War hero senator rejects CIA nominee
dent Barack Obama’s action banning torture.
Two days after taking office in 2009, Obama issued an executive order prohibiting all government employees from using any interrogation method that wasn’t spelled out in the Army Field Manual, a military guide that banned brutal interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning.
For McCain, getting the antitorture amendment passed in 2015 was personal. He was beaten and kept in solitary confinement as a prisoner of war in Vietnam in the 1960s. executive
Graham, who missed much of the Senate action this week to spend time with his friend at the McCain family home, said in an interview that it’s thanks to the Arizona senator’s work that Haspel will be required to follow the law, as she said she would do.
‘‘Senator McCain’s view of what the country’s doing won the day,’’ Graham told AP. ‘‘The reason we are where we are is from Senator McCain’s voice.’’
Haspel, the CIA’s acting director and a career intelligence officer, faced grilling at the Senate Intelligence Committee about her role overseeing some CIA operations in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Some senators asked about her morals. Haspel told them she doesn’t believe torture works.
Haspel also said she believes the US should hold itself to the moral standards outlined in the manual.
The panel is expected to send the nomination on to the full Senate in coming weeks where confirmation will be tight.
The GOP’s narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate has been further slimmed with McCain’s absence. The 81-year-old senator was diagnosed in July with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. McCain left Washington in December and hasn’t yet been able to return.
But at least one Democrat, Sen Joe Manchin of West Virginia, announced he would vote in her favour. Vice President Mike Pence can be relied on to break a tie.
Feinstein said yesterday that she will oppose the nominee, calling the interrogation program part of ‘‘one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history and it must not be repeated.’’ – AP John McCain, Republican Senator Villagers said it started with a loud rumble, then houses collapsed one by one under an approaching wall of water.
‘‘We took our children and rushed to higher ground,’’ farmer Joseph Maina told The Associated Press. Their home was submerged and their crops were washed away but, unlike dozens of others, they survived.
At least 44 were dead and another 40 were missing yesterday after a dam swollen by weeks of seasonal rains burst in Kenya’s Rift Valley, sweeping away hundreds of homes and sending people fleeing, officials said.
At least 20 of the dead were children. The estranged wife of Harvey Weinstein has said she was ‘‘terribly naive’’ not to suspect his behaviour and fears their children’s lives will be blighted forever by the scandal.
Georgina Chapman, a fashion designer, said she had been happily married and considered Weinstein to be a ‘‘wonderful partner’’ until accusations of sexual assault and harassment against him began mounting up.
Breaking her silence for the first time since the allegations began surfacing in October, Chapman wept as she discussed the couple’s children, India, seven, and Dashiell, five.
‘‘There was a part of me that was terribly naive – clearly, so naive. I have moments of rage, I have moments of confusion, I have moments of disbelief.
‘‘And I have moments when I just cry for my children. What are their lives going to be? What are people going to say to them? It’s like, they love their dad. They love him. I just can’t bear it for them,’’ Chapman told US Vogue.
She maintained that Weinstein
‘‘Many people are missing. It is a disaster,’’ said Rongai town police chief Joseph Kioko.
The bursting of the Patel Dam in Solai, Nakuru County, on Wednesday night local time, was the deadliest single incident yet in the seasonal rains that have killed more than 170 people in Kenya since March. The floods hit as the East African nation was recovering from a severe drought that affected half of the country.
Almost an entire village was swept away by silt and water from the burst dam, said Gideon Kibunja, the county police chief in charge of criminal investigations. Officials said homes over a radius of nearly 2km were submerged.
Forty people have been reported missing, Regional Commissioner Mwongo Chimwanga said, while was ‘‘a wonderful father to my kids’’ and ‘‘a wonderful partner to me’’.
She added: ‘‘That’s what makes this so incredibly painful: I had what I thought was a very happy marriage. I loved my life.’’
Asked if she was ever suspicious about the Hollywood mogul’s behaviour, she said: ‘‘Absolutely not. Never.’’
Chapman said she had stayed out of the spotlight since October out of ‘‘dignity and respect’’ for the victims.
‘‘I was so humiliated and so broken that I didn’t think it was respectful to go out. I thought, who am I to be parading around with all of this going on? It’s still so very, very raw.’’ about 40 others were rescued from the mud and taken to local hospitals.
The area has seven dams used by a commercial farm, said Keffa Mageni, an official with an advocacy group that helps to resettle displaced people. With the heavy seasonal rains the dams do not have an outlet, he said.
‘‘There are two other dams which are leaking,’’ one resident, Stephen Nganga, said.
He asked the government to investigate them for the residents’ safety.
Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiangi, visiting the scene, said the government had launched investigations to determine the stability of the other dams.
