Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed sympathy for the 1,000 U.S. dead and said he was confident the interim Iraqi government would find a way to retake cities now in the hands of insurgents.

However, in the latest of a spate of kidnappings, about 20 men with Kalashnikovs and pistols with silencers drove up to a private house belonging to the humanitarian organization Bridge to Baghdad in a busy commercial area of the Iraqi capital and rushed inside in broad daylight Tuesday.

They left with two Italian staff, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, both 29, and two Iraqis, a woman who worked for an Italian organization, Intersos, and a male employee of Bridge to Baghdad.

A spokesman for Bridge to Baghdad, Lello Rienzi, told reporters in Rome that the men were from an unidentified Islamic group. “We had no sign of danger,” he said, adding that the women “believed they were working in complete security.”

Witnesses described the kidnapping as “extremely professional” and said a well-dressed man wearing a suit and tie had led the operation. “Four cars pulled up outside our house. About 20 guys suddenly burst inside. They made us sit on the ground and started beating us,” one eyewitness, Haider Muhammad Ali, 26, said. “They kidnapped the Italian women and an Iraqi girl. The women didn’t scream. They just went quietly with the kidnappers. We were completely terrified. We were 100 percent convinced we would all die.”

Around 15 people were inside the house at the time. The kidnappers took five hostages — but one man, an Iraqi, escaped in the confusion. None of the guards at the house had weapons, Ali said. “We are a humanitarian organization and we don’t believe in them.”

The chief of the Italian intelligence service, SISMI, Nicolo Pollari, recently warned that hostage takers might target women for extra emotional impact.

Numerous Iraqis and Westerners have been abducted by political groups, and criminal gangs demanding ransom, but there is growing concern among some that gangs seeking large amounts of ransom are now targeting non-Iraqis. Last week, Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport Co. said it paid $500,000 in ransom for seven of its employees. The latest abductions are likely to fuel uncertainty over the fate of two French journalists whose kidnappers have reportedly demanded $5 million for their release.

It was not clear last night whether the motivation behind yesterday’s kidnapping was political or financial. Italy has about 2,700 troops in Iraq, the third largest number after the U.S. and Britain, and its pro-American government has refused to cave in to militant demands that they leave.

Torretta, the head of the organization’s Iraq operation, has been in the country since before the war started. Pari arrived in Iraq in June 2003, and was working on a school project in the capital.

Some six games, including the final, will be played at the stadium. More than 100,000 England fans are expected for the tournament — which will be played at 12 city venues around the country next summer — together with thousands of other supporters from all over the world.

As well as fans, German authorities are expecting a different kind of influx — at least 40,000 prostitutes. Previous global sporting events have attracted large numbers of sex workers; indeed, at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, authorities tried to banish prostitutes from the city center. And though the figures are necessarily hazy, officials believe that around 10,000 sex workers plied their trade during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, many of them imported from abroad.

This time, World Cup organizers are expecting an even bigger invasion, not least because prostitution is legal in Germany. Asked how many women might turn up, Romy, the manager of Artemis, says: “You can hang another zero onto the 40,000 figure.

“A lot of girls arrive here during trade fairs when the city is full,” she adds. “Next summer will be bigger. It’s going to be an invasion.”

Inside Artemis, meanwhile, a handful of early-evening male customers stroll around in fluffy peach bathrobes; the women, naked apart from a micro-beach towel, chat and joke.

The new 5 million-euro, 40-room facility is the brain wave of a German-Turkish businessman; unlike in most brothels, the women are free to negotiate their own rates and don’t have to pay a pimp, he says. The entrance fee is seven euros (about $8.25). The sex costs extra. Artemis, named after the virgin goddess of hunting, has an entrance for disabled people. The Olympic stadium, with its creepy, Nazi-era atmosphere, is just three S-Bahn stops away. “We are normally open from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., but during the World Cup we are considering staying open 24 hours,” says Romy.

