In the Nation

WASHINGTON - A $7,000 tax mistake shouldn't disqualify Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius from serving as the nation's top health official, a key Republican senator said yesterday.

Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a conference call that he felt Sebelius made "a good-faith effort" to pay her taxes correctly in the first place, and that errors found in a recent review should not count against her. She recently corrected three years of returns and paid more than $7,000 in back taxes.

Grassley said he was reserving judgment on Sebelius, the Kansas governor, until confirmation hearings but indicated that taxes would not be the deciding factor for him. The committee holds a hearing today on her nomination. - AP

BOSTON - President Obama's Kenyan aunt will remain in the United States until at least next year as she awaits a chance to make her case before an immigration judge in her bid for asylum.

At a closed hearing yesterday in U.S. Immigration Court in Boston, a judge set Zeituni Onyango's case to be heard next Feb. 4. Onyango, 56, who declined to comment to reporters, first applied for asylum in 2002, but her request was rejected and she was ordered deported in 2004. She did not leave the country and continued to live in public housing in Boston.

In December, a judge suspended her deportation order and reopened her asylum case. The president has said that he did not know that Onyango, the half-sister of his late father, was living here illegally and that he believed laws covering the situation should be followed. - AP

CLEVELAND - John Demjanjunk, an Ohioan with a reputed Nazi past, asked the United States yesterday to block his deportation to Germany, citing humanitarian reasons.

Demjanjuk, who turns 89 tomorrow, is charged in an arrest warrant in Germany with 29,000 counts of acting as an accessory to murder while working as a Nazi death-camp guard during World War II.

His request, filed yesterday with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, says that he is in poor physical condition and that being sent to Germany would be inappropriate and degrading treatment.

Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in 1988 after being convicted in Israel for war crimes. In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court determined he was not the notorious Treblinka death-camp guard Ivan the Terrible, and he was sent home to a suburb of Cleveland. The charges now place him as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. - AP

Most Judiciary Committee Republicans boycotted yesterday's confirmation hearing for President Obama's first judicial nominee, allowing Democrats to pitch softballs to U.S. District Judge David Hamilton of Indiana in his quest for a seat on the Chicago-based appeals court. Ranking Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said it was "very distasteful" that Republicans were not given adequate preparation time.