Thursday,  July 11, 2013 • Vol. 14--No. 354 • 27 of 34

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slow, crash-landed on Saturday, killing two passengers and injuring many others as it skittered and spun 100 feet.
• The pilots were assigned to work together through a tightly regulated system developed after several deadly crashes in the 1980s were blamed in part on inexperience in the cockpit, NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman said Wednesday.
• ___

AP Exclusive: Did secret CIA prison spawn top-secret vacuum cleaner from hands of a terrorist?

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could embark on an unusual project: Would the spy agency allow Mohammed, who had earned his bachelor's in mechanical engineering, to design a vacuum cleaner?
• The agency officer in charge of the prison called CIA headquarters and a manager approved the request, a former senior CIA official told The Associated Press.
• Mohammed had endured the most brutal of the CIA's harsh interrogation methods and had confessed to a career of atrocities. But the agency had no long-term plan for him. Someday, he might prove useful. Perhaps, he'd even stand trial one day.
• And for that, he'd need to be sane.
• "We didn't want them to go nuts," the former senior CIA official said, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the now-shuttered CIA prisons or Mohammed's interest in vacuums.
• ___

Quebec train crash's missing all presumed dead, police say; attention focuses on CEO

• LAC-MEGANTIC, Quebec (AP) -- Everyone missing in the fiery crash of a runaway oil train in Quebec is presumed dead, police told grieving families, bringing the death toll to 50 in Canada's worst railway catastrophe in almost 150 years.
• Meanwhile, attention focused on the CEO of the railway's parent company, who faced jeers from local residents and blamed the train's engineer for improperly setting its brakes before the disaster.
• Officials said Wednesday evening that 20 bodies had been found in this burned-out town, and 30 people were missing.

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