World in brief Britain plans e-mail terror notices
Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence agency plans to send out e-mail terror alerts to the public, pioneering an effort to use the Internet to warn of heightened risk.
Anyone who wants to track the perceived level of threat to Britain – which has been set at “severe,” the second-highest rating, since Aug. 14 – can receive e-mail updates under the new MI5 scheme.
The United States and France have similar alert systems but do not offer any kind of official e-mail service.
The direct-to-the-public alerts signal a growing openness by Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, whose very existence was once a state secret.
JERUSALEM
Former U.S. imam arrested in Israel
Israel arrested the former imam of Ohio’s largest mosque after he was deported from the United States last week, the Shin Bet internal security service said Tuesday, ending a four-day mystery about his whereabouts.
Fawaz Damra, 46, was arrested because of his ties to Islamic Jihad, a militant Palestinian group classified by Israel and the U.S. as a terrorist organization, Shin Bet said. It gave no other details.
Smadar Ben-Natan, an Israeli lawyer retained by Damra’s family to represent him, said he was being held at the Kishon prison and she planned to meet with her client Wednesday.
Damra, imam at the Islamic Center of Cleveland, was deported by American authorities last week because he concealed his ties to Islamic Jihad when he applied for American citizenship in 1994. Relatives expecting him to enter the West Bank on Friday said he never showed up.
HAMBURG, Germany
Sept. 11 victim was philanthropist
In Jan. 8 stories about the sentencing of a Moroccan man who aided the Sept. 11 hijackers, the Associated Press erroneously described one victim.
Sonia Morales Puopolo was a first-class passenger aboard one of the downed airliners, not a flight attendant.
Dominic Puopolo Jr., her son, said she was a philanthropist on her way to the Latin Grammy awards in Los Angeles at the time of the hijackings.