Page 14 - Mark Gitenstein News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Yves here. While most Americans who follow politics know that the appointment of ambassadors includes quite a few patronage postings, few follow the sausage-making on that beat. This post fills that lapse, and shows the cooking is as rotten as you’d expect. And dispatching to Rahm to Japan makes perfect sense, in a sick sort of way. The Japanese are not know nfor racial tolerance, so misdeeds against people of color on his watch would not register with them as an issue. By Max Moran, a research director for the personnel team at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)’s Revolvi...

POLITICO Diplomats to Biden: Don’t give the plum Europe posts to donors and allies President Joe Biden is expected to release his first batch of political nominees for ambassadorships in the coming weeks. “Right now, every post has significance,” a former officer warns. President Joe Biden is in the final stages of vetting some political nominees and expects to announce his first such batch in the coming weeks, according to four people, including donors and former administration officials. | AP Photo/Alex Brandon Link Copied As President Joe Biden finalizes his first batch of political...

You can subscribe here. /// EDITOR’s TAKE As we predicted last week, more phantom non-papers emerged on Western Balkans in the wake of a mysterious document that kicked up a storm by proposing a radical redrawing of borders in the region. Reportedly authored by Germany and France, a leaked document proposed that Kosovo and Serbia recognise each other while agreeing to create and an autonomous district in Serb-populated northern Kosovo. This time though, the alleged authors promptly denied having anything to do with the document. The highly unusual flurry of activity over documents whose au...

AFP An equally noteworthy occasion, President Biden spoke before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening emphasizing several domestic policy issues, including police reform and federal investment in infrastructure and childcare. On foreign policy, Biden addressed relations with China and Russia, and his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. A full video of the speech can be watched here. Senator Tim Scott gave the official GOP reaction, which can be watched here. With COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in India increasing dramatically over recent weeks, the Biden admin...

Thomas R. Nides. Photo: US Department of State/Wikimedia Commons. JNS.org – Former US State Department official Thomas R. Nides is likely going to be nominated by the Biden administration to be the next US ambassador to Israel, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday. Nides, an executive at Morgan Stanley, previously served as deputy secretary of state for management and resources from 2011 to 2013. As part of that role, he established several working relationships with Israeli officials and played a role in helping the Obama administration’s approval of extensions on loan guarantees fo...