Janet Yellen nominated by Obama as head of US Federal Reserve

President will nominate Yellen as head of the US central bank on Wednesday, ending long public debate over successor to Ben Bernanke

Dominic Rushe

US politicians sceptical as Obama administration puts case for Syria strike

Members of Congress attend classified presentation of evidence after John Kerry mounts defence of plan for military action vote

The Obama administration has begun the tough task of persuading sceptical members of Congress that they should authorise military action against Syria, as secretary of state John Kerry claimed the US had evidence that sarin gas was used in an attack outside Damascus last month that killed 1,400 people.

A classified briefing was held on Capitol Hill on Sunday a few hours after Kerry made the rounds of all five Sunday talk shows in the US, mounting a strong defence of President Obama’s unexpected plan to allow Congress a vote on military action against the Syrian government.

Presented with the awkward scenario that Congress would not back Obama, Kerry stressed that the president had the power to act anyway. But Kerry said he was confident of a yes vote. “We don’t contemplate that the Congress is going to vote no,” Kerry told CNN.

As members of Congress emerged from the briefing, it was clear that the Obama administration could not be sure of the outcome of the president’s high-risk strategy. In particular, Obama could not count on his own party to deliver the votes. “I don’t know if every member of Congress is there yet,” said Representative Janice Hahn, a California Democrat who said she would vote no on authorising a military strike. “The room was sceptical,” said Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat.

The briefing took place after Kerry conducted a back-to-back round of television interviews to press home the case for military strikes. Kerry, one of the leading advocates of a military assault on the regime of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, outlined new evidence he said the administration had obtained about the chemical attacks outside Damascus in August. He said blood and hair samples from first responders who helped victims of the attacks had tested positive for indicators of the nerve agent sarin.

Kerry said the evidence had come through a “secure chain of custody”, but not from United Nations weapons inspectors. He did not give any further details of the source for the samples, nor where or when they had been tested. The new evidence bolstered the case for action, Kerry said. “Each day that goes by this case is even stronger,” he told CNN.

On Sunday, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, asked chemical weapons inspectors to speed up their investigation because of the “horrendous magnitude” of the attack in Syria.

Ban spoke by phone with the head of the team, Ake Sellstr m, the Swedish scientist who returned from Syria to The Hague on Saturday. The UN spokesman Martin Nesirky, briefing reporters at UN headquarters in New York, said Ban had asked for the process of analysing samples taken from the sites of the 21 August attack to be conducted as quickly as possible in keeping with the requirements of scientific stringency.

“The whole process will be done strictly adhering to the highest established standards of verification recognised by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” Nesirky said.

The samples are scheduled to be sent to laboratories in Finland and Sweden on Monday. On Friday, the UN estimated the process would take about two weeks but the findings now seem to likely to be delivered before that.

At an emergency meeting in Cairo, the Arab League called on the United Nations and the international community to take “deterrent” measures under international law to stop the Syrian regime’s crimes, but could not agree on whether to back US military action. In their closing statement, Arab foreign ministers held the Assad regime responsible for the “heinous” chemical attack, saying the perpetrators should be tried before an international court “like other war criminals”.

In Syria, Assad poured scorn on Obama, saying in comments carried by state media that Damascus was “capable of confronting any external aggression.”

Opposition figures reacted with exasperation to what they perceive as Obama’s delay in striking against Assad. While the Obama administration insists that the exclusive purpose of any such military attack would be to punish the chemical weapons attack and deter future use, the fractious and diverse opposition hopes the anticipated US strike will finally tip the military balance in their favour, something they have not managed decisively in a two-and-a-half year civil war that has killed nearly 100,000 people.

Samir Nishar of the opposition Syrian National Coalition called Obama a “weak president”, according to CNN.

Kerry reacted to the Syrian opposition’s evident disappointment by suggesting that Obama will not limit US involvement in the foreign civil war to cruise missile strikes tethered to chemical weapons. The administration “may even be able to provide greater support to the opposition”, Kerry said. Obama authorised the provision of weapons to Syrian rebels after determining earlier this year that Assad had carried out a smaller-scale chemical attack.

Deeper involvement in the Syrian civil war has prompted reluctance within the US military to bless even a one-off military strike. General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and a multi-tour veteran of Iraq, has voiced such fears for more than two years.

But Congressional hawks say Obama has not gone far enough. Senator John McCain, one of the most interventionist Republicans, said the administration needed to have a more decisive plan to topple the Assad regime. He warned against the possibility of Congress defying the president. “The consequences of a Congress of the United States over-riding a decision of the president of the United States on this magnitude are really very serious,” he told Face the Nation on CBS.

McCain and his fellow Republican senator Lindsey Graham said earlier this weekend that they wanted any military campaign to “achieve the president’s stated goal of Assad’s removal from power, and bring an end to this conflict”. Kerry, responding to McCain and Graham, said he was confident the two senators would become convinced that “there will be additional pressure” on Assad.

“A strategy is in place in order to help the opposition and change the dynamics of what is happening in Syria,” Kerry told ABC News, while simultaneously denying the US would get sucked into the mire of the civil war.

Before Sunday’s classified briefing, some leading legislators predicted that Obama would win a vote of the kind that his UK counterpart, Prime Minister David Cameron, unexpectedly lost last week. “At the end of the day, Congress will rise to the occasion,” Representative Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, told CNN. “This is a national security issue.”

Others were less sure. Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican, put the chances of an authorisation vote in the House of Representatives at 50-50. “I think the Senate will rubber stamp what he wants but the House will be a much closer vote,” he told NBC.

Legislators estimated that between 100 and 150 members of Congress attended Sunday’s classified briefing in the basement of the US Capitol, representing approximately a fifth of the Senate and House. Deputy national security adviser Antony Blinken was scheduled to be joined in the basement auditorium by four colleagues from the state department, the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the military’s joint staff and the Pentagon’s policy directorate.

Scott Rigell, a Virginia Republican, praised Obama for going to Congress, even as Rigell said he would not vote for the resolution. “What I wrestle with, and of course I am continuing to wrestle with this, is how do we define success and our objective, and a full understanding and consideration of the ramifications,” Rigell said.

He said he was troubled by the likelihood that “the Assad regime is still there” after a strike.

Sander Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said he would support a strike, declaring himself persuaded that the Assad regime had crossed “a red line that began to be drawn a hundred years ago”.

Asked how US involvement in Syria ends – with the strikes being a one-off affair or a prelude to deeper US military engagement – Levin said, “I don’t think anybody’s quite sure, but I think we know where we need to start.”

Representative Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, said he left the briefing with questions about US strategy toward Syria, but also with questions about whether Assad would be strengthened if Congress voted against a strike, as the British parliament did last week.

Cummings said the draft authorisation for a military strike that Obama sent to Congress was “very, very broad,” giving him pause. “I want to know exactly what the game plan is after this,” Cummings said. “How will this strike lead, as the resolution says, to a diplomatic resolution of this issue?”

He left the briefing unsure if Obama would abide by the final vote on the Syria authorisation, which could come as early as next week, when Congress returns from summer recess. “I don’t know,” Cummings said. “I’m pretty sure they will, but I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

US army’s top sex assault prosecutor suspended over assault claims

Jay Morse suspended for allegedly assaulting female lawyer in 2011
Blow to victims’ groups as Senate blocks military sexual assault bill

Karen McVeigh

Conservative group Alec trains sights on city and local government

American Legislative Exchange Council forms new initiative to target ‘villages, towns, cities and counties’

Ed Pilkington

US will not seek death penalty for Edward Snowden, Holder tells Russia

Reports this week claimed Snowden had applied for asylum in Russia because he feared torture if he was returned to US

The US has told the Russian government that it will not seek the death penalty for Edward Snowden should he be extradited, in an attempt to prevent Moscow from granting asylum to the former National Security Agency contractor.

In a letter sent this week, US attorney general Eric Holder told his Russian counterpart that the charges faced by Snowden do not carry the death penalty. Holder added that the US “would not seek the death penalty even if Mr Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes”.

