"How China and India Sabotaged the UN Climate Summit"

"The public was kept almost completely in the dark about the hectic crisis meeting that took place behind closed doors in Copenhagen and dragged on for 10 hours. The Chinese are said to have openly warned their Danish hosts against indiscretions.

Now, for the first time, SPIEGEL is in a position to reconstruct the decisive hour-and-a-half meeting on that fateful Friday. Audio recordings of historical significance, in the form of two sound files that total 1.2 gigabytes in size and that were created by accident, serve as the basis for the analysis. The Copenhagen protocol shows how the meeting Gordon Brown called 'the most important conference since the Second World War' ended in a diplomatic zero. As if viewed through a magnifying glass, the contours of a new political world order become visible, one shaped by the new self-confidence of the Asians and the powerlessness of the West."

Tobias Rapp, Christian Schwägerl, and Gerald Traufetter report for Der Spiegel May 5, 2010 (in English).