Asian Americans on Friday hailed Pete Rouse as the first White House chief of staff from the community, adding to a record representation in US President Barack Obama’s administration.
Rouse, whose mother is Japanese American, was appointed on Friday to take over as Obama’s right-hand man, succeeding Rahm Emanuel who stepped down to run for mayor of Chicago.
INTERNMENT
Photo: Reuters
US Democratic Representative Mike Honda, who heads the Asian American caucus in Congress, said that Rouse’s appointment would “bring even more color to a historically all-white house.”
“This is groundbreaking considering that a mere 60 years ago, Japanese Americans were corralled into internment camps at the height of World War II,” said Honda, who himself was interned as a result of his Japanese ancestry.
With elections approaching in one month, Honda said the appointment showed that the Democratic Party “will continue to most aptly and ably represent our increasingly diverse American public.”
Rouse’s mother was born in the US as Mary Mikami, the daughter of Japanese immigrants. The new chief of staff’s grandfather was born in Tokyo in 1864 and moved to Alaska where he worked as a tailor.
WASHINGTON VETERAN
Rouse, 64, is a veteran Washington insider who served as Obama’s chief of staff when he was a senator.
A record three Asian Americans serve in Obama’s Cabinet: Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who are both of Chinese descent, and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, who is of Japanese descent.
Jeff Yang, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote that Obama could be seen as the first Asian US president, pointing to his “clear comfort with and respect for Asian Americans as colleagues and key team members.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack