The events in Belgrade: The German government is supporting the opposition.

Kosovo: While the opposition is taking over in Serbia, the Albanians in the crisis-ridden province are afraid of a changeover of power. Without the Belgrade dictator, their independence will move into the remote distance.

“A Stranger at the Foot of the Karavanke Mountains”

Slovenia: The conservative prime minister Andrey Bajuk, who grew up in Argentina, is disrupting the post-Communist idyll of the Slovenian nation with its two million inhabitants. At the elections on Sunday he threatens to suffer a bitter defeat.

“Priority for the Bomb”

Interview with Khadir Hamza, for many years the head of Iraq’s atomic programme, on Saddam Hussein’s acquisition of nuclear arms and his willing helpers in the German supply industry:

“Saddam still has an enormous arms potential. The inspectors haven’t found anything like all the manufacturing and storage sites. … We were treated particularly obligingly in Germany. Our embassy in Bonn maintained excellent contacts with the industry. We were able to move around millions through Deutsche Bank, and our orders were shipped out via Hamburg without any problems. … Saddam is concentrating all his energy and resources on manufacturing nuclear arms. That is a prestige project for him, more important than developing agents for biological and chemical warfare.”

“Death in the Polar Night”

Navy: Using modern locating technology, Norwegian specialists have discovered Hitler’s last missing battleship. The sinking of the “Scharnhorst” marked the end of an era – filigree electronics condemned the armoured giants to extinction.

SPIEGEL interview with Paul Spiegel on anti-Semitism in Germany

“The Secret of the Killer Bacteria”

Russia: American experts are anxious that the remains of the Soviet biological warfare production could trigger a disaster – and they have a dreadful suspicion. The Russian military is experimenting in secret laboratories with microbes that could kill millions of people.

“The Island of Tears”

An island in the Aral Sea is contaminated with anthrax spores - lethal and extremely resistant bacteria which Soviet scientists once planned to use in a biological war against the West. The threat is drawing closer inexorably: Chernobyl in slow motion.

“The Americans Are Coming”

Banks: Deutsche Bank is mutating to become a global financial institution patterned on the US model. The future spokesman of the board of directors, Josef Ackermann, is further expanding the influence of the investment bankers.

“All Taxes Are too High”

SPIEGEL in-depth interview with economist Milton Friedman on Gerhard Schröder’s reforms, the Internet and the blessings of anarchy:

“It’s always right to lower taxes, in any country in the world, at any time, on any occasion at all. All taxes are too high, all governments are too fat. They should drive taxes down as far as they possibly can. … I don’t think that such a thing as social justice exists. There is only individual justice. Justice has something to do with the individual and not with society as a whole. Besides, I don’t believe that German society is any more just than American society … The Internet is indeed the best thing that could have happened to us. Because the Net makes it difficult for governments to impose taxes.”

“The Methods Are Perfidious”

SPIEGEL in-depth interview with actor Heiner Lauterbach on his life in the headlines of the tabloid press, the curse of a macho image and his latest role as the publisher Axel C. Springer:

“No doubt I helped to shape my macho image – though more subconsciously. Except that with all the pithy quotations, they tended to leave out the twinkle in the eye that was there between the lines. … The cooler guys are always the ones who keep out of things altogether. But there are so many gossip columns and tabloid magazines, and they all need to be filled. And sometimes I was the one who did the dirty work.”

“First a Glass of Jägermeister”

SPIEGEL interview with actress Franka Potente on fake kisses in Hollywood, genuine fame in Germany and her new film “The Warrior and the Empress:

“I don’t feel like a Hollywood star yet. “Blow” doesn’t even have a release date in the USA yet, and besides I only have a supporting role in it. … In an artistic profession, you always draw on your own biography and your own surroundings, of course. That’s why I feel very comfortable in German films, because I feel that I know the characters from real life. In the USA I was more of an exchange student who gave the other people on the set Milka chocolate and taught them a bit of German.”

“The Big Brotherhood”

Entertainment: According to researchers, “Big Brother” signalises a television revolution. Television is becoming a place for establishing contacts, the dividing line between everyday life and the medium is disappearing, intimate formats are displacing fiction and politics. The young generation that grew up with television and whom Mother TV helped to raise displays a totally new pattern of behaviour in front of the box. The medium and intimacy, stage-production and reality are undergoing a totally new, revolutionary admixture, according to the experts – good times for new television structures, bad times for media watchdogs with conservative values.

“Walking the Mud Flats through Space”

Physics: In a month’s time the world’s largest particle accelerator near Geneva is to be switched off. Physicists have until then to find the Higgs particle. If they succeed, an emeritus professor in Scotland can hope to receive the Nobel Prize for the only idea in his life. If the call to Stockholm does ever reach him, Higgs will have left physics behind him. The monstrous accelerators were never his world anyway. And even in the realm of formulae and theoretical constructs he was something of an outsider. Nature could foil the efforts of the CERN physicists and force them to give up just short of their goal. Because once the old particle ring has been switched off they will have to wait five years before they can once again venture into unknown new territory. They will have to look on helplessly as their US colleagues at Fermilab try to beat them to the coveted Higgs trophy.