Free Republic

Police in the western German city of Aachen arrested five people, at least three of them foreign citizens, on Tuesday in an operation linked to the militant attacks last Friday in Paris that killed 129 people. A special police response unit overpowered two women and one man outside a job centre in Alsdorf, a small town near Aachen close to Germany's border with Belgium and the Netherlands. "After the terror attacks last Friday in Paris and the search for the perpetrators and the people pulling the strings, police in Aachen got a lead to suspicious individuals in Alsdorf," a police...

Chicago Tribune CHICAGO - A Chicago art collector has agreed to pay $6.5 million to settle a claim that a Picasso oil painting she bought in 1975 was looted by the Nazis. Marilynn Alsdorf, who acquired Picasso's "Femme en blanc" ("Woman in White") from New York art dealer Stephen Hahn for $357,000, will pay the sum to Californian Thomas Bennigson, whose grandmother owned the painting before it was confiscated during the Holocaust. Though Alsdorf has fought Bennigson's claim since 2002, when he sued for $10 million in California state court, she agreed to settle after attorneys for both parties met...