July 3
[ 2007-07-03 08:00 ]
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| Barbie was known as the
Butcher of Lyon |
| 1987: Nazi war criminal gets life |
England have
The former Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie, has been sentenced to life
imprisonment for crimes against humanity.
Nine jurors and three judges found Barbie guilty of the 341 separate
charges that were brought against him at the court in Lyon.
The 73-year-old was accused of deporting 842 people - mainly Jews - to
concentration camps in Germany during the Second World War.
In one incident 44 children were rounded up from a farmhouse east of
Lyon, at Izieu, and sent to their deaths.
A total of 373 of the people transported under Barbie's command died.
Surviving relatives of the victims filled the courtroom and heard
Barbie's last-minute plea of innocence.
"Barbie has been promoted to the rank of an expiatory victim, a
scapegoat so that France can try and shed its own responsibility", argued
defence lawyer, Jacques Verges.
Coverage of the trial in France has been exhaustive and crowds of
people waited outside the court to hear the judgement.
The editor of Le Monde newspaper, Andre Fontaine, said: "It's a time in
France where people are more and more conscious of the necessity of
knowing something about history and especially about recent history."
The man they call the Butcher of Lyon has already been condemned to
death twice for his war crimes. Both of these sentences lapsed as Barbie
was living under an assumed name in Bolivia.
He was found by barrister
Serge Klarsfeld in 1972, but it was not until over 10 years later, in
1983, that the Bolivian government agreed to extradite him.
Barbie's trial began on 11 May this year with Mr Klarsfeld as chief
prosecutor.
It took the judges and jury six-and-a-half hours to reach their final
verdict after they retired at 0530 BST (0430 GMT) today. |
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| Jim Morrison was found
dead in a bath in an apartment in Paris |
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1971: Doors' singer Jim Morrison found
dead | Artificially 1969:
The Jim Morrison,
the lead singer of American rock group The Doors has died in Paris aged
27.
He was found in a bathtub at his apartment at 17 Rue
Beautraillis by his girlfriend, Pamela Courson.
A doctor's report stated the cause of death was heart failure
aggravated by heavy drinking.
The rest of the band - keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie
Krieger and drummer John Densmore - are currently in the United States.
Morrison, also known as the Lizard King, was born in Florida in 1943,
the son of a US Navy admiral.
He formed The Doors with Ray Manzarek in 1965 in Los Angeles.
Morrison had come up with the name after reading Aldous Huxley's
account of drug experiences, The Doors Of Perception.
The group became the first popular "new wave" band. Their first album,
The Doors, released by Elektra Records in 1967, was a number one hit in
the US, though only just scraped into the British charts.
Their following albums, Strange Days and Waiting For The Sun, provided
further American hits and, in Hello I love You, a British number 15.
Arrested for lewd behaviour
But with its ever growing fame, the band lost some of its credibility
in the rock underground.
Morrison's behaviour, fuelled by drink and drugs, became more
outrageous and in 1969 he was arrested for "indecent exposure, lewd
conduct and public intoxication" after a concert in Miami's Dinner Key
auditorium.
Though some of the charges were later dropped, the scandal made it hard
for the band to perform live for some time.
Morrison used the crisis as a spur to creativity and produced one of
the group's most critically acclaimed albums, Morrison Hotel, in 1970.
Over the past year he has made clear he wanted to drop music altogether
to become a writer.
He has already published two volumes of poetry, The Lords and The New
Creatures, and planned to begin a literary career once his contractual
obligations to Elektra were fulfilled. |
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| Vocabulary:
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barrister : a lawyer admitted to plead at the bar
in the superior
courts（律師；法律顧問）
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