Paris
Madonna sued: The far-right National Front party is suing Madonna for displaying a picture of its leader, Marine Le Pen, with a swastika on her forehead. The picture was part of a video playing on a giant screen as Madonna sang “Nobody Knows Me” at a Paris concert last week. The Le Pen image flashed right before an image of Hitler; the video also featured photos of the pope and Sarah Palin. Le Pen, who came in third in France’s presidential race on an anti-immigrant platform, has distanced the party from the views of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Nazi apologist. Le Pen said she had warned Madonna that playing the video in France would draw a lawsuit but added, “It’s understandable when aging singers who need publicity go to such extremes.”
Budapest
Nazi suspect nabbed: A 97-year-old suspected Nazi war criminal was discovered this week living under his own name in a Budapest apartment. Acting on a tip from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the British tabloid The Sun tracked down Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary and surprised him in his underwear. Hungarian authorities subsequently placed him under house arrest. The Hungarian ex-policeman is accused of overseeing the deportation of 15,700 Jews from Kassa, Hungary (now Kosice, Slovakia), and was sentenced to death in absentia in 1948. He was discovered in Canada in 1997 but fled before he could be deported. Some Hungarian experts say prosecuting Csatary will have little impact. “Csatary was a small fish,” said historian Laszlo Karsai. “The money spent hunting down people like him would be better spent fighting the propaganda of those who so energetically deny the Holocaust today.”
Burgas, Bulgaria
Israeli bus bombed: At least four Israelis were killed and many injured when a bomb blew up a tourist bus at Burgas airport. The Israelis, mostly youths, had just arrived on a flight from Tel Aviv and were apparently boarding the bus to go to their hotel in the Black Sea city. The attack came on the 18th anniversary of an attack on a Jewish center in Argentina, which killed 85 people and is widely believed to have been carried out, under Iran’s direction, by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. “Iran is responsible for the terror attack in Bulgaria,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We will have a strong response against Iranian terror.”
