnhardt and Zschape, who went by the names Max, Gerry and Liese, strolled over to one of the nearby campers and asked whether anyone wanted to play cards. The campsite neighbors later said that they had quickly developed a friendly relationship with the trio. Bohnhardt bought an inflatable boat with an outboard motor, Mundlos went windsurfing with one of the neighbors and Zschape spent a lot of time sunbathing. Life was peaceful in that summer of 2007.

They didn't discuss politics. None of the other campers had any idea that the three were leading a double life, that they had been on the run for almost 10 years, and that at least two of them were under the delusion that it was up to them to save the German people. Bohnhardt and Mundlos believed that enemies were lurking around every corner: in politics, in the media and -- naturally -- among leftists. They also thought they had enemies among ordinary Turkish greengrocers and owners of doner kebab stands.

They began running from the authorities in January 1998, when police found a pipe bomb, among other incriminating items, in a garage that Zschape had rented in the eastern city of Jena. Their lives as fugitives came to an end in November 2011, with the deaths of Bohnhardt and Mundlos in a camper in the eastern city of Eisenach. Thirteen years and nine months had passed in the interim.

The U.S. and Europe are to demand that Iran dismantle its fortified underground nuclear facility and halt higher-grade uranium enrichment at a new round of talks this week as a condition for lifting sanctions and the threat of a military attack – demands that Tehran swiftly denounced as "irrational".

U.S. President Barack Obama has reiterated that Washington is prepared to accept Tehran maintaining a peaceful nuclear power program, but at the same time the White House is becoming more explicit in warning that the negotiations beginning in Istanbul on Friday are "perhaps a last chance" for diplomacy to work.

Diplomats say Iran will be pressed by the permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany, known as the P5+1, to shut its underground nuclear facility at Fordo, to stop enriching uranium to 20%, and to hand over the estimated 100kg of uranium already enriched to that level.

The demands match those made by Binyamin Netanyahu at a White House meeting last month at which Obama pressed the Israeli prime minister to hold off from a military attack on Iran and give sanctions and diplomacy an opportunity to work. Britain and France are also pushing for Iran to dismantle those parts of its nuclear program that could be used for weapons.

Netanyahu repeated the three requirements in a meeting with the Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, on Sunday. He also warned against allowing Iran to use the talks "to delay and deceive".

The Israeli prime minister also said in an interview with Maariy newspaper over the weekend that the underground nuclear facility at Fordo must be shut down.

Washington looks set to wave through new cyber-security legislation next week that opponents fear will wipe out decades of privacy protections at a stroke.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) will be discussed in the House of Representatives next week and already has the support of 100 House members.

It will be the first such bill to go to a vote since the collapse of the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in January after global protests and a concerted campaign by internet giants such as Google, Wikipedia and Twitter.

The author of the new bill, Mike Rogers, the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has said it is aimed at tracking the nefarious activities of hackers, terrorists and foreign states, especially China. But its critics charge the bill will affect ordinary citizens and overturn the privacy protections they now enjoy.

Opponents fear the way it is currently drafted will open up ordinary citizens to unprecedented scrutiny. The bill uses the wording: "Notwithstanding any other provision of law," a phrase that if it became law would trump all existing legislation, according to critics.

In one section, the bill defines "efforts to degrade, disrupt or destroy" a network as an area that would trigger a CISPA investigation. Opponents argue something as simple as downloading a large file – a movie for example – could potentially be defined as an effort to "degrade" a network.

A new international accord on the management and safety of nuclear power plants should be a priority for governments, said the World Energy Council.

A year after Japan's Fukushima reactor was shut down, the World Energy Council - whose members include many of the biggest energy companies from around the world – said an agreement was possible and should be a matter of urgency. "Global nuclear power is one of the rare issues on which an international accord could be achieved with a reasonable level of efforts - the need to act is urgent, and the time is right," its report stated.

"Very little has changed in respect of improving global governance of the nuclear sector, highlighting the need for action. There is critical need to inform the public about issues relating to nuclear generation technologies, safety, costs, benefits and risks."

The WEC also found that nuclear energy continues to be a popular choice when governments around the world are setting their future priorities, despite concerns over the safety of reactors following the Fukushima disaster last March.

Although many countries have paused their work on nuclear power developments, and some – including Germany, Italy and Switzerland – have withdrawn altogether, the WEC study concluded that the impetus for nuclear development in key parts of the developing world would continue.

Christoph Frei, the secretary general of WEC, said: "The nuclear renaissance is continuing. But there is a strong need for the public to be informed, and for more discussion around safety procedures. Safety should not be a competitive issue – it should be something where companies collaborate to ensure that everyone is using the best practice."

Almost a year after the Fukushima disaster, 52 of Japan's 54 nuclear power plants have been shut down. The reactor explosion destroyed the population's trust in nuclear energy. But the atomic lobby -- and the country's industrial needs -- could block a possible phase-out.

An icy wind blows through the center of Rikuzentakata. Standing in front of the remains of his town hall, Mayor Futoshi Toba, 47, looks out on a scene of utter desolation. Only a few ruins of steel and concrete dot the landscape: a school, a hospital, a post office and a supermarket. Along the shoreline, four floodlight towers stand like ghostly sentinels. The sports arena that they once illuminated has been largely swallowed by the sea.

Almost one year ago, Toba stood on the same spot. The earth shook on the afternoon of March 11, 2011 -- and he would have preferred to immediately run home and check on his wife -- but he remained at his post. He wanted to bring to safety as many of his city's inhabitants as he could while a 14-meter (46-foot) tsunami wave was racing toward the coast.

Nearly one-tenth of the 23,000 inhabitants of Rikuzentakata died in the disaster. Entire city districts have been transformed into a muddy, gray mire.

Bulldozers have formed a number of piles from the rubble and debris left by the tsunami. For nearly a year now, the survivors have been clearing away the remains of their city -- and meticulously separating wood, concrete, electrical scrap and wrecked cars.

The earthquake and subsequent tsunami claimed the lives of some 20,000 people, including Toba's wife Kumi. And yet, to this day, the memory of this tragedy is overshadowed by another disaster -- the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi. Tens of thousands of people have since had to be evacuated from the contaminated region.

The company's public image took a dive after revelations about working conditions in the factories of some of its network of Chinese suppliers. The allegations, reported at length in the New York Times, build on previous concerns about abuses at firms that Apple uses to make its bestselling computers and phones. Now the dreaded word "boycott" has started to appear in media coverage of its activities.

Apple assembly line at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, southern China. Photo: Bloomberg/Getty

"Should consumers boycott Apple?" asked a column in the Los Angeles Times as it recounted details of the bad P.R. fallout.

The influential Daily Beast and Newsweek technology writer Dan Lyons wrote a scathing piece. "It's barbaric," he said, before saying to his readership: "Ultimately the blame lies not with Apple and other electronics companies – but with us, the consumers. And ultimately we are the ones who must demand change."

MasterCard and Visa are investigating a potential major security breach that may have compromised the security of millions of cards.

The credit card issuers said the issue involves a company based in the U.S. and is also being reviewed by an independent data-security organization.

The announcements came after a report on the Krebs on Security blog said that both MasterCard and Visa Inc have been alerting banks across the U.S. about a "massive" breach that may affect more than 10 million cardholders.

Krebs said the type of data that was compromised meant that the information could be used to create counterfeit cards.

"MasterCard is concerned whenever there is any possibility that cardholders could be inconvenienced and we continue to both monitor this event and take steps to safeguard account information," the company said in a statement. "If cardholders have any concerns about their individual accounts, they should contact their issuing financial institution."

MasterCard did not say how many of its cardholders might be affected.

The recovery in the U.S. jobs market stalled in March, adding just 120,000 jobs, according to the labor department, far below the figures most economists had been predicting.

The U.S. added 240,000 new jobs in February and economists had been expecting that this would be the fourth month in a row that the economy has added over 200,000 jobs. Ahead of the release economists in a Bloomberg News survey forecast non-farm payrolls would rise by 205,000 in March.

The fall will be disappointing to President Barack Obama who has put the economic recovery at the heart of his re-election campaign.

"This is a weak and very troubling jobs report that shows the employment market remains stagnant. Millions of Americans are paying a high price for President Obama's economic policies, and more and more people are growing so discouraged that they are dropping out of the labor force altogether," said Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney.

The unemployment rate, obtained by a separate survey of U.S. households, ticked down a tenth of a percentage point to 8.2%, but the drop resulted in part from fewer Americans seeking work.

