RFE/RL : U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (Republican-Texas) says he is holding up the confirmation of the next Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief in order to pressure President Joe Biden to stop Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. “I’ll release my hold when the Biden admin meets its legal obligation to report and sanction the ships and companies building [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s pipeline,” Cruz said in a tweet on March 6 as he confirmed an earlier Bloomberg story. Biden in January picked William Burns, a career Foreign Service officer who served as ambassador to Russia in the 2000s, to be the next head of the CIA.