Holder said he had sent the letter, addressed to Alexander Vladimirovich, Russia’s minister of justice, in response to reports that Snowden had applied for temporary asylum in Russia “on the grounds that if he were returned to the United States, he would be tortured and would face the death penalty”.

“These claims are entirely without merit,” Holder said. In addition to his assurance that Snowden would not face capital punishment, the attorney general wrote: “Torture is unlawful in the United States.”

In the letter, released by the US Department of Justice on Friday, Holder added: “We believe that these assurances eliminate these asserted grounds for Mr Snowden’s claim that he should be treated as a refugee or granted asylum, temporary or otherwise.”

The US has been seeking Snowden’s extradition to face felony charges for leaking details of NSA surveillance programmes. There were authoritative reports on Wednesday that authorities in Moscow had granted Snowden permission to stay in Russia temporarily, but when Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, arrived to meet his client at Sheremetyevo airport, he said the papers were not yet ready.

Kucherena, who has close links to the Kremlin, said Snowden would stay in the airport’s transit zone, where he has been in limbo since arriving from Hong Kong on 23 June, for the near future.

The letter from Holder, and the apparent glitch in Snowden’s asylum application, suggest that Snowden’s fate is far from secure.

But a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin insisted Russia has not budged from its refusal to extradite Snowden. Asked by a reporter on Friday whether the government’s position had changed, Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies that “Russia has never extradited anyone and never will.” Putin has previously insisted Russia will not extradite Snowden to the US. There is no US-Russia extradition treaty.

Putin’s statement still leaves the Russian authorities room for manoeuvre, however, as Snowden is not technically on Russian soil.

Peskov said that Putin is not involved in reviewing Snowden’s application or involved in discussions about the whistleblower’s future with the US, though he said the Russian security service, the FSB, had been in touch with the FBI.

Speaking on Wednesday, Snowden’s lawyer said he was hoped to settle in Russia. “[Snowden] wants to find work in Russia, travel and somehow create a life for himself,” Kucherena told the television station Rossiya 24. He said Snowden had already begun learning Russian.

There is support among some Russian politicians for Snowden to be allowed to stay in the country. The speaker of the Russian parliament, Sergei Naryshkin, has said Snowden should be granted asylum to protect him from the death penalty.

The letter from Holder was designed to allay those fears and negate the grounds for which Snowden as allegedly applied for asylum in Russia. The attorney general said that if Snowden returned to the US he would “promptly be brought before a civilian court” and would receive “all the protections that United States law provides”.

“Any questioning of Mr Snowden could be conducted only with his consent: his participation would be entirely voluntary, and his legal counsel would be present should he wish it,” Holder said.

He added that despite Snowden’s passport being revoked he “remains a US citizen” and said the US would facilitate a direct return to the country.

Germany’s president, who helped expose the workings of East Germany’s Stasi secret police, waded into the row on Friday. President Joachim Gauck, whose role is largely symbolic, said whistleblowers such as Snowden deserved respect for defending freedom.

“The fear that our telephones or mails are recorded and stored by foreign intelligence services is a constraint on the feeling of freedom and then the danger grows that freedom itself is damaged,” Gauck said.

Senate Democrats to challenge Republicans with vote on debt ceiling

Bill expected to permit new borrowing above current $16.7tn debt but not likely to include spending cuts sought by Republicans

Four US states considering laws that challenge teaching of evolution

Critics charge ‘academic freedom’ legislation in Colorado, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma is just creationism in disguise

Four US states are considering new legislation about teaching science in schools, allowing pupils to to be taught religious versions of how life on earth developed in what critics say would establish a backdoor way of questioning the theory of evolution.

Fresh legislation has been put forward in Colorado, Missouri and Montana. In Oklahoma, there are two bills before the state legislature that include potentially creationist language.

A watchdog group, the National Center for Science Education, said that the proposed laws were framed around the concept of “academic freedom”. It argues that religious motives are disguised by the language of encouraging more open debate in school classrooms. However, the areas of the curriculum highlighted in the bills tend to focus on the teaching of evolution or other areas of science that clash with traditionally religious interpretations of the world.

