US: Josette Sheeran, a senior US state department official, former managing editor of the Washington Times and once a senior member of the Unification Church ("Moonies"), has been chosen to head the UN's World Food Programme for a five-year term.
And the World Health Organisation (WHO) yesterday nominated China's Margaret Chan as its new chief as it gears up for a feared flu pandemic and battles global scourges such as Aids.
Ms Sheeran, the US undersecretary of state for economics, business and agricultural affairs, will replace American James T Morris. She will take charge of the UN's largest humanitarian institution, which feeds about 90 million people in about 80 of the world's poorest countries.
She is the latest Bush administration nominee to secure a senior position in the world's most prominent international agencies. Others include World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, who had been deputy secretary of defence, and former agriculture department secretary Ann Veneman, now the executive director of the UN Children's Fund.
Ms Sheeran said she would focus her energy on meeting UN targets to end hunger, which accounts for 25,000 daily deaths, by the year 2015.
UN secretary general Kofi Annan and Jacques Diouf, the head of the food and agriculture organisation, named Ms Sheeran after consulting with Mr Annan's successor, South Korean foreign minister Ban Ki Moon, who takes the helm at the UN on January 1st.
The Bush administration was sensitive to the possibility that Ms Sheeran's former membership in the Unification Church would emerge as an issue. A US official pressed the Washington Post not to mention her past links to the church, saying it was inappropriate to describe her religious affiliation. (LA Times/Washington Post service; additional reporting Reuters)