Hundreds of people were evacuated from flooded homes Monday as a fierce nor’easter drenched the Northeast with record rainfall. Nine deaths were blamed on the huge storm. Power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses was knocked out, and refrigerators and trucks floated downstream.
Just 1.3 percent of imported fish, vegetables, fruit and other foods are inspected. Yet those government inspections regularly reveal food unfit for human consumption. Beans from Belgium, jalapenos from Peru, and baked goods from Canada, India and the Philippines are on the list of tainted food detained at the border by the Food and Drug Administration.
Sudan on Monday approved the deployment of attack helicopters and more than 3,000 U.N. troops, police and other personnel in Darfur. They will beef up the 7,000-strong African Union force in the troubled region.
Angry crowds in several Indian cities burned effigies of actor Richard Gere on Monday. Photographs of Gere, 57, embracing Shilpa Shetty and kissing her on the cheek at an HIV/AIDS awareness event in New Delhi were splashed across Monday’s front pages in India, where sex and public displays of affection are largely taboo.
France’s foreign intelligence service learned as early as January 2001 that al-Qaida was preparing a hijacking plot likely to involve a U.S. airplane, former intelligence officials said Monday, confirming a report that also said the CIA received the warning. Pierre-Antoine Lorenzi, the former chief of staff for the agency’s director at the time, said he remembered the note and that it mentioned only the vague outlines of a hijacking plot.
An alleged Iraqi “sleeper agent” who came to the United States to spy on Saddam Hussein’s enemies was convicted Monday of lying about his ties to the former Baghdad regime. Sami Khoshaba Latchin, 59, could go to prison for 40 years.
New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine on Monday underwent a second operation on the leg he broke in a highway crash that left him in critical condition. Corzine, 60, was injured when the sport utility vehicle he was riding in crashed on the Garden State Parkway just north of Atlantic City.