“Taken at face value, they sound innocuous and lovely: critical thinking, debate and analysis. It seems so innocent, so pure. But they chose to question only areas that religious conservatives are uncomfortable with. There is a religious agenda here,” said Josh Rosenau, an NCSE program and policy director.

In Oklahoma, one bill has been pre-filed with the state senate and another with the state house. The Senate bill would oblige the state to help teachers “find more effective ways to represent the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies”. The House bill specifically mentions “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning” as areas that “some teachers are unsure” about teaching.

In Montana, a bill put forward by local social conservative state congressman, Clayton Fiscus, also lists things like “random mutation, natural selection, DNA and fossil discoveries” as controversial topics that need more critical teaching. Meanwhile, in Missouri, a bill introduced in mid-January lists “biological and chemical evolution” as topics that teachers should debate over including looking at the “scientific weaknesses” of the long-established theories.

Finally, in Colorado, which rarely sees a push towards teaching creationism, a bill has been introduced in the state house of representatives that would require teachers to “respectfully explore scientific questions and learn about scientific evidence related to biological and chemical evolution”. Observers say the move is the first piece of creationist-linked legislation to be put forward in the state since 1972.

The moves in such a wide range of states have angered advocates of secularism in American official life. “This is just another attempt to bring creationism in through the back door. The only academic freedom they really want to encourage is the freedom to be ignorant,” said Rob Boston, senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Over the past few years, only Tennessee and Louisiana have managed to pass so-called “academic freedom” laws of the kind currently being considered in the four states. Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and close observer of the creationism movement, said that the successes in those two states meant that the religious lobby was always looking for more opportunities.

She said that using arguments over academic freedom was a shift in tactic after attempts to specifically get “intelligent design” taught in schools was defeated in a landmark court case in 2005. Intelligent design, which a local school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, had sought to get accepted as legitimate science, asserts that modern life is too complex to have evolved by chance alone. “Creationists never give up. They never do. The language of these bills may be highly sanitized but it is creationist code,” she said.

The laws can have a direct impact on a state. In Louisiana, 78 Nobel laureate scientists have endorsed the repeal of the creationist education law there. The Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology has even launched a boycott of Louisiana and cancelled a scheduled convention in New Orleans. Louisiana native and prominent anti-creationist campaigner in the state Zack Kopplin said that those pushing such bills in other states were risking similar economic damage to their local economies. “It will hurt economic development,” Kopplin said.

There is also the impact on students, he added, when they are taught controversies in subjects where the overwhelming majority of scientists have long ago reached consensus agreement. “It really hurts students. It can be embarrassing to be from a state which has become a laughing stock in this area,” Kopplin said.

Others experts agreed, arguing that it could even hurt future job prospects for students graduating from those states’ public high schools. “The jobs of the future are high tech and science-orientated. These lawmakers are making it harder for some of these kids to get those jobs,” said Boston.

President Obama presents plan for immigration reform – as it happened

President welcomes bipartisan Senate proposal
Could open pathway to citizenship for 11m immigrants
Boehner warns president not to ‘drag debate to the left’

Tom McCarthy

White House condemns court ruling on ‘unconstitutional’ Obama appointments

Spokesman says ruling heralded by Republicans’ lawyers as ‘stinging rebuke’ to president is ‘novel and unprecedented’

Barack Obama breached the constitution when he bypassed Congress to make appointments to a labour relations panel, a federal appeal court ruled on Friday in a decision that was condemned by the White House as “novel and unprecedented”.

The judgement, from a three-judge panel of the US court of appeals for the DC circuit and regarding the filling of vacancies at the the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), represents a significant legal victory for Republicans and big business. It could also severely restrict the president’s use of a constitutional provision that permits him to directly appoint officials without congressional approval.

Successive presidents have used the provision to place hundreds of officials who have been rejected, or are likely to be rejected, by the Senate at confirmation hearings.

But in what lawyers for the Republican congressional delegation called a “stinging rebuke” to Obama, the court narrowed the president’s authority considerably by ruling that the constitution only permits him to make those appointments when the vacancy occurs during a recess between individual Congresses, such as occurred earlier this month when a newly elected Congress took office. Any appointment must then be made during the same recess.

