  I report on recent results obtained within the Hamiltonian approach to QCD in
Coulomb gauge. By relating the Gribov confinement scenario to the center vortex
picture of confinement it is shown that the Coulomb string tension is tied to
the spatial string tension. For the quark sector a vacuum wave functional is
used which results in variational equations which are free of ultraviolet
divergences. The variational approach is extended to finite temperatures by
compactifying a spatial dimension. For the chiral and deconfinement phase
transition pseudo-critical temperatures of 170 MeV and 198 MeV, respectively,
are obtained.
