BARACK OBAMA has chosen former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle for the key post of health and human services secretary, according to Democratic sources.
The news follows reports that the president-elect is poised to name Eric Holder, a deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, as the United States's first African-American attorney general.
Mr Daschle has been a long-standing political supporter of Mr Obama, who recruited many of the former South Dakota senator's staff after Mr Daschle lost his seat in 2004.
If Mr Holder (57) is appointed attorney general, he could face questions during Senate confirmation hearings over his role in approving Mr Clinton's pardon for Marc Rich, a fugitive financier.
The lawyer, who headed Mr Obama's vice-presidential vetting team, has been a harsh critic of the Bush administration's detention and torture of suspected terrorists.
"Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the war on terror have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe," Mr Holder told the American Constitutional Society in June.
"For the sake of our safety and security, and because it is the right thing to do, the next president must move immediately to reclaim America's standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights," he said.
Mr Holder has not always been so protective of constitutional rights, however. He supported the Patriot Act, which gave the US government sweeping new powers after the September 2001 terrorist attacks. "We're dealing with a different world now," he said in June 2002. "Everybody should remember those pictures that we saw on September 11th. The World Trade Center aflame, the pictures of the Pentagon, and any time some petty bureaucrat decides that his or her little piece of turf is being invaded, get rid of that person.
"Those are the kinds of things we have to do."
In its first response yesterday to Mr Obama's election victory, al-Qaeda has made clear that it does not believe the new president represents a change in US policies.
Ayman al-Zawahri, who is believed to be the organisation's second most powerful figure, said in a message on militant websites, that Mr Obama is "the direct opposite of honourable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American civil rights leader.
Mr Zawahri describes Mr Obama, along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as "house negroes". The message features footage of Malcolm X explaining the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters' houses were more servile than those who worked in the fields.
"America has put on a new face, but its heart full of hate, mind drowning in greed and spirit which spreads evil, murder, repression and despotism, continue to be the same as always," he said. Mr Obama's plan to shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan would fail because Afghans would resist US forces. "Be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them," he continued.
Meanwhile, Democratic hopes of winning a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority in the Senate have received a boost with the defeat of veteran Alaskan Republican Ted Stevens by Anchorage mayor Mark Begich.
Mr Begich defeated Mr Stevens, who was convicted last month of seven fraud charges, by a 3,724- vote margin after absentee and early votes were counted. The Alaska victory gives Democrats their 58th Senate seat, with the party still awaiting a pending recount in Minnesota and a run-off for a Republican-held Senate seat in Georgia next month.