Nakuru County Governor Lee Kinyanjui said water from one of the other dams would be discharged to
She added that she ‘‘lost 10lb in five days’’ after the revelations were published, and was now seeing a therapist.
Weinstein, who entered rehab as the allegations piled up against him, has sold the family homes in the Hamptons, Connecticut and Manhattan and the couple have reportedly agreed to a US$15-20 million divorce settlement.
Chapman is moving with her children to a farm in upstate New York.
Actresses who have made allegations against Weinstein include Uma Thurman, Salma Hayek, Daryl Hannah, Angelina Jolie, Lupita Nyong’o, Gwyneth Paltrow and Rose McGowan. avoid a disaster and that a village near that dam would be evacuated.
More than 225,000 people in Kenya have been displaced from their homes since March, according to the government.
Military helicopters and personnel in the past week have been deployed to rescue people marooned by the flooding.
The dam burst has again raised concerns about the state of Kenya’s infrastructure. The National Construction Authority in the past has blamed contractors bypassing building codes to save on cost.
In April 2016 a residential building in the capital, Nairobi, collapsed during rains, killing 52 people. Last May the wall of a hospital collapsed due to rains, killing six people in Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa. – AP Weinstein has said that while his behaviour was ‘‘not without fault, there certainly was no criminality’’.
The sympathetic interview comes two days after Scarlett Johansson wore a dress by Marchesa to the Met Gala.
Chapman founded the label with Keren Craig, her business partner, in 2004, and it quickly became a red carpet staple – due in part to Weinstein’s influence.
In an article accompanying the interview, Anna Wintour, editor-inchief of US Vogue, urged sympathy for Chapman.
‘‘Georgina is essentially quite old-fashioned, and just as she was always the good daughter – she is still very close to her family – she also became the good wife,’’ Wintour wrote.
‘‘I am firmly convinced that Georgina had no idea about her husband’s behaviour; blaming her for any of it, as too many have in our gladiatorial digital age, is wrong. I believe that one should not hold a person responsible for the actions of his or her partner.
‘‘What Georgina should be receiving is our compassion and understanding.’’
– Telegraph Group Congo’s minister of health yesterday announced the first death since a new Ebola outbreak was declared in the country, as well as nine other cases of people sickened by a haemorrhagic fever that is suspected as Ebola.
Health officials declared an Ebola outbreak in the country’s northwest on Wednesday after lab tests confirmed the deadly virus in two cases from the town of Bikoro in the Equateur province. Officials from the World Health Organisation and other international health agencies are in the area to help contain the outbreak’s spread.
Seven people with a hemorrhagic fever, including two confirmed cases of Ebola, were hospitalised in Bikoro as of yesterday, according to Health Minister Oly Ilunga. The death happened overnight at a hospital in nearby Ikoko Impenge hospital that also reported four new suspected cases of Ebola, Ilunga said.
Ilunga told The Associated Press that the patient who died was a nurse. Three other nurses also were being treated for a hemorrhagic fever, he said.
The minister clarified with The Associated Press that testing still must be done in nine cases, and equipment to conduct rapid testing on the patients has been dispatched.
‘‘This situation worries us and requires a very immediate and energetic response,’’ he said at a news conference.
The two Ebola cases were confirmed as the Zaire strain after officials in the capital, Kinshasa, were alerted early this month to the deaths of 17 people from a hemorrhagic fever and travelled to the Bikoro area to perform tests.
The deaths occurred over a period of time and Ebola, which is not the only virus responsible for hemorrhagic fevers, has not been confirmed as the cause in any of the 17 cases, Ilunga said.
Bikoro Hospital director Dr Serge Ngalebato said earlier yesterday that nurses at the hospital were among the five suspected Ebola cases there.
‘‘We have isolated the patients,’’ Ngalebato said. ‘‘There are no deaths yet, but all of the sick are presenting signs of fever, diarrhoea, vomiting, abdominal pain and intense fatigue.’’
This is the ninth Ebola outbreak in Congo since 1976, when the deadly disease was first identified.
Ebola occasionally jumps to humans from animals, including bats and monkeys.
There is no specific treatment for Ebola, which is spread through the bodily fluids of people exhibiting symptoms. Without preventive measures, the virus can spread quickly between people and is fatal in up to 90 per cent of cases.
The director of the National Institute of Biological and Bacterial Research, Dr Jean Jacques Muyembe, said that health experts should be able to quickly contain this outbreak because the area is so remote.
The cases could be linked to a policeman in the Bikoro health zone who displayed symptoms of hemorrhagic fever and died in December, Muyembe said. His mother and 10 others then showed similar symptoms.
None of the Ebola outbreaks in Congo have been connected to the massive outbreak in West Africa that began in 2014. – AP