With slightly more than seven months to go until the opening ceremony on June 9, German officials have come up with proposals for bringing prostitutes and World Cup fans together, among them “sex garages.” Dortmund, one of Germany’s bigger World Cup venues, came up with the plan to erect Verrichtungshäuser — a strange phrase, best translated as “performance houses.” These temporary shacks were to have been set up next to Dortmund’s football stadium. Last week, though, city officials confirmed that the plan had been shelved after they were unable to find a sex-hut sponsor.

The prospect of an influx of prostitutes from across Europe arriving for the 2006 World Cup has provoked concern among women’s groups, church leaders and trade unionists. They fear that many of the women who will work during the tournament will have been forced into prostitution or duped by criminal gangs. The National Council of German Women’s Organizations plans to set up stalls around the stadiums urging fans to think twice before having sex with prostitutes who may have been coerced. “We have nothing against prostitutes or prostitution,” said Henny Engels, its executive director, last week. “But we are against people trafficking and forced prostitution. It’s already a big problem in Germany. We want to use the World Cup to make our point.”

The organization has written to the German national team, its coach Jürgen Klinsmann, and Franz Beckenbauer, the head of Germany’s 2006 World Cup organizing committee, urging them to support the campaign. So far the response has not been impressive. Only Jens Lehmann, Arsenal’s reserve goalkeeper, has written back, giving his support, and promising to raise the issue with his British clubmates.

In a condescending letter to Germany’s minister for women, Renate Schmidt, meanwhile, Gerhard Mayer-Vorfelder, president of the German FA, said he would not be dealing with what he called “this tiresome issue.”

Others, though, take a more laidback view of the prostitute phenomenon. “Berlin is a very world-open city. It’s always been like that. There have been prostitutes working here for hundreds of years,” says Martina Schmidhofer, a Green Party councilor responsible for sexual health issues, and for the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district of West Berlin, which includes the Olympic stadium. “Our main concern is that the prostitutes have good working conditions. My message to England fans would be: ‘Behave sensibly, don’t drink too much, use a condom. And don’t expect a love relationship.’”

This article has been provided by the Guardian through a special arrangement with Salon. ) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005. Visit the Guardian’s Web site at http://www.guardian.co.uk.

The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered the deportation of all foreign nationals found guilty of participating in the riots, including those with residence permits. “When one has the honor to have a permit, one should not be caught provoking urban violence,” he said.

Copycat arson attacks were reported in Germany and Belgium for the third day running, though police said they were small-scale incidents and not gang related.

Nine cars have been set alight in Berlin since the weekend, compared with hundreds a night in France. “These appear to be individual acts,” said a German police spokesman. “Our situation is nothing like Paris. There is only a marginal connection.”

Despite some media criticism and fears that the emergency measures — never before used in mainland France — would prove a further provocation, a poll for Le Parisien newspaper showed that a large majority of French people back the government’s stance: 73 percent said they supported the decision to give selected local officials the power to impose nighttime curfews.

Major cities such as Marseille, Strasbourg, Lyon and Toulouse, as well as the Paris suburbs, were given emergency powers, in force for the next 12 days. Only half a dozen towns had actually imposed curfews, on minors, by late Wednesday.

An extra 1,000 police were brought in overnight, bringing the total on duty across the country to 11,500. Residents in several towns organized patrols, taking turns in standing guard with fire extinguishers over apartment buildings, car parks and local facilities such as schools and social centers.

The government released details of a package of measures to improve conditions in the suburbs of major cities, aimed mainly at ensuring that the education system serves North African and black youths better and improves their chances of getting a job. All unemployed people under 25 and living in one of the 750 sensitive suburbs will be assessed by job centers and given guidance and work placements. Benefit claimants will get a one-off 1,000-euro payment to return to work as well as 150 euros a month for 12 months. Companies will be given tax breaks if they set up on or near these suburbs.

