STRASBOURG, France: A 17th-century silver cross taken by a US medic from a French church during World War I was returned by his granddaughter over the weekend, the town’s mayor said yesterday.
Alfred Hayes, who served at a makeshift hospital at the church in Neuvilly-en-Argonne in eastern France, had taken the 30-centimetre (12-inch) cross with him when he left France in October 1918.
His granddaughter Patricia Carson came to France from Kansas and returned the cross on Sunday, the town’s mayor Alain Jeannesson, said, adding that he was agreeably “surprised” by the gesture.
He said the cross was the sole object to have disappeared from the church during the war.
Merkel’s election manifesto draws fire
BERLIN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted yesterday she would not raise taxes or take on new debt to finance tens of billions in election pledges that even the business wing of her party said contradict the austerity champion’s promise of budget discipline.
In a campaign speech three months before the election, Merkel pledged that “we must do everything to promote growth and create jobs and refrain from doing anything which endangers this. That’s why we are so vehemently against ... tax increases.”
If re-elected on September 22, she said, her conservative government would also seek to “take on no new debt, and ... start repaying our debt. That would be the first time in decades, and that’s what we want.”
Two ETA suspects arrested in France
MADRID: French and Spanish police arrested two suspected members of the armed Basque pro-independence group ETA in southwestern France yesterday, the Spanish government said.
Both suspects — Joaquin Aranalde, born 1946 and Benat Atorrasagasti, born 1976 — were listed on European arrest warrants for belonging to an “armed or terrorist group”, the Spanish Interior Ministry said in a statement.
They were detained by French police in joint operations in which Spanish security forces took part, the government said. Agencies
