The world at a glance . . . Europe

Paris

Crackdown on illegal downloads: France has created a government agency to track and punish people who download music and films without paying for them. Anyone caught pirating files a third time will have his or her Internet service cut off for up to a year. The crackdown is the brainchild of Culture Minister Christine Albanel, who said France had to act to curb some of the worst Internet piracy in the Western world. Sales of CDs and DVDs have dropped 60 percent in France over the past six years, as consumers simply download music and videos for free on Napster-style sites. Consumer advocates opposed the new law, saying innocent people could be punished if hackers use their IP addresses for downloading.

Munich

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

Demjanjuk in prison: Alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk was taken to a prison in Germany this week after being deported from the U.S. Demjanjuk, 89, has always denied accusations that he was a concentration camp guard during World War II. He settled in the U.S. as a refugee after the war and spent decades working at an auto plant in Cleveland. In 1988, he was sentenced to death in Israel, where Holocaust survivors identified him as “Ivan the Terrible,” a guard at the Treblinka death camp. That verdict was later overturned, though, and Demjanjuk returned to the U.S. Last March, German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant accusing him of overseeing the slaughter of 29,000 people as a guard in the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.