"The Climate Is Better"

Foreign policy: George W. Bush and Gerhard Schröder claim to be starting a "new chapter". In actual fact, new controversies are preventing a return to the old German-American friendship. Since the argument over Iraq, there has been tension in the air at every meeting between the President and the Chancellor - despite the public show of rapprochement. Controversial issues will be on the agenda once again at the meetings in Brussels and Mainz, numerous differences in opinion are far from being resolved: Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, China. Bush has so far made no positive noises as regards Schröder's pet topic, a permanent seat on the Security Council, though he has long ago assured the Japanese of his support. A sense of distrust continues to smoulder below the surface.

"Too Much Sense of Mission"

SPIEGEL interview with Martin Schulz, chairman of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, about the European criticism of the United States:

"So far one fails to see in what respect Bush's politics have changed materially from those during his first term in office, or at least changed in such a way that the Europeans can agree with his politics. ... Bush explicitly hasn't ruled out the possibility of military intervention in other parts of the world, if necessary, the way he intervened in Iraq. This is a risky policy, a long way from the USA, but right on the European Union's doorstep."

"Al Qaida Wants the Bomb Too"

SPIEGEL in-depth interview with the Chief Weapons Inspector of the United Nations, Mohammed El Baradei, about the danger posed by possible new nuclear powers, such as North Korea and Iran, the chances of curtailing a nuclear black market for terrorist organisations, and the argument over his re-election:

"I do not believe that military strikes will solve this problem; the most they can do is delay the development. ... At the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s there were encouraging steps towards disarmament, but those have almost come to a standstill. At the moment, tens of thousands of nuclear warheads still exist, far too many. ... In every single case, we have to try and understand what makes a country take this step, what national humiliation, what security concerns. And to try and allay these fears. ... A nuclear war is drawing ever closer if we don't settle upon a new system of international control. ... There is no indication that terrorists got hold of critical amounts of nuclear material during the turmoil surrounding the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But it cannot be ruled out. ... In May there will be a unique opportunity to make the world a safer place. The heads of state will be meeting in New York for the Review Conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which take place every five years."

"I Don't Have a Magic Wand"

SPIEGEL in-depth interview with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas about the chances for peace in the Middle East, the attempt to swear the militant Palestinian groups to non-violence, and the conditions for coexistence with Israel:

"The only authority is that of the state and the state has a monopoly on the use of force. No state in this world can afford to permit other authorities alongside it. This is why we will enforce the law if necessary. ... We want to admit the fighters into our security forces, and then the whole atmosphere will change. Hamas also wants to take part in the parliamentary elections in July. ... East Jerusalem is to be our capital, West Jerusalem that of the Israelis. We do not want to divide the town, we can even envisage having a joint city council. ... What right does Israel have to build settlements on our land? ...Israel must finally appreciate that we are giving up a large part of historic Palestine and instead making do with 22 percent in order to reach a historic peace."

"Expensive Exodus"

Immigration: Negotiations are due to take place this week as to how many Jews from former Soviet states are still to be allowed to enter the country. The question is a delicate one - both for the interior minister and for the overstretched Jewish communities. Religiously inclined immigrants have allowed Jewish life to blossom; without them, the Central Council's 89 communities would have had just 12,653 members at the end of 2003, rather than 102,472. A success story, in other words. But there is another side to it too: the immigrants pose enormous problems to the communities and the government in terms of their integration. It is estimated that 60 to 85 percent of Jewish immigrants depend on social security. Stefan Kramer, Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews, feels that it is already time to ask the "lifeboat question": should the Central Council concentrate all its efforts on a few, large communities, in other words in the cities, so as to be able to provide attractive offers, from Jewish nursery schools to Jewish high schools? Or should it try to rescue everything, at the risk of offering too little everywhere and ending up unable to hold onto anything at all?

The growing wage competition coming from Eastern Europe is giving rise to a new argument within the government. While Economics Minister Wolfgang Clement would like to open up the European service market even further, Chancellor Schröder is urging for a corrective adjustment of the political course. Priority is to be given to protecting domestic jobs.

"The ABC of Dictatorship"

Syria: To the mind of the American President, the Assad clan has set up a despicable regime. But is he right? The country is colourful and full of contradictions, and the young ruler is not very keen to experiment because those with the true power do not leave him any room. Perhaps Bashar al-Assad really did mean it seriously when he promised a new beginning four years ago. But he certainly underestimated the tenacity of the powers which his own father had created during three decades of dictatorship: the influential military and no less than four monstrous intelligence services, which combine political and economic interests with one another. At the same time, the opposition is too weak now to mobilise the majority of Syrians.

"Big Brother in a Bee Hive"

Wildlife: Bees become smarter the older they grow, they suffer from occupational diseases and will travel astronomical distances for a glass of honey - Würzburg scientists have been using state-of-the-art surveillance technologies to revolutionise our picture of mankind's third most important economically useful animal. "Virtually nothing you find in school textbooks is still true today," says neurobiologist Jürgen Tautz. "We are simply investigating a couple of age-old questions, but using the latest technology." In a unique experiment, the Würzburg group is drawing up precise profiles of its subjects' movements. For this purpose, thousands of bees have been fitted with miniature transponders (RFID) on their backs. "We have turned bee hives into Big Brother houses", explains Tautz. His latest idea is an "intelligence test" for bees, which beekeepers can use to straightforwardly measure how clever their colonies are - and how healthy.

"Kant in Teheran"

Philosophy: Immanuel Kant's vision of peace presupposes the separation of the state and the church - not the only tricky issue at a memorable congress in the Iranian capital, at which Muslim scholars debated with German social philosophers about Enlightenment and religion. The basis for all the lectures and debates was Immanuel Kant's impressive paper "Perpetual Peace", written in 1795. This describes Kant's grand idea, far ahead of its times, of universal civil rights which had emancipated themselves from religious dogmas and were to ensure peace between nations as well as curbing the evilness of human nature - an idea that already contains the basic notion of the League of Nations and of the United Nations. The liberal Iranian thinkers, a minority in this circle too, risk punishment if they express Kant's ideas about enlightenment, criticism and a secular state to sound too much like misgivings concerning the ruling doctrine of the Shiite Revolution in Iran. Conservative hard-liners on the panel, on the other hand, are wary of subverting their own authority - the dialogue about Kant must not be allowed to get out of control. And the German philosophers need to be careful not to be instrumentalised, and to be sure that their presence is not used as a publicity stunt backing up the local dogmatists and their teachings.

"The Unequal Fathers"

SPIEGEL interview with Willi Mohr about his father, the Gestapo official Robert Mohr who interrogated the Munich student Sophie Scholl in February 1943 after a leafleting campaign against the Nazi dictatorship. The interrogation scenes are at the centre of the film "Sophie Scholl - The Last Days" which has just received much acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival and will be opening in cinemas around the country this week. Robert Mohr, played in the film by Alexander Held, tries to save Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) from execution by persuading her to renounce the ideas of the "White Rose":