Holocaust memorial finally under way

Germany’s national Holocaust memorial took shape Saturday after years of delay as its U.S. architect, Peter Eisenman, above, presented the first of 2,700 stark charcoal-gray concrete slabs that will make up the monument near the Brandenburg Gate.

Backers expressed relief that the memorial was finally getting under way in earnest on a sandy site in the capital’s revived center where the Berlin Wall ran before Germany reunited in 1990.

German politicians rallied behind the project in the late 1990s after decades of debate over how Germany should remember Holocaust victims, but wrangling over details and the contract for making the slabs persisted even after the final design was approved in 1999.

The planned monument — 2,700 concrete slabs on a plot the size of two football fields — commemorates the more than 6 million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis.

Germany

71 detained at march for Hitler deputy Hess

German police detained 71 neo-Nazis marching Saturday in the Bavarian town where Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess was buried after his 1987 suicide.

Police said they deployed some 1,000 officers to prevent trouble at the march, which drew 2,600 neo-Nazis to Wunsiedel.

Demonstrators were detained for displaying outlawed Nazi symbols like the swastika or for carrying weapons such as knives, tear gas spray and a baseball bat, police spokesman Klaus Bernhardt said.

All 71 were released without charges by Saturday evening, by which time marchers dispersed without incident, he said. Police said they also confiscated neo-Nazi music CDs from some marchers.

The Wunsiedel cemetery where Hess was buried in the family plot was sealed off by police Saturday.

Hess hanged himself at age 93 in Spandau Prison in the former West Berlin on Aug. 17, 1987, after nearly 41 years as a prisoner.

Mexico City

Most-wanted suspect in drug ring arrested

Mexican troops arrested one of the country’s most-wanted drug-traffic suspects, Armando Valencia, along with seven top figures in his ring, officials announced Saturday.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said Valencia headed one of the top four drug-smuggling operations in Mexico, a key link between Colombian smugglers and the Southwestern U.S. border.

Mexican Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha told a news conference that the group may have accounted for a third of the drugs smuggled from Mexico to the United States.

Officials said that one of Valencia’s main smuggling routes was through the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo.

Defense Secretary Ricardo Vega Garcia said it was “a very cruel cartel with a lot of killings,” though he did not list specific incidents.

Paris

Prime minister defends heat wave response

With as many as 3,000 people, mostly elderly, killed in France from Europe’s withering heat wave, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, above right, toured a retirement home on Saturday and defended his government’s response amid opposition criticism.

“It’s time for solidarity, not a polemic,” the prime minister told reporters during a visit to a retirement home in the town of Fleury-sur-Ouche in the eastern Burgundy region.

The effects of the heat wave that scorched much of Europe in recent weeks eased Saturday, with temperatures returning closer to normal across much of the continent. But lingering torrid weather in parts of Italy and Spain continued to fan forest fires.

Raffarin’s center-right government has faced criticism for allegedly reacting too slowly to the record hot spell in France starting Aug. 7. Doctors cited heat stroke and dehydration among the causes of death.

Health ministry officials said final, complete figures on the death toll weren’t expected until at least next week.

London

U.S. officials requested palace for embassy

British royal officials rejected a request from American diplomats to move the U.S. Embassy in London into Kensington Palace, the former home of Princess Diana, a newspaper reported today.

The Sunday Telegraph said American officials approached representatives of Queen Elizabeth II about using the palace because they considered the embassy’s current location in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, to be vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

Both sites are in central London but the palace, in Kensington Gardens, is set well back from the street and can only be approached by a guarded cul-de-sac.

The newspaper said the request was considered seriously by royal officials but eventually rejected, largely because the palace is still home to royal tenants, including Princess Michael of Kent.