Some 5,000 extra teachers and educational assistants are to be recruited for schools serving the suburbs concerned, 10,000 scholarships will be awarded next year to encourage academic achievers to stay at school, and 10 boarding schools will be created for those who want to study away from their suburb. The school-leaving age will be lowered to 14 for underachieving pupils eager to take up an apprenticeship.

A national agency for “social cohesion and equality of opportunity” is to be set up, and an extra 100 million euros allocated to community organizations active in youth and social work.

There were growing signs Wednesday that the riots may unsettle the French economy. The euro came under pressure as concerns grew about the impact of the riots on tourism and consumer confidence.

This article has been provided by the Guardian through a special arrangement with Salon. ) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005. Visit the Guardian’s Web site at http://www.guardian.co.uk.

The library in Weimar where the music was stored for several centuries recently burned down, but by chance, the box containing the score had already been removed. Two weeks ago a member of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany, Michael Maul, stumbled on the composition while looking through material relevant to Bach’s tempestuous but thinly documented life. The box contained more than 100 poems and verses, together with a mysterious “strophic aria.”

Proof that the work was genuine came when experts compared the hand-penned manuscript with Bach’s writing.

“After Michael and I had identified it as Bach’s, we opened a very expensive bottle of Champagne,” Peter Wollny, head of research at the Bach Archive, in Leipzig, said Tuesday. “Michael came back from Weimar two weeks ago and said he had found something interesting. We got the microfilm of the score last week. We compared it with Bach’s known compositions — and bingo.”

He added: “The last time anything by Bach was discovered was 80 years ago. So far we’ve only heard it on the computer. But it’s a charming little work, written for one singer — a soprano — and a harpsichord. There’s a little postlude at the end for a string ensemble — two violins, a viola and a cello. It takes just four or five minutes to play.”

British conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who has been asked by the Bach archive to perform and record the aria, said: “It’s so exciting. Maul has been sleuthing away, looking at the records in Weimar, which is something of a forgotten town in terms of Bach’s history.”

Gardiner believes the aria is likely to be part of a longer cantata. “It is absolutely beautiful. So many of Bach’s cantatas went missing after he died. His son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was pretty profligate with his father’s stuff. He sold manuscripts off, lost them, used them as fire lighters. So when something like this turns up it is wonderful.

“It’s a reflective, meditative, soothing piece, as Bach’s church music so often is. It’s not going to set the world alight — enough of Bach’s music from this early to mid-period has survived to give us a sense of his musical personality at that time — but it’s just great to have this because every one of his cantatas and arias is on a completely different level from all of his contemporaries.”

Gardiner plans to record the piece before Christmas and perform it at London’s Cadogan Hall on Dec. 18.

Wollny Tuesday said that the composition sheds fresh light on Bach’s enigmatic early career in Weimar, a small town in central Germany, which was later made famous by Goethe but at the time boasted just 5,000 inhabitants.

Born in 1685 into a highly musical family, Bach worked as court organist in Weimar from 1708 to 1717. He was also a member of the town’s chamber orchestra, which he led from 1714. During this period he was rapidly becoming famous, not just for his compositions but as Germany’s greatest organist. His storming performances frightened the organ builders.

“We hardly know anything about Bach from this period because very little has survived,” Wollny said Tuesday. “There are very few compositions. It fills a black hole in his artistic career. It also tells us a great deal about his musical and vocal style during the Weimar period.”

So delighted was the Bach Archive by its discovery that it Tuesday flew in professor Christoph Wolff, the world’s leading expert on Bach, from Harvard University. Wolff said he was convinced the work was genuine, and described it as “an exquisite and highly refined strophic aria, Bach’s only contribution to a musical genre popular in late 17th century Germany.” Other stunning Bach discoveries could follow, he predicted.

The box where the manuscript was discovered, said Wollny, was only removed from the library because the researcher, a bookbinder, was interested in the rare marble paper on which the work was written. “Otherwise it would have been burned down in the fire. Nobody would have known that it existed,” Wollny said.

