US President Barack Obama said on Friday that his new chief of staff is longtime foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough, who has played a key role in all of the major national security decisions of his presidency, including the end of the war in Iraq, winding down the war in Afghanistan and responses to natural disasters in Haiti and Japan.
McDonough would replace outgoing chief of staff Jack Lew, who has been nominated as treasury secretary.
McDonough’s place in Obama’s inner circle was illustrated during the Navy SEAL raid that killed then-al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May 2011. He is among those whose images are captured in a well-known White House photograph seated in the situation room with Obama and other senior officials watching the raid unfold.
McDonough, 43, becomes the latest link in a chain of staffers elevated to key roles in the Obama White House following years of service within the president’s closely guarded inner circle.
“The president trusts him — perhaps more than anyone else in the White House. And I think he knows the president’s mind perhaps better than anyone else in the White House,” said John Podesta, who served as former US president Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and co-chaired Obama’s transition team. Earlier, McDonough worked as a foreign policy specialist in Congress. Like so many of the president’s senior aides, his work for Obama started during the 2008 presidential campaign, where he served as a foreign policy aide and was a senior adviser on the transition team. In 2009, he became the chief of staff for Obama’s national security staff.
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court on Friday invalidated Obama’s “recess” appointments to a labor board last year, ruling that the move was unconstitutional and dealing a blow to Obama’s strategy of bypassing US Senate Republicans.
The three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in January last year were made while the Senate was out of town, but potentially available to act on them.
“Considering the text, history and structure of the Constitution, these appointments were invalid from their inception,” it said.
Obama also used such a “recess” appointment in January last year to install Richard Cordray as head of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, although his appointment was not part of the lawsuit.
The suit started as a routine dispute between soda bottling company Noel Canning and the labor board, but lawyers for Senate Republicans seized on the suit as a chance to challenge the appointments.
The case was seen as a test of the limits of the president’s ability to make appointments during a Senate recess, a power that bypasses the Senate’s usual ability to block nominees and that dates to the US Constitution of 1787.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not