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Transcripts of secret U.N. Security Council sessions show that U.S. and British diplomats were constantly thwarted by their French, Russian and Chinese counterparts while investigating Saddam Hussein's dirty deals under the oil-for-food program. Minutes of meetings of the so-called 661 Committee — the U.N. Security Council panel that oversaw Iraq sanctions and the oil-for-food program — have been recently turned over to U.S. congressional committees investigating the $10 billion bribery kickback scandal, officials said. According to a top congressional investigator who has read the highly sensitive documents, the minutes confirm that there was widespread knowledge inside the United Nations years...

FLASH: Late Monday, federal prosecutors rejected an offer by the lawyer for celebrity sleuth Anthony Pellicano to plead guilty to one charge of illegally storing C-4 explosives. He now faces three counts and will now go to trial before a judge (not a jury) on Oct. 8. The charges grew out of an FBI search of his office which was prompted by a threat to an L.A. Times reporter.

Pentagon's top investigator will lead inquiry into accident By Rupert Cornwell in Washington 03 February 2003 NASA turned yesterday to a retired four-star admiral who led the inquiry into the October 2000 terrorist attack on the destroyer USS Cole at Aden to head an independent commis-sion examining the Columbia space shuttle disaster. Harold Gehman, with 35 years of active duty in the navy, is regarded as one of the Pentagon's wisest and most experienced investigators. He has a career of high military appointments behind him – the most recent as Nato's supreme allied commander for the Atlantic, in charge of...

The arrest of a narcotics investigator with the Texas Department of Public Safety could jeopardize past and pending cases in Harris County courts if the officer played a key role in the investigations. Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said his office is looking at every case Sgt. Johnnie Davis worked on for DPS. "We're checking to see if there are cases in which he was involved in the chain of evidence," Rosenthal said Wednesday. Any pending cases that Davis was extensively connected to might have to be dismissed. And Rosenthal said any past cases Davis was involved in, where...