New storm, Gustav, strengthens quickly

PORT-AU-PRINCE - Haitians were told to prepare for evacuations as Tropical Storm Gustav formed quickly yesterday in the Caribbean on a path to hit the country's denuded southern coast as a hurricane before moving on to Cuba, the Bahamas, and Florida. Reports yesterday afternoon from an Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft indicated that top sustained winds had already reached nearly 60 miles per hour as Gustav moved northwest, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. Floods and landslides were possible across Haiti's southern peninsula, and the forecasts suggested the eye could pass very closely to Port-au-Prince, home to nearly 3 million people. (AP)

CHAMONIX - French police found the bodies of eight climbers yesterday after they went missing in an avalanche near Mont Blanc, officials said. The bodies were buried beneath as much as 165 feet of ice and the climbers - four Germans, three Swiss, and an Austrian - most likely had fallen into a deep crevasse, said Regis Lavergne, commander of the High Mountain Gendarmes based in Chamonix. A helicopter was able to locate them after it picked up the signal of a homing device the climbers were wearing, Lavergne said. Because the area is prone to avalanches, rescuers will not attempt to recover the bodies, which are expected to resurface in "a few weeks or several years" because of the movement or melting of the glaciers, he said. (AP)

MAILLE - President Nicolas Sarkozy paid homage yesterday to victims of a 1944 Nazi massacre that was long forgotten by the history books, overshadowed by another event the same day: the liberation of Paris. On Aug. 25, 1944, as the Allies liberated the French capital from the Nazis, retreating German troops massacred 124 of the 500 townspeople in the village of Maille in the Loire Valley, 160 miles to the southwest. Sarkozy said that by visiting the site he hoped to "repair an injustice." "By ignoring the tragedy in Maille for so long, by remaining indifferent to the pain of the survivors, by letting the memory of the victims be erased, France committed a moral mistake," Sarkozy said. The massacre of townspeople and the razing of the village were believed to be retaliation for Resistance action in the region, according to local archives. Forty-four children were among the dead, the youngest just 4 months old. (AP)

DAMASCUS - Indirect peace talks between Syria and Israel are focused on the thorny issue of how much Syrian territory is under Israeli occupation, Walid al-Moualem, Syria's foreign minister, said yesterday. In the first official comment on the content of the talks, which began in May under Turkish mediation, Moualem said the two sides were seeking agreement on land Syria controlled before Israel captured the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war. "We feel that the two sides are serious about solving the lingering issues that are being discussed. Foremost is determination of the June 4, 1967, line," Moualem said after meeting his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner. (Reuters)