1. Obama picks ex-P&G head to lead Veterans Affairs
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama plans to nominate former Procter & Gamble executive Robert McDonald as the next Veterans Affairs secretary, as the White House seeks to shore up an agency beset by treatment delays and struggling to deal with an influx of new veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
An administration official said Obama would announce McDonald’s appointment today. If confirmed by the Senate, McDonald would succeed Eric Shinseki, the retired four-star general who resigned last month as the scope of the issues at veterans’ hospitals became apparent.
In tapping McDonald for the post, Obama is signaling his desire to install a VA chief with broad management experience. McDonald has a military background, graduating near the top of his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and serving as a captain in the Army, primarily in the 82nd Airborne Division.
The administration official insisted on anonymity in order to confirm McDonald’s appointment before the president’s announcement.
The VA operates the the largest integrated health care system in the country, with more than 300,000 fulltime employees and nearly 9 million veterans enrolled for care. But the agency has come under intense scrutiny in recent months amid reports of patients dying while waiting for appointments and of treatment delays in VA facilities nationwide.
2. Benghazi case unfolds against political backdrop
WASHINGTON (AP) — The first prosecution arising from the Benghazi attacks is playing out in the federal courthouse blocks from both the White House and Capitol Hill, an appropriate setting for a case that has drawn stark lines between President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress.
The criminal proceedings could provide new insights into the 2012 attacks that killed four Americans and will serve as the latest test of the U.S. legal system’s ability to handle terrorism suspects captured overseas.
Unfolding during an election year, the case against alleged mastermind Ahmed Abu Khattala could help shape the legacies of Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, and spill over into the potential 2016 presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Untangling the law from the politics may prove especially challenging for the public, given how prominent the attacks on the diplomatic compound in the eastern Libyan city have become in U.S. political discourse.
“What’s going to matter to the public more than anything else is the result, and I think it’s going to only diffuse some of the ongoing Benghazi conspiracy theories if the Obama administration is going to be able to successfully obtain a conviction in this case,” said American University law professor Stephen Vladeck, a national security law expert.
3. Ukraine president talks to Putin, Merkel, Hollande
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tried to keep his peace plan to settle the conflict with pro-Russian separatists on track in a four-way phone call Sunday with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of France and Germany.
The two-hour conversation came ahead of a Monday deadline that European Union leaders set for Russia and the separatists to take steps to ease the violence, warning that otherwise they were ready “at any time” to impose further punitive measures.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande encouraged the Ukrainian and Russian presidents to work on meeting the EU conditions, Hollande’s office said in a statement. The EU’s demands included the return of three border checkpoints to Ukrainian control, verification of the cease-fire by monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and talks to put Poroshenko’s peace plan in place.
The call was the latest in a series of discussions the four leaders have held in recent weeks in an effort to stop the fighting that has killed more than 400 people since April. A cease-fire in place since June 20 has been shaky, with each side accusing the other of numerous violations.
4. Winning public trust essential in tax effort
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Tax experts and conservative thought leaders who gathered at Gov. Mike Pence’s tax summit last week focused on everything from broad concepts of tax simplification to the minutiae of credits, deductions and other tax items. But something else came to the fore throughout the conference: winning the public’s trust.
During a discussion of tax simplification, John Ketzenberger, president of the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute and a former Statehouse reporter, asked, “How do we convince the public we’re telling them the truth?”
It’s a baseline issue for any representative democracy — ensuring the public trusts what its elected representatives are doing — and at the heart of much national cynicism, at least based on routine gauges of public attitudes toward politicians, such as congressional approval ratings.
Grover Norquist, a conservative thought leader and well-known anti-tax activist, said that when Congress and former President Ronald Reagan worked on the last major national tax reform in 1986, one of the fears was that a tax increase would be slipped in.
“There are just enough moving parts — you know, like the three-card Monte guy — to make you not see the billion-dollar tax increase,” he said.
5. Gay pride parades step off across United States
NEW YORK (AP) — Gay pride parades stepped off around the nation Sunday, in cities large and small, with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer people and their supporters celebrating a year of same-sex marriage victories.
New York’s Fifth Avenue became one giant rainbow as thousands of participants waved multicolored flags while making their way down the street. Politicians, including Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, were among those walking along a lavender line painted on the avenue from midtown Manhattan to the West Village.
The parade marked the 45th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the 1969 uprising against police raids that were a catalyst for the gay rights movement. The parade route passes The Stonewall Inn, the site of the riots.
In Chicago, as many as one million people were expected to pack the streets of the city’s North Side for the first gay pride parade since Illinois legalized gay marriage last month.
“I think there is definitely like an even more sense of pride now knowing that in Illinois you can legally get married now,” said Charlie Gurion, who with David Wilk in February became the first couple in Cook County to get a same-sex marriage license. “I think it is a huge thing and everybody’s over the moon that they can do it now.”
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