There has been no previous record of, or reference to, the composition, which has the words “aria,” “soprano solo” and “ritornello” written at the top. The last time an undiscovered piece by Bach turned up was when a cantata was found, but the work was a mere fragment.

In an interview with the Guardian, Flegel, now 93 and living in a nursing home in northern Germany, Sunday described how she began working as a Red Cross nurse at the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin in January 1943. She had been transferred there from the eastern front.

As the German army collapsed, Hitler stayed in Berlin continuously from November 1944, eventually retreating into the bunker with his entourage. From then on, Flegel saw him frequently. “I was in the building and someone said, ‘The Führer is here,’” she said. “The first time it didn’t particularly affect me. He was away from Berlin for a long time before someone announced again, ‘The Führer is back.’ Hitler shook hands with all the people he hadn’t greeted before. After that he talked to us regularly.

“His authority was extraordinary. He was always polite and charming. There was really nothing to object to.”

As the Russians approached, and Berlin came under direct artillery fire, the mood in the bunker changed. “The circle got increasingly small. People were pushed together. Everyone became more unassuming.”

Flegel’s existence only emerged after the transcript of an interview she gave to American interrogators in November 1945 was declassified four years ago by the CIA. The Guardian discovered her insider’s account of Hitler’s final hours in a Washington vault and published it.

But her fate remained a mystery. Two months ago a Berlin-based newspaper, the BZ, tracked down her relatives via the German Red Cross and war archives. To the paper’s astonishment, her family revealed that Flegel was still alive. She is the last surviving female witness to have been inside the bunker. Traudl Junge — Hitler’s secretary, whose memoirs provided the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated film “Downfall,” and who gave numerous interviews to journalists and historians — died in 2002. The only other survivor, 88-year-old Rochus Misch, Hitler’s telephonist, refuses to talk.

Speaking at her nursing home, which has a picturesque river view, Flegel Sunday said that as the Russians drew closer to Berlin, those inside the bunker began to live “outside reality.”

In the middle of April 1945, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ propaganda chief, his wife, Magda, and their six children moved in. Flegel, whose original job had been to look after wounded S.S. soldiers, said she had got to know Magda Goebbels well. When it became clear that the situation was hopeless, she had tried to persuade her to send her children out of Berlin.

“She was a brilliant woman, on a far higher level than most people,” Flegel told the Guardian. “I wanted her to take at least one or two of them out of the city. But Mrs. Goebbels simply said, ‘I belong to my husband. And the children belong to me.’

“One evening she told me, ‘I have to go to the dentist and can’t be with them. I would like you to say goodnight to the children.’ I said, ‘Of course. I’ll do it. Don’t worry.’”

Flegel, then 33, sang the children to sleep. “The children were charming. They would have delighted anybody. They played with each other in the bunker,” she said. “They should have been allowed to live. They had nothing to do with what was going on around them. Not to spare the children was madness, dreadful.”

Hitler was fond of them, she added, and drank hot chocolate with them and allowed them to use his bathtub.

Magda Goebbels, meanwhile, tolerated her husband’s frequent and well-known infidelities. “She didn’t say anything. Nobody liked Goebbels. There were always people who hung around him, of course. They included many women who were young and pretty, who had an easier time of it than the rest of us. I don’t know the details. It was all gossip and trash.”

In her original testimony, Flegel also described how in the final days before his suicide on the afternoon of April 30, 1945, Hitler had begun to crumble before her eyes. “When parts of Berlin were already occupied, and the Russians were coming closer and closer to the center of the city, one could feel, almost physically, that the Third Reich was approaching its end,” her statement said.

“Hitler required no care; I was exclusively there for the care of the wounded. To be sure, he had aged greatly in the last days; he now had a lot of gray hair, and gave the impression of a man at least 15 to 20 years older. He shook a good deal; walking was difficult for him; his right side was still very much weakened as a result of the attempt on his life.”

Sunday Flegel said that before his wedding to Eva Braun on the night of April 28, Hitler “sank into himself.”

