Nation & World Digest

Taco Bell founder dies

LOS ANGELES — Glen W. Bell, Jr., the innovator and entrepreneur who tapped an unsated hunger for Mexican fare as Americans discovered fast food, creating Taco Tia, El Taco and, in 1962, his signature Taco Bell, has died. He was 86.

Bell, who had Parkinson’s disease since 1985, died Sunday at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, north of San Diego, the company announced. No cause of death was given.

“We changed the eating habits of an entire nation,” Bell said in his 1999 biography, “Taco Titan: The Glen Bell Story.”

Pope’s shooter released

NKARA, Turkey — The Turkish man who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 was released from prison on Monday after more than 29 years behind bars.

Mehmet Ali Agca waved to journalists as he left the prison in a white sedan in a convoy of several vehicles. He was taken to a military hospital to be assessed for compulsory military service. A 2006 military hospital report said he is not fit for military service because of a “severe anti-social personality disorder.”

There have been long-standing questions about the 52-year-old Agca’s mental health based on his frequent outbursts and claims that he was the Messiah.

In a statement Monday, distributed by his lawyer outside the prison in Sincan on the outskirts of Ankara, the Turkish capital, he raved again: “I proclaim the end of the world. All the world will be destroyed in this century. Every human being will die in this century. ... I am the Christ eternal.”

Agca is undergoing medical examination at a psychatry department of the military hospital, GATA, said a lawyer, Melahat Uzunoglu.

Terrorist sentenced

BRAMPTON, Ontario — A Canadian judge on Monday sentenced the ringleader of a homegrown terrorist plot to set off truck bombs in Ontario to life in prison.

Zakaria Amara, 24, pleaded guilty in October. He acknowledged being a leader of the so-called Toronto 18 plot to set off bombs outside Toronto’s Stock Exchange, a building housing Canada’s spy agency and a military base. The goal was to scare Canada into removing its troops from Afghanistan.

The 2006 arrests of Amara and 17 others made international headlines and heightened fears in a country where many people thought they were relatively immune from terrorist strikes.

Judge Bruce Durno said Monday that the attack would have been the most horrific crime in Canada’s history if the plot been successful.

“What this case revealed was spine-chilling,” Duro said. “The potential for loss of life existed on a scale never before seen in Canada.”

Man questioned in deaths

BELLVILLE, Texas — Authorities working to determine what spurred a flurry of gunshots that left five people dead in southeast Texas are questioning a 20-year-old man who lived with the victims in the isolated house surrounded by pastureland.

Police said Monday the victims of the weekend bloodshed all lived in the single-story brick home in Bellville, a town of about 4,000 people located 55 miles northwest of Houston.

Those found inside the house were identified as George T. Washington, 69; his wife, Debra Washington, 54; Kiana Shree Thearse, 25; and Khalilah Masse-Chambers, about 3. A man found in the thick expanse of woods behind the house was identified as Cedric Thomas, 19.

Officials said they haven’t determined the victims’ relationship, but a relative of Debra Washington said both Thearse and the 20-year-old man in custody were Debra Washington’s children.

Housing-bias settlement

HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — More than 40 years after her family was forced from their home because they were black, Sallie Sanders received the keys to a new house built to settle one of the longest-running cases of housing discrimination in the United States.

“My parents would be ecstatic that their offspring would be able to enjoy the things they couldn’t,” the 60-year-old Sanders said Monday before a ceremony to celebrate the milestone on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Hamtramck agreed in 1980 to develop 200 family housing units to make up for violating the civil rights of blacks whose neighborhoods were targeted by white officials to make way for urban- renewal projects in the 1960s.

Hamtramck still hasn’t met that goal, although officials predict it will by next year. The city of 23,000 is now extremely diverse, with immigrants from the Middle East, Africa and Bangladesh in the historically Polish community.

Combined dispatches