US President Barack Obama’s picks for ambassadors to Iraq and Afghanistan cleared an important hurdle on Tuesday when a key committee approved their nominations for full Senate consideration.
However, Obama’s nominee to be Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, sent a letter to senators saying that she had recently corrected three years of tax returns and paid more than US$7,000 in back taxes after finding “unintentional errors.”
While Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry seemed on course to breeze to easy confirmation as the top US envoy in Kabul, veteran diplomat and North Korea expert Christopher Hill could still face a fight to get to Baghdad.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave the green light to both nominations by voice vote with no lawmakers objecting — but Hill’s fiercest foes do not sit on the panel and could delay, though not block, a final vote.
Republican Senator Sam Brownback has accused Hill of ignoring North Korean human rights abuses, misleading lawmakers on the six-party denuclearization talks, and botching that diplomatic effort to end Pyongyang’s atomic ambitions.
The North Koreans “are now just as hostile and dangerous as ever,” he said on the Senate floor last week.
Brownback has been joined by other Republican senators, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, in his opposition to Hill. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could bring the nomination to a full Senate confirmation vote at any time and is expected to have little trouble harnessing the 60 votes needed to overcome any legislative delay tactics.
A Reid spokesman said it was “too early to tell” when a final vote would come and noted that it is unusual for the Senate to confirm a nominee on the same day that they cleared their relevant committee.
Democratic Senator John Kerry, the panel’s chairman, told his colleagues that there was “an urgency to getting these nominees out there” and praised Hill and Eikenberry’s “significant qualifications.”
“We are in, really, a crucial phase,” Hill told Kerry’s committee at a March 25 hearing. “I just don’t want to screw it up.”
Eikenberry would take up the task of managing Obama’s newly unveiled plan for turning around the situation in Afghanistan. He used his March 26 confirmation hearing before the Senate panel to offer a brief message to Afghanistan’s population — “Your success is our success” — and warn that winning the war requires neighbor Pakistan to crack down on extremists blamed for cross-border violence.
“We can succeed in Afghanistan, it’s true, but if we don’t address the problem, the linked problems in Pakistan, then we’ll have no lasting success,” Eikenberry said.
Meanwhile, Sebelius told senators that she had filed the amended returns as soon as the errors were discovered by an accountant she hired to scrub her taxes in preparation for her confirmation hearings.
She said the changes involved charitable contributions, the sale of a home and business expenses.
Sebelius and her husband, Gary, a federal judge in Kansas, paid a total of US$7,040 in back taxes and US$878 in interest to amend returns from 2005 to 2007.
Sebelius is scheduled to appear again today before the Senate.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS