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Washington/Warsaw: Samantha Power, who resigned as an adviser to President-elect Barack Obama after calling his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton a "monster", is working on his transition team for the State Department, which Clinton is expected to lead.
Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a professor at Harvard University, stepped down as a foreign policy adviser to then presidential candidate Obama in March, calling her comment printed in The Scotsman newspaper "inexcusable".
The British newspaper quoted Power as saying of Clinton: "She is a monster, too - that is off the record - she is stooping to anything."
Obama won the Democratic Party's presidential nomination after a long and bitter primary battle against Clinton, a US senator from New York and the wife of former US President Bill Clinton. He then defeated Arizona Republican Senator John McCain in the November 4 election and will take office on January 20.
Policies
As he prepares to take power, Obama has named teams to study the operations and policies of major US agencies. His transition Website (http://change.gov/) lists Power as a member of the group that is reviewing the State Department.
A Democratic official last week said Obama was on track to nominate Clinton to be secretary of state. A State Department spokesman had no comment on the matter and referred questions to the Obama transition office.
Obama's transition office had no immediate comment on the issue.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday he was encouraged by Obama's view of the global problem of climate change, hailing a new attitude from the United States.
"With some satisfaction I noted the recent statements of president-elect Obama and our discussions on the changing attitude of the United States on global warming," the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza quoted Ban as saying in an interview published Saturday.
Ban's comments came ahead of the opening of the 14th UN climate conference on Monday in the city of Poznan, in western Poland. Ban said he was pleased to see that Obama considered the UN climate negotiations a priority.
Sales soar: Fortune cookie
Want an example of the change Barack Obama is bringing to the country? Check out cookie sales at Baby Boomers Cafe in Des Moines.
Ever since word spread about the president-elect and his family's fondness for Baby Boomers' chocolate chunk cookies, the small downtown restaurant can't bake them fast enough.
"Two months ago I was giving these cookies away," said co-owner Rodney Maxfield. "Now, it's like, 'I need two dozen cookies. I need four-dozen cookies.'" The Obamas were frequent visitors to the cafe in the summer of 2007.
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