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DURHAM, N.C. -- Officials say they are investigating an alleged assault involving Durham police officers outside a Raleigh bar.

NEW YORK Apr 14, 2005 — Four more people were charged Thursday in the scandal in the U.N. oil-for-food program, including a Texas oil executive and a South Korean businessman who was at the center of a 1970s corruption case involving Congress. ~snip~U.S. Attorney David Kelley called the new charges "two more pieces in the oil-for-food puzzle" and said the investigation is not over. ~snip~One of the indictments announced Thursday charges a Texas oil company owner and two oil traders with paying millions in secret kickbacks to Saddam's regime to secure oil deals, thus cheating the program out of money...

...The indictments announced by U.S. Attorney David Kelley support what the critics have long been saying: Oil for Food was designed from the beginning, and virtually in plain sight, in a way that allowed skimming and kickback operations to help Saddam Hussein circumvent U.N. sanctions.... The same story described "total anarchy" and "flagrant disregard of U.N. Security Council resolutions" in Oil for Food. A myriad of shady middlemen had moved in after the world's major oil companies shunned Iraq in response to Saddam's widely publicized demand the previous year for illegal kickbacks on oil contracts. This open and flagrant corruption......

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, whose integrity and son were dragged into a scandal surrounding a UN oil-for-food program in Iraq, said Thursday the United States and Britain shared the blame. Annan made reference to "the fact that the bulk of the money that Saddam (Hussein) made came out of smuggling outside the oil-for-food program, and it was on the American and British watch." Earlier Thursday, US prosecutors charged three people with scheming to pay millions of dollars in kickbacks to Saddam's Iraq regime out of oil-for-food funds, which were meant to purchase relief supplies for Iraqis. Annan, addressing a...