STOP PRESS

Evening Star, Issue 25425, 5 March 1945, Page 8

STOP PRESS

ARUESTKD IX VESTRY

Admitting that ho liad been abNt?nt for 16G days, James Erskino Allen alias Cooper, a labourer (.'!!), was charged with escaping from the military defaulters' camp ut Whitanui, near Foxton. The accused, who pleaded •guilty, was arrested in the vestry of a local church on Eiiday evening when iil-nut to be married. The police

said that a regulutien was now in force by which such persons had to serve an extra period of detention, equal to the period of escape. The'magistrate -(Mr Lawry) said whether the accused would serve •HiG days extra or only rf2—the time he had been at TLerty alftcr the passing of thr.- regulation—would depend on a similar case in which decision- had yet to be given. A sentence of three months' . im-pn.-.onment was imposed, the point ahou-l extra detention being reserved until a decision is given in iJie other case.—Palmerston North Press Association. DRKSDEX WIPED OUT.

LO-XDOX, March 4. Dresden was completely wiped out by the massive Allied air blows of February 14 and 15. Xot a single building remains. Ten thousand citizens were buried beneath the ruins, reports the German . Xews Agency in what Renter describes ay the most revealing admission of devastation ever to pass the German censorship.-The Xews Agency's war correspondent writes: "Dresden on the night of February 15 included ,000.000 refugees from the east. Raging fires which spread irresistibly through the narrow streets killed a great many from sheer lack of oxygen. Even identification of the victims was hopeless. Two more British fonnatiens cppeaied on the blood-red horizon after midnight and spread further devastation, adding to the holocaust. The town area is devoid of human life. The buildings are beyond reconstruction. 'Dresden has been wiped from the map of Europe." LE'RLIX HEARS THE GUXS. LOXDOX, March 4.—Renter's Moscow correspondent says the seen lit.,- blackout on the central Oder, front continues, but the tliunder of the suns can be heard in .Herlin. The German'High C.onv m.ind is expecting any day a fresh .Soviet blow against Berlin. " Let tluun make no mistake about it. When the blow comes it ivill.be u st.: one,'' lie bays.'"