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Benghazi report could damage Clinton’s legacy at State Dept.By Julian Pecquet - 12/19/12 05:30 AM ET The Benghazi report released Tuesday night bemoans “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies” in Hillary Clinton's State Department that could come back to haunt her should she run for president in 2016. Clinton remains one of the nation's most popular politicians and has worked tirelessly to improve America's image abroad following President George W. Bush's tenure. The independent review of the Sept. 11 attack, however, tarnishes that legacy by faulting the department for failing to put in place a coordinated approach for handling...

Three top officials in the State Department resigned Wednesday in the wake of a scathing report which slammed "systemic failures" and "management deficiencies" in the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, which resulted in the murder of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Assistant Secretary Eric Boswell, head of the bureau of diplomatic security, and Charlene Lamb, deputy assistant secretary for international programs, have stepped down, CNN and CBS television said, citing unnamed department officials. Lamb, who was Boswell’s deputy in charge of international programs, denied requests from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli for an extension of temporary security...

Republic of Korea: For the record. Pak Ku'n-hye (Park Geun-hye) of the New Frontier Party won South Korea's presidential election on 19 December, media reported. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee and the first woman elected to be president of the Republic of Korea. That should confound the North! North Korea-Iran: According to a Japanese news service, an Iranian lawmaker told the service that North Korea informed Iran in October of its plan to launch a satellite. The head of an Iranian parliamentary delegation to North Korea, Hamid Reza Taraghi, revealed talks took place mid-October with the North's delegates...

And so the reckoning begins. Only hours after a special task force concluded on Wednesday that “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies” may have contributed to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, the State Department’s security chief resigned and three other officials were relieved of their duties. What was lacking in the report, however, was any sense of who was responsible farther up the chain. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Accountability Review Board—chaired by retired Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering and vice chaired by another national-security heavyweight, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael...

The House and Senate foreign relations committees have already announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify on Benghazi next week, but the State Department said today that´s not a done deal. Moreover, the State Department may not even share the report of its own internal review on Benghazi with Congress, a top State Department official said today. Congress expects Clinton to testify Dec. 20 about the results of the Accountability Review Board, State´s internal review on the events leading up to and during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi

The State Department Thursday reined in expectations that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will share with lawmakers the findings of an inquiry into the Sept. 11 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland could not confirm that Clinton would give testimony on Capitol Hill next Thursday—even though the chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee have both issued advisories to that effect. Nuland told a press briefing that to her knowledge the Accountability Review Board (ARB) has yet to complete its work. “I don’t have any dates—any schedule of the secretary’s...

State Department preparing for Libya bombshell?Published December 14, 2012 FoxNews.com Susan Rice's abrupt withdrawal from consideration for secretary of state, coupled with suggestions from the State Department that Secretary Hillary Clinton may not testify as scheduled next week, has stirred speculation that something big is brewing in the Libya terror attack investigation. "You're starting to see the State Department squirm a little bit," Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said. For the better part of the last three months, an independent board has been conducting a review for the State Department of the Sept. 11 terror attack in Benghazi. In anticipation of...

Republicans are 'not giving up' on BenghaziBy Julian Pecquet - 12/15/12 03:24 PM ET Republican lawmakers are vowing to keep pressing the administration on Benghazi despite Susan Rice’s decision to drop her bid to become secretary of State. “We'll continue to seek answers,” a Republican Senate aide told The Hill. “We're not giving up on it.” Rice’s decision to step aside averted a contentious confirmation fight with Republican senators that might have pointed to an end to the political battle over the U.S. consulate attack. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations had become the flash-point for criticism since describing...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won't testify to Congress next week on Benghazi, after fainting and suffering a concussion Saturday and due to her ongoing stomach ailment. "While suffering from a stomach virus, Secretary Clinton became dehydrated and fainted, sustaining a concussion," Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines said in a statement. "She has been recovering at home and will continue to be monitored regularly by her doctors. At their recommendation, she will continue to work from home next week, staying in regular contact with Department and other officials. She is looking forward to being back in the office...

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities. So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling...

The State Department’s top security officer is coming under scrutiny for playing a role in creating a special board that is investigating last month’s fatal attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. One of the State Department’s accountability review board’s key tasks will be to probe why the office of Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, rejected requests for more diplomatic security in Libya in the weeks leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. Mr. Kennedy, a career diplomat whose portfolio includes being the top security officer, signed the memo Oct. 1 that set up the review...

