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Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, now a symbol of German unification, is being defaced by the presence of performers in Cold War uniforms, say Berlin politicians. The fake soldiers argue that they're making the area more attractive to tourists.

One of Berlin's most famous landmarks, the Brandenburg Gate, is being exploited by actors wearing Cold War-era uniforms who are lowering the tone by posing for tourists for money, some Berlin politicians are saying.

The soldiers dressed in American, East German or Soviet military uniforms, stand in front of the Brandenburg Gate holding flags. Some offer to stamp fake visas to provide tourists with a memento of their visit.

The Turks, who always used to complain to their Western allies about their rough neighborhood, apparently no longer have any enemies in the east. Turkey's old rival Russia has since become its most important energy and trading partner. Syria and Iraq, two countries with which Ankara has in the past been on the brink of war, are now friends of Turkey, and relations are even improving with Armenia. The Arabs, who never truly took to the successors of the Ottomans, now look with admiration to what they call the "Turkish model," a dynamic, open country that has a better handle on its problems than they do.

When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assumed office in 2003, he planned to lead Turkey into the European Union. But Europe was unmoved by this vision, and it has also lost much of its appeal within Turkey. According to Germany's Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think tank linked to the center-left Social Democratic Party, as the Europeans have become weary of expansion, Turkey has lost interest in joining the EU. Indeed, what Erdogan meant when he spoke of Turkey's "alternative" to becoming an EU member is becoming increasingly clear.

Critics and supporters alike describe this new course as "neo-Ottomanism." Ankara remains formally committed to its European ambitions. However, frustrated by the open rejection with which it has long been met in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, and which it has been facing once again during the EU election campaign, Turkey is focusing increasingly on its role as a peacekeeping power in a region it either ruled or dominated for centuries.

Fresh in office, US Attorney General Eric Holder made his first visit to Berlin on Wednesday and asked for the German government's support in the closing of the Guantanamo prison camp. "Just as we joined hands with our international allies to bring down the Iron Curtain that divided this great city, so must we join together to close Guantanamo," Holder said during a speech on Wednesday night given at the American Academy in the German capital.

"I know that Europe did not open Guantanamo, and that, in fact, a great many on this continent opposed it," Holder said in Berlin, before making a direct appeal to Germany to provide its backing. "But as we turn the page to a new beginning, it is incumbent on us all to embrace new solutions, free from the rancor and rhetoric that divided us in the past. To close Guantanamo, we must all make sacrifices and we must be willing to make unpopular choices."

He said the talks were "open and productive" and that he was leaving Europe with a "very good impression." "There were no definitive no's anywhere," he said, adding that the groundwork had been completed for Washington to make concrete requests for Europeans to take in former Guantanamo prisoners. Holder said he would return to Washington hopeful.

US President Barack Obama spent much of his trip to Europe rebuilding bridges. In Prague on Sunday for a US-EU summit, he said "in my view, there is no old Europe or new Europe. There is only a united Europe."

During a speech at the NATO summit in Strasbourg late last week, Obama reached out the olive branch, saying, "in America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world."

And at the G-20 summit in London before that, Obama even took responsibility for the global economic meltdown. "It is true … that the crisis began in the US. I take responsibility, even if I wasn't even president at the time."

Three former American secretaries of state and a former secretary of defense were in Moscow on Thursday for informal meetings with top Russian officials in an attempt to pull relations between the United States and Russia out of a tailspin before the countries’ presidents meet for the first time next month. The flurry of so-called track two diplomacy by figures outside government was another gesture of outreach to Russia. A month ago, the Obama administration sent a letter proposing a dialogue on curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions that could diminish American needs for a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

Henry A. Kissinger, who is now 85, the architect of the original détente policy with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, led one group of three former American officials on a visit to the Russian capital. They are advocating a new round of international arms-reductions talks intended to eliminate all nuclear weapons. Separately, James A. Baker III, who was secretary of state when the Berlin Wall fell, was in Moscow for a conference on the politics of Caspian Sea oil and natural gas riches that both Russia and the West are maneuvering to obtain access to.

The visits by the former warhorses of American diplomacy toward Russia were seen as testing the waters for President Obama’s intention to, as Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. put it, “press the reset button” on bilateral relations.

Officials in Berlin now face the question of what went wrong. The operation lasted for three weeks, at a cost to the German treasury well in excess of the combined ransom payments of recent years. The failed campaign demonstrated that without improved logistics and available aircraft and ships, the GSG-9 is incapable of operating swiftly enough in comparable situations.

The government was determined to break this pattern but, as it turned out, it had overestimated its capabilities. What began as an effort to send a signal of strength ended up, in the Stavanger case, as a sign of impotence. This could have serious consequences. German sailors can now expect to become prime targets for pirates, in contrast to their French or American counterparts, whose governments have not hesitated to use force to rescue their citizens.

Although there was no shortage of resolve in Berlin, the Germans did lack the means to complete the operation successfully. There is a vast divide between Berlin's sensitivities and the raw reality of African pirates, who care very little about turf wars among German bureaucrats. The case exposes serious deficiencies in the Germany security apparatus.

