WORLD & NATION DIGEST || Review: No misconduct in approval of waterboarding

Review: No misconduct in approval of waterboarding

WASHINGTON — Justice Department lawyers showed “poor judgment” but did not commit professional misconduct when they authorized CIA interrogators to use waterboarding and other harsh tactics at the height of the U.S. war on terrorism, an internal review released Friday found.

The decision closes the book on one of the major lingering investigations into the counterterrorism policies of George W. Bush’s administration. President Barack Obama campaigned on abolishing the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding and other tactics that he called torture, but he left open the question of whether anyone would be punished for authorizing such methods.

Mosque minaret collapses in Morocco, killing 36

RABAT, Morocco — A minaret collapsed during Friday prayers — killing 36 people and injuring 71 — at a crowded mosque in the old town of the historic Moroccan city of Meknes, the official MAP news agency said.

Officials blamed the accident on heavy rain that had weakened the minaret at the Bab Berdieyinne Mosque, according to a statement released by the Interior Ministry.

King Mohammed VI sent the interior minister and religious affairs minister to Meknes, a UNESCO heritage city and one of Morocco’s four imperial cities, some 62 miles east of the capital Rabat.

Haiti plans to appropriate land to aid quake victims

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive says the Haitian government will appropriate land to build temporary camps for earthquake victims. The decision, announced in an interview with The Associated Press, is potentially explosive in a country where a small elite owns most of the land in and around the capital.

That elite, a traditionally corrupting force in Haitian politics, has the power to bring down the government.

The government owns some land but not enough, Bellerive said in an interview Thursday, meaning he has no choice but to take over private terrain.

Plane crash exposes gap in security measures

GEORGETOWN, Texas — After Sept. 11, cockpit doors were sealed, air marshals were added, and airport searches became more aggressive, all to make sure an airliner could never again be used as a weapon. Yet little has been done to guard against attacks with smaller planes.

That point was driven home with chilling force Thursday when a Texas man with a grudge against the IRS crashed his single-engine plane into an office building in a fiery suicide attack. One person inside the building was also killed.

“It’s a big gap,” said R. William Johnstone, an aviation security consultant and former staff member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. “It wouldn’t take much, even a minor incident involving two simultaneously attacking planes, to inflict enough damage to set off alarm bells and do some serious harm to the economy and national psyche.”

Experts in survey: Using Internet makes us smarter

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Google and other Internet sites aren’t making us stupid: They’re making us smarter, according to an overwhelming majority of 895 experts surveyed by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University.

“Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge,” study co-author Janna Anderson said in a statement Friday.

Anderson and Lee Rainie, director of the Pew project, conducted the survey in response to author Nicholas Carr’s July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly cover story, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

NJ senator has treatable lymphoma of stomach

PATERSON, N.J. — Sen. Frank Lautenberg, at 86 the nation’s second-oldest U.S. senator, has curable lymphoma of the stomach, his office said Friday.

Doctors for the Democrat found B-cell lymphoma that will require treatment over the next few months, spokesman Caley Gray said in a news release. He will not be resigning, Gray said.

Independent doctors agree that Lautenberg’s type of lymphoma is usually treatable.

Lautenberg will undergo six to eight chemotherapy treatments and should make a “full and complete recovery,” said Dr. James Holland of New York City’s Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Combined dispatches