German retailer to pay Jews for seized land

A German retail giant agreed Friday to pay $117.2 million for a plot of land in the heart of Berlin that a Jewish family lost under the Nazis, resolving one of the city's longest-running World War II-era compensation disputes.

Under the agreement, KarstadtQuelle also will retract competing claims it had with heirs of the Wertheim family on 50 other properties throughout Berlin and its surrounding state of Brandenburg, clearing the way for those plots to be restituted.

The money will flow through the Jewish Claims Conference, which said it will use an unspecified amount of the income in programs for Holocaust victims. The rest will go to heirs of the Wertheim family.

The Wertheims once ran a grand department store there. It was seized by the Nazis as part of Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic "Aryanization" laws.

N'Djamena, Chad

Displaced facing food crisis, U.N. says

Rising violence spilling across the border from Darfur is forcing more people from their homes in eastern Chad, and tens of thousands of the displaced are running out of food, the World Food Program said Friday.

The U.N. food agency said it had planned to feed 50,000 Chadians in the parched scrubland region, but ethnic conflict has displaced an additional 80,000 who need urgent assistance.

They require an additional 7,500 metric tons of food at a cost of $7.5 million. The agency faces a race against time, as food must be delivered before the rainy season starts in June, making roads impassable.

Manila, Philippines

Parents laud captors of children on bus

The parents of 26 children held hostage aboard a bus by two men demanding better education for the youngsters have refused to press charges, praising the captors as champions of the poor.

Authorities, unmoved by the campaign on behalf of Armando "Jun" Ducat Jr. and his accomplice, prepared preliminary charges Friday of illegal detention and possession of firearms and explosives, punishable by 40 years in prison. The president denounced the publicity stunt as "prank terrorism."

London

Exile questioned over ex-spy's death

A self-exiled Russian billionaire and Kremlin opponent said Friday he had been questioned on behalf of a Russian prosecutor investigating the poisoning death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

Tycoon Boris Berezovsky said a Metropolitan Police officer put questions to him on behalf of the Russian state prosecutor at a central London police station, with a Russian official present.

A team of Russian investigators arrived in London this week for discussions with British police about cooperation with their inquiry into the death of Litvinenko, a friend and associate of Berezovsky. Litvinenko died Nov. 23 after being exposed to radioactive polonium-210 in London.

Also

A Vietnamese court sentenced a dissident Catholic priest to eight years in prison for anti-government activities after a dramatic trial Friday in which the defendant shouted denunciations of the ruling Communist Party. A judge at Thua Thien Hue Provincial People's Court in central Vietnam sentenced Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly, 60, on charges of disseminating anti-government documents and communicating with pro-democracy activists overseas.

Seattle Times news services