■ United Nations
Oil-for-food chief charged
The former UN oil-for-food chief was charged on Tuesday with bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for allegedly accepting US$160,000 to illegally influence the US$64 billion program. Benon Sevan, 69, of Nicosia, Cyprus, countered through his lawyer that he was a political scapegoat and had accounted for every penny as he successfully ran the largest humanitarian program in UN history, helping to save "tens of thousands of innocent people from death by disease and starvation." The charges were contained in a rewrite of an indictment stemming from the scandal over the program set up from 1996 to 2003 to permit the Iraqi government to sell oil primarily to buy food and medicine for suffering Iraqis.
■ United States
Much of nation hit by storm
A massive winter storm has covered swathes of the US in a mantle of snow, sleet and ice, killing 42 people, threatening millions of US dollars in citrus crops and leaving hundreds of thousands without electricity, officials said on Tuesday. "This is a big one, affecting all the way from New Mexico to Maine," said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Weather Service. The worst-hit areas were Oklahoma, where freezing rain left behind a sheet of ice, and Missouri, hard hit by sleet, he said. "With the ice, the trees come down on the power lines, and in Oklahoma it's going to take the rest of the week to get all that restored," he said. "The lines are completely down. It's not like it's a transformer here and there -- it's the whole grid."
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