LAWMAKERS SEEK ANSWERS FROM DEA ON OPIOIDS

Frustrated lawmakers threatened Wednesday to subpoena information from the Drug Enforcement Administration, accusing the agency of delaying responses to their questions about wholesale drug distributors that poured millions of pain pills into West Virginia.

Raising his voice, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, promised to “bring the wrath of this committee down on the DEA.” The delays, he said, “are inexcusable when people are dying every day from opioid overdoses.

Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which he leads, has been waiting for six months for information from DEA on which companies supplied 9 million pain pills to a small pharmacy in Kermit, W.Va., a town with 392 residents, over a two-year period.

Trump opposes massive California water project.

SAN FRANCISCO»

A massive California water project has drawn opposition from the Trump administration, the government said Wednesday, the latest and one of the most serious blows to Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to re-engineer the state’s water system by building two giant tunnels.

“The Trump administration did not fund the project and chose to not move forward with it,” Russell Newell, deputy communications director for the U.S. Interior Department, said in an email.

Asked if that meant the Trump administration did not support California’s tunnels project, Newell said yes. While the plan is a state initiative, it would intersect with existing state and federal water projects and would require approval from the Interior Department to move ahead.

Brown wants California water agencies to pay the $16 billion price tag to build two, 35-milelong tunnels to divert part of the state’s largest river, the Sacramento, to supply water to the San Francisco Bay Area and central and Southern California.

But the plan has run into its biggest obstacles yet in recent weeks, when two key water districts opted not to help fund it. While the federal government was never supposed to bear the cost of the project, the Obama administration spent millions planning for it.

U.S. ambassador to U.N. evacuated from volatile camp.

SUDAN» The U.S. ambassador SOUTH to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, was evacuated from a U.N. camp for displaced people Wednesday because of a demonstration against President Salva Kiir, witnesses said.

Shortly after Haley left the camp, U.N. security guards fired tear gas to disperse the crowd of more than 100 residents who looted and destroyed the office of a charity operating there, an aid worker at the camp said. The aid worker spoke on condition of anonymity out of safety fears.

Haley, in the middle of a threecountry African visit, met earlier Wednesday with Kiir over the country’s long civil war. Speaking later to U.N. station Radio Miraya, Haley said she warned Kiir that the U.S. no longer trusted South Sudan’s government.

Opposition leader urges boycott on eve of repeat vote.

KENYA» The leader of NAIROBI,

Kenya’s main opposition party urged his supporters to boycott a rerun of the disputed presidential election scheduled for Thursday amid rising political tensions and fears of violence.

Jubilant supporters of President Uhuru Kenyatta, who seeks a second term, celebrated the news that the election would proceed after a last-minute petition to the Supreme Court seeking to postpone the vote couldn’t go forward. Kenyatta said security forces will be deployed nationwide to ensure order, and he urged Kenyans to vote while respecting the rights of those who don’t.

Opposition leader Raila Odinga, called on his political coalition to become a “resistance movement,” accusing the president of moving a country known for relative stability and openness toward authoritarian rule.