Aug 1 (Reuters Point Carbon) - In an effort to dissuade companies in key industries facing new carbon costs from leaving the state, California is considering giving them millions of dollars worth of additional free greenhouse gas allowances, state's air regulator said on Monday. California's cap-and-trade program seeks to emulate tactics used in the European Union and Australia to address emission "leakage" - a term describing the exodus of employers from a state or country in order to sidestep environmental costs. The California Air Resources Board (ARB), the regulator of the forthcoming program, held a workshop in Sacramento on Monday...

The merchant shipping industry has failed a second time to short-circuit California's effort to combat the toll on the health of its population from air pollution caused by oceangoing vessels. The industry is contesting California's authority to regulate fuel used by seagoing vessels up to 24 miles off its coast. The Air Resources Board estimates the vessels' emissions of particulate matter cause 300 premature deaths across the state every year. California mandates that ships "use cleaner marine fuels in diesel and diesel-electric engines, main propulsion engines, and auxiliary boilers" while operating far beyond the traditional three-mile jurisdictional limit. The Pacific...

Regulations: A California legislator pushes a November ballot initiative to free the state from the job-killing shackles of a 2006 law designed to fight climate change. The other choice is freezing in the unemployment line. At last report, California's unemployment rate was 12.3%, with 2.25 million residents looking for work. So one would assume the first rule of holes would apply — when you're in one, stop digging. Yet there was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touting his state's green initiatives in Copenhagen as California barrels toward full implementation of its own version of job-killing cap-and-trade. "The desire and hope and desperate...

The message delivered by Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the state's Air Resources Board, was clear: Businesses, especially small and midsize operations, will be the among the primary drivers behind the state's sweeping goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels within 12 years. Underscoring that call to arms was the choice of venue. Nichols unveiled the fleshed-out plan at Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale during a conference held by the Climate Group, a consortium of business leaders that released its own plan for helping employers toe the green line. The meeting was attended by officials from valley giants like Apple and...

SAN FRANCISCO -- California's effort to limit vehicle emissions of gases that contribute to global warming hit a snag Friday when a federal appeals court ruled that the state and environmental groups acted too early when they sued the Bush administration in January for blocking the law. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco dismissed a lawsuit filed by California, 15 other states and five environmental groups over the Environmental Protection Agency's refusal to let the state enforce its limits on greenhouse gas fumes from new cars and trucks. The court said the Jan. 2 suit was...

One year after California Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols decided to sell off some energy stocks that showed a potential conflict of interest with her role as a state regulator, records show her diverse investment portfolio still contains many energy interests. Nichols also sold stock in a company that stands to profit from new diesel regulations that the ARB is set to adopt this fall, and other companies that have business before the board, according to financial disclosure documents filed with the Fair Political Practices Commission. But FPPC records show that she and her husband, attorney John Duam, sold...

Thus far, California’s landmark law to cut greenhouse gases from its factories and businesses—a law that has given Gov. Schwarzenegger an international image of environmental activist—has been mostly talk and little action. Rules covering perhaps 60 percent of the reductions needed to meet the targets are already in place or soon will be, the result of other laws, covering such things as renewable energy standards, energy efficiency, clean-car rules, low-carbon fuel standards and others. One key component, to cut greenhouse gases from car tailpipes, is stalled pending a federal waiver, although that permission is all but certain after President Bush...

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Saddam Hussein's unruly execution, gunbattles in Iraq and U.S. airstrikes on Somalia are increasing hostility toward America in the Arab world and deepening the Shiite-Sunni divide. The conflicts in Iraq and Somalia are not directly connected, but this week's U.S. strikes in the Horn of Africa country are feeding a fear among Sunni Muslim Arabs that a growing campaign is challenging their historic dominance of the Middle East. In Somalia, the assault is seen as coming from mainly Christian Ethiopia, whose troops swept in to topple the hard-line Islamic Sunni group that had seized control of...

Three months after his initial choice of an industry lobbyist was condemned by environmentalists and rejected by Democratic legislators, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday appointed a respected air-quality scientist to chair the California Air Resources Board. The Republican governor's choice of Democrat Robert F. Sawyer — a UC Berkeley emeritus energy professor who has been active on air-quality issues for decades — is not expected to generate any significant opposition from environmental groups or the Legislature. The appointment of Sawyer, 70, must be confirmed by the state Senate. The job pays $117,818 a year. "I am honored Gov. Schwarzenegger has...