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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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."

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.

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.  

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.