Nobelist Grass finally talks about Nazi service in letter
Warsaw, Poland – German novelist Günter Grass said in a letter to the mayor of his hometown of Gdansk that only in his old age has he found the “right formula” to talk about having served in the Waffen-SS during World War II.
“In the years and decades after the war, when the terrible scope of Waffen-SS crimes was revealed, I kept to myself this episode from my young years that was brief, but which weighed on me heavily,” Grass wrote in the letter, dated Aug. 20 and made public Tuesday. “However, I did not erase it from my memory. Only now, with age, I have found the right formula to talk about it in a wider perspective.”
Mayor Pawel Adamowicz had the letter read out by actor Jan Kiszkis at a news conference in Gdansk.
Earlier this month, Grass, 78, made the surprising confession that he served in the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the Nazis’ fanatical organization.
Grass, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize for literature, has long been respected as a moral authority in Poland and elsewhere. Poland was subjected to a brutal invasion and occupation by the Nazis, and Poles enthusiastically welcomed the fact that Grass for decades urged his fellow Germans to confront their nation’s past crimes.
SAN FRANCISCO
Sequoia-monument logging ruled illegal
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that a Bush administration plan to allow commercial logging inside the Giant Sequoia National Monument violates environmental laws.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer sided with environmental groups that sued the U.S. Forest Service over its plans for managing the 328,000-acre preserve, home to two-thirds of the world’s largest trees.
Breyer had already issued a preliminary injunction, in September 2005, to halt further logging in the national monument created by President Clinton in 2000.
In the lawsuit filed last year, the Sierra Club and other conservation groups said the management plan for the reserve in the southern Sierra Nevada range was a scientifically suspect strategy that was intended to satisfy timber interests under the guise of wildfire prevention.
COLUMBIA, S.C.
Death penalty to be sought in slaying
A prosecutor said Tuesday that he will seek the death penalty for a Tennessee man charged in the slaying of a Clemson University student who was strangled with a bikini top.
Jerry “Buck” Inman, a convicted sex offender, was arrested in June in Dandridge, Tenn., and charged with murder, rape and kidnapping in the death of 20-year-old Tiffany Marie Souers.
“We have completed our review of the case and have spoken with both law enforcement and the Souers family,” prosecutor Bob Ariail said. “We are all in agreement that this is the proper course for us to take.”
Souers, of Ladue, Mo., was found dead in her off-campus apartment on May 26 with the bikini top still around her neck, investigators said.
DETROIT
Teachers picket amid tough contract talks
Thousands of Detroit teachers picketed Tuesday amid tense contract negotiations and fears of a strike that could delay the start of school.
Chanting “No contract, no work” and wearing placards with slogans such as “Hands Off My Benefits,” members of the Detroit Federation of Teachers marched around the city’s landmark Fisher Building next door to the school district’s headquarters. The district wants $105 million in concessions from its unions.
MADRID, Spain
Russian honored for solving brain-twister
A reclusive Russian genius won the Fields Medal, the math world’s highest honor, Tuesday for work toward resolving a 100-year-old brain-twister about three-dimensional space.
But he shunned the ceremony and stayed out of the spotlight.
Grigory Perelman, a 40-year- old native of St. Petersburg, Russia, was cited for solving the Poincare conjecture, a conundrum concerning the nature of three-dimensional space that experts say might help determine the shape of the universe.
JERUSALEM
Israeli leader faces sex-harassment probe
Israeli President Moshe Katsav will face questioning in a sexual-harassment investigation, police said Tuesday after seizing computers and documents in a late-night raid on his official residence.
The probe marked the latest in a string of scandals involving top officials and shocked the country at a time of growing malaise following the recent war in Lebanon and discontent with the nation’s leaders.
At least two former female employees have accused Katsav of harassing them, police said. One of the women reportedly also alleged that Katsav received money for granting pardons. Katsav has denied wrongdoing.
Police plan to question Katsav at his residence today, a police spokesman said.
BEIRUT
Tape shows oil slick’s destruction of sea life
An oil slick caused by Israeli bombing has begun sinking to the floor of the Mediterranean, blanketing marine life with sludge, according to a Greenpeace video that shows dead fish along the sea bottom.
The scuba diver’s videotape, released Tuesday by Greenpeace, graphically details some of the environmental destruction a month after the oil spill began sinking, creating what has been called Lebanon’s worst-ever environmental disaster.
The U.N. has said the spill could take as long as a year to clean up and cost $64 million.