Although the GSG-9 is constantly being trained for maritime missions, it lacks the logistics for speedy operations beyond German borders. The German military, the Bundeswehr, can provide the logistics, but it in turn lacks a sufficient number of readily deployable special operations forces. There is poor cooperation between the two organizations, while strategists are hampered by legal restrictions. And in some cases the Germans simply lack the necessary equipment. In the case of the Hansa Stavanger, the German government had to borrow aircraft and an American helicopter carrier to transport its close combat experts within range of the freighter. But by the time these preparations were complete, three weeks had already passed since pirates captured the ship on April 4.

German intelligence agencies believe al-Qaida is planning attacks on Germans abroad and possibly in Germany ahead of the September 27 general election as revenge for Germany's military mission in Afghanistan and to put pressure on Berlin to withdraw its forces

The assessment is based on a warning by the US government that the leadership of al-Qaida in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan has decided to attack Germany, and that the North African branch of al-Qaida -- al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb -- has been tasked with carrying it out.

Germany's domestic intelligence agency (the Office for the Protection of the Constitution) and the BKA Federal Criminal Police Office believe that German company offices in Algeria and German citizens across North Africa are especially at risk. But authorities are also warning about possible attacks on German soil.

En dépit des réserves "juridiques" de Paris et de Berlin, José Manuel Barroso espère que chefs d'Etat et de gouvernement des Vingt-sept le désigneront formellement dès le Conseil européen des 18 et 19 juin, à Bruxelles.

Les réserves française et allemande. Nicolas Sarkozy et Angela Merkel ont de fortes réserves sur le calendrier défendu par le PPE et son candidat. Paris veut temporiser en attendant la ratification définitive du traité de Lisbonne.

For more than a year now, Warsaw public prosecutor Robert Majewski has been investigating former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller's government on allegations of abuse of office. At issue is whether sovereignty over Polish territory was relinquished, and whether former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and his left-leaning Social Democratic government gave the CIA free reign over sections of the Stare Kiejkuty military base for the agency's extraterritorial torture interrogations.

"No European country is so sincerely and vigorously investigating former members of the government as is currently the case in Poland," says Wolfgang Kaleck from the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, which supports the investigations.

The public prosecutor's office has also launched a probe to determine whether the Polish intelligence agency made 20 of its agents available to the CIA, as was recently reported by the conservative Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita. A former CIA official confirmed this information to SPIEGEL. There was reportedly a document issued by the intelligence agency that mentioned both the 20 Polish agents and the transfer of the military base to the Americans. Two members of a parliamentary investigative committee in Warsaw had an opportunity to view this document in late 2005, but it has since disappeared.

Leaders from the Western Hemisphere, inspired by a new American president, closed a two-day summit meeting proclaiming a new dawn for relations in the region, which had been marked by bitter disagreements in recent years with the United States.

Despite the warm feelings, some old tensions remained. President Evo Morales of Bolivia confronted Mr. Obama during a private session on Saturday with a charge that the United States had plotted to assassinate him. Mr. Obama responded on Sunday, saying, “I am absolutely opposed and condemn any efforts at violent overthrows of democratically elected governments.”

Some of that good will went too far for President Obama’s critics in Washington, where seemingly friendly images of him with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Mr. Obama’s overtures to Cuba drew criticism from Republican lawmakers.

President Obama, seeking to thaw long-frozen relations with Cuba, told a gathering of Western Hemisphere leaders on Friday that “the United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba,” and that he was willing to have his administration engage the Castro government on a wide array of issues.

in another twist, Cuba’s strongest ally at the summit, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, no fan of the United States, was photographed at the meeting giving Mr. Obama a hearty handclasp and a broad smile.

Cuba is not on the official agenda here; indeed, Cuba, which has been barred from the Organization of American States since 1962, is not even on the guest list. But leaders in the hemisphere have spent months planning to make Cuba an issue here.

SPIEGEL: The economic crisis has severely damaged the economic model of finance-driven turbo-capitalism. Will this lead to a renaissance in the state economy? Stiglitz: I don't think so. The fall of the Berlin Wall really was a strong message that communism does not work as an economic system. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15th again showed that unbridled capitalism doesn't work either.

SPIEGEL: Could authoritarian systems like in China be the future? Stiglitz: Besides the two extremes of communism and capitalism, there are alternatives, such as Scandinavia or Germany. The Chinese model has succeeded very well for their people, but at the price of democratic rights. The German social model, however, has worked very well. It could also be a model for the US administration.

SPIEGEL: The opposition in Germany is already complaining about government stimulus funding for infrastructure in developing countries. Stiglitz: All the more reason for governments to persuade their people that it is in our own interest that all national economies grow. If banks in Eastern Europe collapse, it weakens Western European banks and then American financial institutions. If we are to learn one thing from the economic crisis, it's this: Globalization can't be stopped. It has to be managed or else the global economy won't work.

Most of today's leaders of NATO member states were not yet born when the Alliance was forged, and almost two decades after the Soviet Union's collapse, military analysts see the Alliance as mired in an identity crisis.

"It's entirely unclear what NATO's reason for existence is after 1989 [the year the Berlin Wall came down]," says Tarak Barkawi, senior lecturer in international security at Cambridge University's Center for International Studies.

"The Taliban does not accept defeat, so how can you win?" says Karl-Heinz Kamp, director of the research division for the NATO Defense College in Rome, which trains all ranking NATO officials and diplomats. "NATO might not be able to lose or win in a classic military way," he adds.