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UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations on Tuesday named American diplomat Josette Sheeran the next head of the World Food Program and she said her top priorities will be to ensure no child goes to bed hungry and to reduce hunger-related deaths.

Sheeran, the U.S. undersecretary of state for economics, business and agricultural affairs, will replace American James T. Morris for a five-year term as head of the world’s largest humanitarian agency.

"WFP has the unique mission of making sure that no child goes to bed hungry any night, and while WFP has made huge contributions to saving lives there’s more to be done,” Sheeran said.

"According to the U.N., 25,000 people a day die from hunger-related issues,” she told the Associated Press in a telephone interview. "So my first focus will be to make sure that we have the resources and capability to meet the emergency needs.”

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, who was told of the decision and jumped the gun on the official announcement, said the United States was very pleased and called Sheeran "extraordinarily well-qualified.”

Founded in 1962, WFP provides food aid to an average of 90 million poor people, including 58 million hungry children in at least 80 of the world’s poorest countries. The United States said it provides nearly half of the annual contributions to the Rome-based agency, which has an annual budget of just under $3 billion.

Muslim convert sentenced to life in prison over plot to bomb targets in U.S., London

LONDON — An al-Qaida operative was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange and other U.S. financial targets and blow up landmark London hotels and train stations with limousines packed with gas tanks, napalm and nails.

The plans were designed to cause maximum carnage, the judge told Dhiren Barot, who stared blankly ahead as he learned he would not be eligible for parole for at least 40 years — one of the harshest sentences ever meted out in a British court.

Barot, a 34-year-old British convert to Islam who pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to commit mass murder, remains wanted by the United States and Yemen on separate terror-related charges. Under British law, he could be temporarily transferred to the United States to stand trial.

Investigators said Barot traveled the world to gain terrorist training, meeting terror leaders including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Born in India and raised in London, Barot began plotting in 2000 to attack a host of financial industry targets in the United States. Investigators said he shelved the plan after the 9/11 attacks, focusing his efforts on ways to detonate limousines loaded with gas, napalm and nails.

His targets included landmark London hotels such as The Ritz and The Savoy, and railway stations such as London’s Waterloo, Paddington and King’s Cross, prosecutor Edmund Lawson said at the two-day sentencing hearing.

IBM develops technology to help improve language skills at India call centers

NEW DELHI — Even as Indian call centers have thrived in the past decade, helping U.S. companies cut costs and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs here, they have faced a seemingly insurmountable problem: Most Indian employees speak heavily accented English.

Now IBM Corp.’s India Research Lab says it has a way to help operators fix the harsh consonants, local idioms and occasionally different grammar of Indian English, often a source of frustration of those who call in search of tech support and other information.

IBM, which operates large call center facilities here, has developed a Web-based training technology that can help improve language skills of operators.

Although the technology was initially developed for its call center employees in India, it has broad applicability for individuals as well as in schools and businesses, said Ashish Verma, who led efforts to develop the tool at the India Research Lab in New Delhi.

The program evaluates grammar, pronunciation, comprehension and other spoken-language skills, and provides detailed scores for each category. It uses specially adapted speech-recognition software to score the pronunciation of passages and the stressing of syllables for individual words.

The technology also consists of voice-enabled grammar evaluation tests, which identify areas for improvement by highlighting shortcomings and providing examples of correct pronunciation and grammar.

"Most of the existing solutions are available offline, where you listen to model speakers and mimic their accents,” Verma said. "In our case, we are analyzing speech.”

But many call center companies in India said the new technology could prove to be a supplement rather than a substitute to existing training programs.