News Briefs

Frans van der Lugt, a 75-year-old Dutch Jesuit who refused to leave war-torn Syria, was beaten by armed men and killed with two bullets to the head, according to a message sent from the Jesuits’ Middle East Province to the Jesuit headquarters in Rome on April 7. • Linda LeMura, named president of Le Moyne College in Syracuse on April 4, is the first laywoman to be appointed president of a Jesuit college or university. • Calling torture “an intrinsic evil” under any circumstance, Bishop Richard E. Pates, chair of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, supported Senate efforts on April 2 to declassify parts of an intelligence committee report on C.I.A. interrogation practices. • Responding to criticism of his new $2.2 million residence, Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory of Atlanta apologized on April 3 in a column in the archdiocesan newspaper and vowed to “live more simply, more humbly, and more like Jesus Christ who challenges us to be in the world and not of the world.” • The bloody Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria would be stopped, said Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto, if the government would create “the environment to trap the energy of the youth and to channel it toward national development.”