Senate Speaker Crin Antonescu, who will serve as interim president now that Basescu has been effectively suspended, said a popular referendum on Basescu's fate would be held July 29. Basescu was impeached in 2007 but survived a referendum.
- AP
Hitler gave break to Jewish war vet
BERLIN - A Jewish World War I veteran was allegedly spared - for a while, at least - from Nazi persecution thanks to a letter that claimed Adolf Hitler wanted him protected, a German Jewish newspaper reported.
The Nazi leader ordered the genocide of all Europe's Jews but apparently wanted Ernst Hess, a judge, to be left alone because they had served in the same WWI unit and Hess had briefly been his commanding officer, said historian Susanne Mauss, who discovered the letter. It was signed by a senior member of the SS paramilitary organization and dated Aug. 19, 1940.
"It was a wonderful chance find," she said Friday. "There had always been rumors but this was the first written reference to a protection by Hitler." In an article in the Berlin quarterly Jewish Voice From Germany, Mauss wrote that Hess eventually lost his special protection, and was made to work as a forced laborer from 1943 until the end of the war in 1945.
After the war he turned down an offer to return to the judiciary and instead worked for the federal railways. He died in 1983. His sister Berta was murdered at Auschwitz.
- AP
7 more terror arrests in Britain
LONDON - Seven men have been arrested on suspicion of terrorist offenses in Britain after a routine vehicle search turned up firearms and weapons, police said Friday.
The arrests, which took place this week in South Yorkshire in northern England, were announced one day after officers in London detained six other terror suspects using stun guns and smoke grenades in early-morning swoops, including one on a home close to London's Olympic Park.
Police insist that the 13 arrests in recent days did not involve threats to the Olympics, set to begin in three weeks, but the counterterror sweeps - and a false alarm Thursday that involved a bus filled with passengers - have raised anxiety in the run-up to the Games. - AP
