Mississippi

Two arrests made after fatal hospital shooting

Two people were arrested Sunday in a fatal shooting at a hospital that may have been related to an earlier murder-suicide attempt, police said.

One of the suspects was arrested at Rush Foundation Hospital, and the other turned himself in to police, Meridian Police Chief Benny said. Both were expected to be charged today.

The man fatally shot at the hospital was the son of a man who Dubose said shot himself and a woman at a Meridian home Sunday morning in an apparent murder-suicide attempt. Dubose said one of the suspects is the woman’s son.

The man and woman found at the home did not suffer life-threatening injuries.

The fatal shooting victim’s name was not immediately released by authorities.

Police closed off the hospital for several hours after the shooting to search for the gunmen. The hospital was reopened Sunday evening.

South Carolina

Railroad car patched to stop toxic leak

Crews put a temporary patch Sunday on a railroad car that had been leaking toxic chlorine gas since a train wreck last week.

Nine people were killed and more than 250 were sickened by chlorine gas released when the tank car was damaged in the wreck of a Norfolk Southern train early Thursday.

Thom Berry, spokesman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, said workers would now focus on transferring the gas to a safer container and removing all the damaged railcars. About 16,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide has been safely removed from another railcar at the crash site, he said.

More than 5,400 residents evacuated from their homes within a one mile radius of the site were told they would not be able to return until Wednesday at the earliest, Sheriff Michael Hunt said Sunday.

New York

Oil-for-food audits released on Web site

Internal U.N. audits sent to the director of the Iraq oil-for-food program uncovered extensive mismanagement of multimillion-dollar deals with contractors and fraudulent paperwork by its employees, according to copies of some of the reports obtained by The Associated Press.

An independent panel investigating corruption in the humanitarian program released the 55 internal audits on its Web site Sunday, a day earlier than originally planned after some of the reports were leaked to the media.

The panel led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who was appointed in April by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to investigate the growing scandal, was given access to the audits that were conducted throughout the duration of the program, along with other relevant documents.

The oil-for-food program was created as a humanitarian exemption to sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which led to the 1991 Gulf War.