“The filling up of a vacancy that happens during a recess must be done during the same recess in which the vacancy arose,” the court said.

The ruling struck down the president’s appointment of three people to the NLRB a year ago, but if it stands it is likely to have much wider implications.

Anthony Riedel of the National Right to Work Foundation, which is fighting several cases seeking to have NLRB rulings overturned on the grounds that the appointments were invalid, described the ruling as a “game changer”.

“What the court did pretty much took a strict constructionist view of the constitution and said that the president cannot make recess appointments unless during the recess in which one Congress turns into the next Congress. It also said that the vacancy must have occurred within that recess,” he said. “This is a game changer on a broader scale of how the president has the power to make recess appointments during a recess.”

The court decision came in response to a legal challenge by the owners of a soft-drinks bottling plant, after the NLRB ruled against them in a union dispute. The company claimed Obama did not have the power to directly appoint the three officials to the NLRB last year while the Senate was on a 20-day holiday, and said the board’s ruling was therefore invalid.

The dispute centres on article two of the constitution, which gives the president “the power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate”.

Successive administrations have interpreted that as meaning whenever the Senate takes a break, such as during Christmas and summer holidays. Obama has invoked the article 32 times to make recess appointments. His predecessor, George W Bush, used it 99 times. But the court ruled that the framers of the constitution had a different meaning in mind.

At the time the article was written, Congress sat far less frequently, sometimes for less than half of the year.

“There is no reason the framers would have permitted the President to wait until some future intersession recess to make a recess appointment, for the Senate would have been sitting in session during the intervening period and available to consider nominations,” the court said on Friday.

Lawyers for the bottling company argued that holidays did not amount to a recess because although senators were away from Washington, the Senate still effectively remained sitting.

“Such short intra-session breaks are not recesses. Otherwise, every weekend, night, or lunch break would be a ‘recess’ too,” they told the court.

The court agreed, and noted that the House of Representatives had already returned to work the day before the appointments, meaning that Congress was in session even if senators were not in attendance.

Republicans joined the legal action, arguing that “the president usurped the Senate’s control of its own procedures”.

“By appointing officers without the Senate’s consent, he took away its right to review and reject his nominations,” they said.

The US justice department told the court that the Senate does no work, and does not fulfill its role to provide advice or consent on presidential nominations, when it takes holidays and therefore is not in session.

Democrats in Congress led the way in attempting to block direct presidential appointments during President George Bush senior’s administration. They merely adjourned Senate sittings during holiday periods, rather than going into recess.

The Obama administration can be expected to take the case to the Supreme Court.

The American Center for Law and Justice, which represented the House of Representatives speaker, John Boehner, in the case, welcomed the ruling.

“This decision represents a stinging rebuke to the unprecedented and unconstitutional actions of President Obama,” said the ACLJ chief counsel, Jay Sekulow.

“This decision is sound and well-reasoned and respects both the constitution and the separation of powers. From the very beginning, no one questioned the President’s authority to make recess appointments, but those must occur when the Senate is in recess, which we asserted, and the appeals court concluded, is clearly not the case here. While the Justice Department may decide to appeal this decision to the supreme court, the appeals court decision today sends a strong message rejecting this presidential overreach.”

The immediate implications of the ruling for the NLRB are unclear. Riedel said it could potentially invalidate hundreds of board decisions over the past year, and may affect other cases in the pipeline elsewhere in the country including several being handled by his own organisation.

“The NLRB has been handing down very biased decisions in favour of big labor so we’re pleased that there’s a chance these decisions will now be invalidated because the board has been seen to not have a quorum,” he said.

The White House disagreed. “This court decision does not effect this operation, their ability to function,” said Jay Carney, Obama’s spokesman.

However the judgement could affect other recess appointments, notably that of Richard Cordray, who was put in place by Obama to head the newly-formed consumer financial protection bureau, after he was rejected by Congress. At the time, Boehner accused Obama of “trampling our system of separation of powers”.