French court jails attacker of Jewish war memorial

A court in the eastern French town of Verdun has sentenced a 22-year-old man to two years in jail for defacing a Jewish World War I memorial with neo-Nazi graffiti. In May of this year, the memorial dedicated to French Jews who fought and died in the war, was spray-painted in black with swastikas and slogans such as "Heil Hitler." French President Jacques Chirac described the attack as an "offence against the entire nation." The jail sentence is the most severe for this kind of action in France since the 1997 condemnation of four skinheads who had desecrated a Jewish cemetery in 1990.