NEWS OF THE DAY
From Across the Nation
Foreign policy: President Trump’s new national security adviser said Thursday that he wants to reduce the White House foreign policy staff by half. Robert O’Brien said that during the Obama administration the number of staffers swelled to more than 100. He told employees at a National Security Council town hall late Thursday that he wants to bring the staff level back to where it was when Condoleezza Rice was national security adviser for President George W. Bush. “That was about 100 staffers to give policy advice to the president and to help implement his decisions,” O’Brien said on Fox News.
Space walk: Space station astronauts ventured out Friday on their second spacewalk this week to swap more batteries. As Andrew Morgan and Christina Koch emerged from the International Space Station, NASA announced the death of the world’s first spacewalker, Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov at age 85. His 12minute spacewalk on March 18, 1965, preceded the first U.S. spacewalk by Ed White by less than three months. “A tribute to Leonov as today is a spacewalk,” Mission Control in Houston reported. Morgan and Koch swiftly continued their work to replace decadeold batteries in the station’s solar power network with new and improved lithiumion versions.
Fox anchor quits: Shepard Smith, whose newscast on Fox News Channel seemed increasingly an outlier on an outlet dominated by supporters of President Trump, abruptly quit after signing off his final newscast in New York on Friday. Smith, who was one of Fox News Channel’s original hires in 1996, had signed a contract extension last spring. Smith said he had asked the network to let him out of his deal and it had agreed. On his afternoon newscast, Smith had frequently given tough reports debunking statements made by Trump and his conservative supporters — even the Fox News opinion hosts that rule the network’s primetime lineup. Smith’s work was most prominently cited by the network when it received criticism for being too partisan. Smith, 55, said he is not retiring, although his agreement with Fox may forbid him from working elsewhere.
Homeland Security chief: President Trump announced Friday the departure of Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary for the Department of Homeland Security who spent his sixmonth tenure trying to curb a surge of asylumseekers at the southwestern border while managing a turbulent relationship with a president intent on restricting immigration. He took over in April after Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen quit, and he was the fourth person to lead the department in two years.
Hefty avocado: A Hawaii family has won a place with the Guinness World Records for the world’s heaviest avocado. The Pokini family from the island of Maui received the Guinness certificate this week for the avocado weighing 5.6 pounds, The Maui News reported Thursday. The average avocado weighs about 6 ounces, according to Guinness officials.
Chronicle News Services