World in brief

First slabs laid at long-delayed German Holocaust memorial

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

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

"It's been a long road," writer Lea Rosh, who proposed the project in 1988, said as red-and-white tape marking off sections of the construction site fluttered in the wind.

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 by American architect Peter Eisenman was approved in 1999.

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

Backers once penciled in a Jan. 27, 2004, completion date to coincide with the 59th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. Latest plans call for completion by May 8, 2005 - 60 years after Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II.

MEXICO CITY - Mexican troops arrested one of the country's most-wanted drug-traffic suspects, Armando Valencia, along with seven top figures in his ring.

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 Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha said the group might have accounted for a third of the drugs smuggled from Mexico to the United States.

Officials said Valencia was spotted Friday at a Sanborns restaurant in Zapopan, near Guadalajara in north-central Mexico. Troops followed him to a bar a few miles south in the town of Tlajomulco, where he and seven alleged aides were arrested.

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

Raffarin urged the opposition not to exploit the crisis for political ends and called on the public to do a better job looking after the country's elderly.

"It's time for solidarity, not a polemic," the prime minister said 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.

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