Berlin has isolated itself within Europe with its hard line on Ukraine's treatment of Yulia Tymoshenko. The German government is insisting that Kiev release the former prime minister from prison, otherwise there can be no progress in European Union-Ukraine relations. But a possible deal to let Tymoshenko receive medical treatment in Germany may just be another trick by President Yanukovych.

Silence surrounds the estate at Turovskaya Street 13 in Kiev. The ochre-colored villa with an attached office building is in the old Podol neighborhood, not far from the banks of the Dnieper River. There is no sign or plaque, but there are surveillance cameras on every corner, allowing security personnel to monitor everything that happens on the street.

The address, Ulitsa Turovskaya 13, is that of the Batkivshchyna, or "Fatherland" Party, the party that proclaimed the Orange Revolution in Ukraine more than seven years ago.

As quiet as it seems outside the party headquarters on Turovskaya Street, there is turmoil behind the building walls, especially on this particular day. There has been news from Italy that Arsen Avakov was arrested in Frosinone, a town not far from Rome. Avakov was once the governor of the Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine and head of the regional branch of the Fatherland Party. Now Ukraine has issued a warrant for his arrest through Interpol, for alleged "abuse of office."

A special committee is meeting at the party headquarters. Sergei Vlasenko, a member of parliament and Batkivshchyna's most important attorney, has until the evening to find a legal representative to prevent Avakov from being extradited.

The arrest warrant is the Ukrainian president's most recent effort to silence Batkivshchyna. Several former cabinet ministers from the party are already in custody, while others have fled abroad. Nevertheless, President Viktor Yanukovych isn't letting up. Eliminating the opposition, the people who, with their 2004 Orange Revolution, prevented him from assuming the presidency at the time, has become an obsession for him.

Government officials are upset about material insulting to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ruling Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi and major religious figures. Some illustrations have shown Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions and pigs running through Mecca, Islam's holiest city.

On Friday, the federal government told a New Delhi court that there was sufficient material to proceed against 21 social networking sites for offenses of "promoting enmity between classes and causing prejudice to national integration," according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

The cases, which PTI said name companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, represent a new risk of doing business in the nation of more than 1 billion people, which is looking to technology to boost its economy and standard of living. The dispute highlights India's difficulty in balancing the Internet culture of freewheeling discourse with its homegrown religious and political sensitivities.

Convictions could bring fines and up to five years' imprisonment, through prosecutors have named only the companies involved rather than any executives. Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar on Friday asked India's External Affairs Ministry to serve summons to officials of foreign-based companies for court appearances March 13.

European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is running out of patience. Germany's voluntary scheme to increase the number of women in the boardrooms of listed companies is failing, she told a German newspaper. If Europe's workplace inequality does not improve by the summer, she may implement binding quota systems.

In 2011, large German companies managed to avert a mandatory system to increase the proportion of women in top management, instead opting for a voluntary scheme.  But that may be about to change. The European Union is piling pressure onto companies and governments, threatening a legally binding quota if companies fail to elevate more women to the higher ranks of business.

European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is even considering pan-European legislation. "I'm not a fan of quotas. But I do like the results they achieve," Reding told Monday's edition of the German daily Die Welt.

By summer, she wants to make concrete proposals for an EU-wide legal structure. Her remarks follow a lackluster response to her voluntary system, whereby firms pledged to commit to a quota of 30 percent by 2015 and 40 percent by 2020. "Only 24 companies signed up and there was not a single German company among them," said Reding.

Since late 2010, the proportion of women in management and supervisory boards of listed companies in Europe has risen from 12 to 14 percent. Reding said the case of France indicated the effectiveness of a mandatory scheme. Since 2011, French law secures female representation in the top echelons of business and now the proportion of women has increased from 12 to 22 percent. "Where there are laws, there is progress," said Reding.

The shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, has exposed the issue of official misconduct, as police have failed to arrest, and prosecutors have refused to indict, George Zimmerman, Martin's self-professed killer. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, claimed Martin looked suspicious and that he shot him in self-defense. Although a federal investigation is under way, Martin's parents have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate possible meddling by the state's attorney's office with investigations by Sanford police the night of the killing. Martin's family believe that state attorney Norm Wolfinger and Sanford police chief Bill Lee overruled the recommendation of the chief homicide investigator that Zimmerman be arrested and charged with manslaughter. Further, the "stand your ground" law implicated in this case enables vigilantes who wish to perform private, extrajudicial executions and become a legalized lynch mob. The law breaks with centuries of legal tradition by allowing a person to "stand one's ground" and use deadly force wherever he or she feels threatened, without a duty to retreat.

First enacted in Florida and now adopted by at least 21 states, the law is promoted by the powerful National Rifle Association and the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. ALEC is a Koch brothers-funded organization of right-wing legislators throughout the country, responsible for anti-union, voter suppression and forced transvaginal ultrasound legislation in various states. ALEC is supported by corporations such as ExxonMobil, Wal-mart, AT&T, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, UPS and, until recently, Coca-Cola.

As the "stand your ground" law enables vigilantes and lynch mobs who operate outside the justice system, the system also provides cover to insiders, including renegade prosecutors who stand in the way of justice. With broad discretion but little accountability, prosecutors at their worst become vigilantes.

According to the Veritas Institute and the Innocence Project, Texas prosecutors are not disciplined for their misconduct. Between 2004 and 2008, prosecutors committed error in 91 cases. Yet, in 72 of those cases, the convictions were upheld on the grounds of harmless error, while 19 cases were reversed due to harmful error. Only one prosecutor was disciplined by the Texas Bar Association between 2004 and 2011, for a case before 2004.

With Russia set to vote on Sunday, SPIEGEL continues to explore the atmosphere in the country in part two of its pre-election coverage. Vladimir Putin looks set to win the presidency, but residents are growing increasingly resistant to corruption and media control.

This is part two of SPIEGEL's story on the upcoming Russian presidential election. Part one was published on Thursday.  

Disparaging remarks about Putin, protests against election fraud? There were "many fur coats to be seen" during the demonstrations in Moscow, at least according to the rumor mill in Vladivostok, says Larissa Belobrova, 46. "Perhaps these people should try driving out of Moscow and sweeping streets or helping the babushkas, instead of spending their winter vacations in Courchevel," she says. Belobrova, a trained actress and the governor's wife, doesn't wear a fur coat. Only a ring studded with diamonds reveals that she has done tolerably well for herself in the Putin era. Her annual income in 2010 was €27 million, or about twice as much, according to the tabloids, as Hollywood diva Angelina Jolie earned.

She couldn't care less about the "crap" that's being reported about her, says the prima donna of Vladivostok's Gorky Theater. She has better things to do, she adds. In addition to acting, she runs, at least on paper, a business empire that includes a fishing fleet. This allows her to support her husband Sergey Darkin, the governor and most powerful man in the region, who is poor by comparison according to his tax return.

'A Hornets' Nest Of Organized Crime'  

At Putin's pleasure, Darkin has served as governor since 2001. If popular sentiment is to be believed, he would be the first to be voted out of office if the direct election of governors were reintroduced. But despite allegations of corruption, Darkin remains in office in Vladivostok until further notice.

The success of the Pirate Party in Sunday's election in Saarland shows it will be a force to be reckoned with in coming elections, say German commentators. Angela Merkel will be able to draw some relief from the victory of her CDU in the state -- but her coalition partner, the FDP, sank further towards oblivion.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratiic Union (CDU) party won a state election on Sunday in the small state of Saarland but her junior coalition partner, the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), were kicked out of the regional parliament after slumping to just 1.2 percent.

Saarland, tucked in the southwestern corner of Germany, has 1 million inhabitants and the vote was the first in a series of regional elections this year that could determine the fate of the ailing FDP and will set the stage for the next national election in 2013.

If the FDP remains in the doldrums, Merkel will have to find another coalition partner  to win a third term. Commentators are already saying that next year's vote may produce a repeat of the so-called grand coalition of conservatives and center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) that governed Germany under Merkel from 2005 until 2009.

The SPD had hoped for a clean run of election victories this year, but Saarland has robbed it of momentum ahead of two more important state elections, in Schleswig-Holstein on May 6 and in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state with 18 million inhabitants, on May 13.

The SPD hopes to oust Merkel by winning enough votes to form a center-left coalition with the Greens in 2013.

The new, pro Internet freedom Pirate Party, which stunned the German political scene last September by seizing 8.9 percent of votes for Berlin's city assembly, repeated its success in Saarland, winning 7.4 percent to enter the state assembly for the first time.