Biden nominees stuck in senate limbo amid GOP blockade

In July, President Joe Biden announced that he intended to nominate Deborah Lipstadt, a renowned Holocaust scholar, to lead a new office at the State Department assigned to battle soaring antisemitism around the globe. Yet nearly six months later, Lipstadt’s nomination remains in limbo, thwarted by Senate Republicans who have complained that she criticized some of them on Twitter. Lipstadt is among hundreds of Biden nominees whose bids for Senate-confirmed jobs have languished because of partisan dysfunction or personal pique. Members of both parties agree the confirmation system is a contentious mess, owing in part to what Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader, has called “turf problems.”

US details costs of a Russian invasion of Ukraine

The Biden administration and its allies are assembling a punishing set of financial, technology and military sanctions against Russia that they say would go into effect within hours of an invasion of Ukraine, hoping to make clear to President Vladimir Putin the high cost he would pay if he sends troops across the border. In interviews, officials described details of those plans for the first time, just before a series of diplomatic negotiations to defuse the crisis with Moscow, one of the most perilous moments in Europe since the end of the Cold War. The talks begin Monday in Geneva and then move across Europe.

Kazakhstan arrests ex-intelligence chief on suspicion of treason

The former head of Kazakhstan’s intelligence agency was arrested on suspicion of treason, officials said Saturday. Karim Masimov, the former leader of the agency, has been regarded as a key ally of the former president, and the announcement seemed to be another sign of the infighting among the country’s political elite that appears to have contributed to this past week’s violence. The intelligence agency said in a statement that Masimov was arrested Thursday, a day after Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev dismissed him from his post, replacing him with the head of his own security detail. The agency provided no details of what the government was basing its treason accusations on.

A soldier sent a letter to his mom in 1945. It was just delivered.

Angelina Gonsalves answered the doorbell Dec. 9 to find her letter carrier. “Was your husband in the service?” Gonsalves, 89, recalled the carrier asking. “Yes, he was,” she answered. “But I didn’t know him then.” The carrier handed her an envelope. Inside was an unopened airmail letter found in a Pittsburgh postal facility that her husband, John, had sent his mother in Woburn, Massachusetts, when he was a 22-year-old Army sergeant serving in Germany just after the end of World War II. “It was amazing,” she said about reading it. “I really felt like he was there with me.”

By wire sources

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