The Oka principle, lifting of holomorphic maps and removability of intersections

The paper is related to the author's talk at the Hayama Symposium in Complex Analysis in December 2000. In section 1 we survey results on the Oka principle for sections of holomorphic submersions over Stein manifolds. In section 2 we apply these results to the lifting problem for holomorphic mappings from Stein manifolds, and in section 3 we apply them to the problem of removability of intersections of holomorphic maps from Stein manifolds with closed complex subvarieties of the target space.