"Tiny quantity, loud bang"

SPIEGEL interview with Vice-Admiral Elmar Skorgen about the rescue operation by Norwegian divers on the wreck of the Russian nuclear submarine "Kursk":

"Our divers were not permitted to inspect the wreck at all. Their freedom of movement was restricted to between 40 and 50 metres towards the stern of the submarine… If there had been survivors in an initially perhaps not yet flooded section towards the rear end of the submarine, then they could certainly have been rescued. Yet only a precise analysis of the accident will yield information on that… The data collected by our espionage craft not far way indicated explosions in both cases without any doubt. Yet there is so far absolutely no explanation of what triggered the first of these… My own tip tends to be a gas explosion."

"A task for humanity"

Argentina: A Berlin attorney is resorting to German courts to pin responsibility for their crimes in the 1970s on generals of the Argentine junta. Extensive amnesty provisions seriously restrict criminal proceedings against junta hoodlums by Argentinean courts - yet these are feasible in specific cases through German authorities. The legal construction behind issue of a writ is complex. In one case, plaintiff is not German, but one of the accused is, an employee of Mercedes-Benz Argentina (now Daimler-Chrysler). He is said to have played a part in arresting one of the victims.

"Pitiful and clumsy"

SPIEGEL interview about the "Kursk" catastrophe with Boris Nemtsov, leader of the "Union of the Forces on the Right" in the Russian parliament (Duma):

"Putin travelled late - but perhaps not too late - to Murmansk to talk to relatives of the victims… His attitude towards the West is appalling - without the Norwegians and British we could have done barely anything… Putin's idea of an officer's honour is mistaken. He believes that military people must be protected at all costs. He regards anything else as treason."

"Frank Sinatra was the greatest"

SPIEGEL interview with British Pop singer Robbie Williams about the golden rules of entertainment, fisticuffs with fellow musicians and his image as the bad boy of show business:

"I was by far the most deeply impressed by the so-called rat pack, the gang composed of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. I grew up with their music and their TV appearances… My ideal has remained until today the traditional Las Vegas school: Make sure that you truly entertain every single person… I attract trouble as if by magic and I don't want to complain about that here - after all I've done quite enough towards that myself. That's OK, since people seem to adore bad boys… I'm no hard Rocker, but soft as slush."

"Perfume from armpits"

Hygiene: We are seeing new strategies against sweat. Textile researchers are developing special fibres that prevent extreme stink caused by sweat. Microbiologists are manipulating the smelly bacteria of the armpits so that these exude none but pleasant odours. And medical men have even fallen for an agent otherwise feared as a biological battle substance. Several hundred patients are just now sweating away for science as part of a European/German multi-centre survey.

"Murmurs on a wall of letters"

Art: A lot of noise about sweet nothings? The play on script and words is flourishing on the art scene. Slogans, occasionally poetic but much more often of hair-raising banality, are being painted on walls or carved in stone. Trend pioneer Lawrence Weiner has exhibitions running in Berlin and Cologne. The doctrine of ascetic script per se embodies an indisputable logic of its own, yet in Berlin at least its bearded prophet Weiner is simply running amok. Conceptual script art, and not just Weiner's, labours under a general handicap: the message conveyed is seldom so weighty in itself that one would also wish to read it where it would otherwise be found, namely between the covers of a book or in a newspaper.

"More beautiful than any fairytale"

Rivers: In the Rhine and the Elbe, once sewers, a real miracle is occurring: salmon is acquiring citizenship again. Resettlement of the noblest of all noble fish requires the cleansing of several hundred tributaries from the source to the estuary. The scale of this undertaking is comparable to the successful struggle against dying forests and atmospheric pollution waged with filters for power stations and catalysators for cars during the 1980s. Yet the "fish ladder" project could very soon prove to be just one gigantic parochial dispute. To blame for this would be none other than German environmental campaigners. While a new generation of hydraulic engineers repair the sins of their fathers so as to ease ascent for spawning old fishes, everywhere in German inland waters the power station constructors are currently erecting new barriers that will hinder descent for young fish.

"Too much Bismarck"

Diplomacy: The German Foreign Office aims to halt its creeping loss of clout and to dispel frustration among its diplomats with an extensive reform programme. The Foreign Office needs to embrace change because the international political arena is now different. The days are past in which the world's destiny was not infrequently decided through secret diplomatic channels. In this networked media world that permits people to follow wars live on their TV screens, the elite diplomatic service of yore is increasingly becoming a humdrum service provider for businesses and tourists.

"Winning gold from a computer"

Olympics: In many branches of sport taut muscles and mental fitness no longer suffice. These are people whose ambition really brings the struggle for gold medals to a peak. The super-brains in sport, namely, pursue a specific goal: to spur human bodies to performances of the kind that the digital stick-men on the screens of their computers long ago provided. The battle is further stoked up by the market leaders in the sports gear industry.

"Pine in the hammock"

Mental gymnastics: Is working out the root of 157326849 in the head a possibility? The elite of brain acrobats gathered last week in London for this year's Memory Olympics. Tough grind did not produce success, but rather systematic application of the whole panoply of the human power of imagination.

"A troop of cleaners in the network"

Computers: Russian programmers have developed an anti-virus software that repels and destroys almost all known computer bugs. The commercial breakthrough came last spring on the anniversary of the reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl. The "CHH Chernobyl" virus tore around the world from Taiwan and disabled the Windows operating system in an estimated half a million computers. Development engineer Eugen Kaspersky is still happy to recollect this occurrence: "Demand for our gratis counter-agent was so heavy that at times our server collapsed."

"A world as if in a Disney movie"

SPIEGEL interview with the US physicist Michio Kaku:

"Just as today we assume the presence of electricity in every room as a matter of course, in the future we shall find computer intelligence present everywhere... By the year 2020 computers will be as cheap as paper… The dream of building nano machines that produce something will not be realized for another 50 or 100 years at the earliest… It will not be enough to make man immortal. If we do not succeed in halting the ageing process - ideally somewhere between the ages of 35 and 40 - then society will be dominated by grisly old folk bereft of ideas up in the executive suites, and will stagnate. Our brain has as many neurons as there are stars on the milky way and is constantly developing new links. No computer chip achieving this complexity is in sight.