In her statement she gives a shrewish portrait of Braun, whom she dismisses as “a completely colorless personality.” She would not have been conspicuous among a crowd of stenographers, she said. Hitler’s decision to marry Braun made it “immediately clear to me that this signified the end of the Third Reich,” she added, claiming that the death of Hitler’s wolfhound Blondi “affected us more” than Braun’s suicide.

Sunday Flegel made little effort to hide her dislike of a woman who, she suggested, was little more than a Hitler groupie. “Oh dear God. She didn’t have any importance. Nobody expected much of her. She was just a young girl, really,” she said of Braun, who was only six months her junior. “She wasn’t really his wife.”

By April 29, the once mighty German Reich had been reduced to an area the size of a large football field, stretching between Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstrasse. Heavy fighting engulfed the city center. Radio communications with the outside world ceased. Shock troops brought news of the latest Russian positions.

At 10:30 p.m. that evening, Flegel was summoned with the rest of the medical team to line up and take their leave of the Führer. “He came out of the side room, shook everyone’s hand and said a few friendly words. And that was it,” she told the Guardian.

During her interrogation after the war she said: “At the end we were like a big family. The terrific dynamics of the fate which was unrolling held sway over all of us. We were Germany, and we were going through the end of the Third Reich and the war. Everything petty and external had fallen away.”

The next afternoon Hitler shot himself. Braun took prussic acid. “There were a few people who heard it [the shot]. Others didn’t,” Flegel said Sunday. “The remaining staff then had to decide whether to stay or not stay. I knew that Hitler was dead because there were suddenly more doctors in the bunker. I didn’t see his body. But it was taken up to the chancellery garden and burned.”

The next morning the survivors were told that they were released from their oath of loyalty and some, including Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, joined an ill-fated attempt to fight their way out to the west. Others shot themselves. Flegel said she had been convinced there was no way that Bormann, “an older man,” could have survived.

Flegel stayed and witnessed the deaths of the Goebbels family. Helmut Kunz, a dentist, had injected the children, ages 4 to 12, with poison, she said. Later the same evening their parents killed themselves.

Until Hitler’s death Flegel had not even considered survival, she said. “We simply didn’t think about it,” she told the Guardian. “We knew, naturally, who was in charge, and until he was gone, we couldn’t talk about it. The soldiers gradually left. Then they were suddenly gone. Many people tried to reach the U-Bahn in the hope that they could escape the Russians. Everybody was trying as bravely as they could to get out of this bedlam intact.”

On the morning of May 2, 60 years ago, Russians soldiers poked their head round the bunker’s entrance.

“By this stage there were only six or seven of us left in the bunker,” Flegel said. “We knew the Russians were approaching. A [nursing] sister phoned up and said, ‘The Russians are coming.’ Then they turned up in the Reichs Chancellery. It was a huge building complex. The Germans were transported away.”

Flegel said that the Russians she encountered had treated her “very humanely,” despite the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers elsewhere in the city. They had a “look ’round,” discovered the bunker’s underground supplies and then left, she said, advising her to lock her front door.

The Red Army allowed her to continue working as a nurse for the next few months, treating wounded Russians, until she ended up in the hands of the U.S. Strategic Services Unit, one of the precursors of the CIA. Flegel said her “interrogation” by the Americans in November 1945 was little more than an informal chat over dinner. “They invited us to have dinner with them and treated us to six different courses in order to soften us up. It didn’t work with me, though.”

Flegel’s testimony — including her conviction that Hitler was dead, an important statement for the victorious Allies — was deemed sufficiently important that it remained classified.

The interview went missing until 1981, when a Connecticut doctor and amateur historian stumbled on it in an Army archive and sent it to Richard Helms, the U.S. intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin and later CIA director. He wrote back saying: “It is probably one of the most accurate interviews obtained and has thus far never been quoted, as far as I know, in any of the massive books about Hitler’s Germany.”

Sunday Flegel was evasive about her own attitude to the Nazi era and her role in it. Asked why she had kept quiet for so long about her job as Hitler’s nurse, she replied: “After 1945 people started pointing fingers at each other. A great many people didn’t say anything. Later it was still a source of controversy. I didn’t discuss it.” She had never been tempted to write her memoirs, she said. “I didn’t want to make myself important.”

The film “Downfall,” which she watched in her nursing home, gave an accurate portrayal of the Third Reich and its final hours, she said. “They got a few small details wrong. But generally it was correct,” she said, adding: “I even recognized myself as a nursing sister.”

After the war, Flegel continued her career as a nurse, and also worked as a youth social worker, and traveled to remote regions including Ladakh and Tibet. She never married. At the age of 90 she visited the Crimea, where she had worked as a nurse during the war before her transfer to Berlin.

At 93, she is still mobile and lucid. She has few visitors. The only memento in her tiny room of her time at Hitler’s side is a Reichs Chancellery tablecloth.

Nobody knows exactly what was inside. Some believe the boxes contained gold looted by German troops throughout Europe and carried back to Germany. Others think that they contained documents showing where assets confiscated from Jewish victims were hidden in Swiss bank accounts.

The state company that controls the lake, Bundesforste AG, has signed a contract with Norman Scott, an American treasure hunter, who hopes to solve the mystery.

Later this month Scott will begin a detailed underwater survey of the 350-foot-deep lake, though there is profound official skepticism that there is anything left to find. “I really don’t know if there is anything down there, but we want to resolve the mystery once and for all,” Irwin Klissenbauer, a director of Bundesforste AG, told the Guardian Tuesday. “The aim at first is to measure the lake.” He added: “This is a beautiful area. You have heard of Loch Ness. For Austrians this has been a bit like Loch Ness. Lots of people come here. And whether there is gold down there or not, the mystery has been very good for tourism.”

Klissenbauer said that under the terms of the deal — which allows the U.S. team to dive for the next three years — any treasure found will be divided between the Americans and the Austrian state. “Obviously if they recover anything which has an identifiable owner, under Austrian law we have to give it back.”

This is not the first time explorers have tried to retrieve the lake’s legendary lost gold. In 1947 a U.S. Navy diver became entangled in Lake Toplitz’s many submerged logs and drowned. Then in 1959 a team financed by the German magazine Stern had more luck, retrieving 72 million pounds in forged sterling currency hidden in boxes and a printing press. The currency, it turned out, was part of a secret counterfeiting operation, Operation Bernhard, personally authorized by Adolf Hitler to weaken the British economy. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who had retreated to the Austrian Alps intending to fight a last-ditch guerrilla battle apparently dumped the currency to prevent its discovery.

In 1963 the Austrian government imposed a ban on explorations after another diver, led to the lake by an S.S. officer, drowned during an illegal dive. More recent expeditions have had mixed fortunes. In 1983 a German biologist accidentally discovered more forged British pounds, numerous Nazi-era rockets and missiles that had crashed into the lake, and a previously unknown worm. The last diving team to explore the lake, in 2000, had less luck. After a three-week search in an underwater diving capsule, they came away with nothing more than a box full of beer lids, apparently dumped in the lake as a practical joke.

Scott, whose previous expeditions have included a search for a steamer carrying gold coin that sank on the way to Panama, said he was confident he would find “something damn big. Until now nobody has explored the lake using high-tech equipment. We will be the first people to go to the right spot,” he told Swiss newsmagazine Facts.

Scott, 72, claims to have discovered fresh clues in archives in Berlin and Washington pointing him toward the gold, though he refuses to give details.

Some experts believe he may be right. They point out that the bottom of the lake is encrusted with a thick carpet of logs. Any treasure could be stuck in the mud underneath, they suggest. “There is a lot of wood down there. We don’t know yet whether it is possible to get through it,” Klissenbauer said. “You have to remember that the last lot who went down there with a mini-U-boat didn’t find anything.”