European nations dispatch planes to evacuate citizens from hantavirus-hit cruise ship

HENDAYE, Franco-Spanish Frontier, April 6.—(UP)—Loyalist Spain, ripped in half by the insurgents' war machine, made a frantic last-minute appeal to Britain and France today for arms and munitions to answer the enemy's ultimatum for an unconditional surrender. Catalonia, seat of the loyalist government, struggled in a strangulation grip as insurgent armies completely circled it by land and left only the Mediterranean—dotted with insurgent warships—as a chance of escape. The Insurgent Generalissimo Francisco Franco threatened to blast Barcelona from the map unless there was a complete loyalist surrender, frontier dispatches said. To London and Paris went urgent loyalist notes, asking for abolition of the International Non Intervention committee with its "intolerable injustices" to permit arms and munitions shipments to the loyalist armies. Talk of a surrender, the loyalists said, was "fantastic." To the south of his 165-mile front Franco's siege guns along the Ebro watershed ripped up the coastal highway and railroad to slice the CONTINUED on page three