WASHINGTON: Donald Trump has sacked an aide who said cancer-stricken Senator John McCain’s opposition to a presidential nominee did not matter because “he’s dying anyway,” the White House announced Tuesday.
The White House was roiled by bipartisan fury over the remark attributed to Kelly Sadler in May.
“Kelly Sadler is no longer employed within the Executive Office of the President,” read a brief statement by deputy White House spokesman Raj Shah.
McCain, 81, had indicated he opposed the nomination of now CIA Director nominee Gina Haspel over her role in enhanced interrogation techniques under president George W. Bush.
The Arizona senator, who was held prisoner and tortured during the Vietnam War, is battling brain cancer.
CNN had quoted a White House official as saying Sadler, speaking at a staff meeting, meant the comment as a joke but that it flopped.
Another extraordinary attack against McCain that stunned Washington came around the same time from a fellow veteran, retired US Air Force lieutenant general Thomas McInerney, who said torture works because it made McCain spill sensitive information to his captors during his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
The attacks, remarkable for their bluntness, triggered swift reaction from across the political spectrum, with lawmakers demanding an apology from Trump that never came.
Meghan McCain, a conservative commentator on ABC’s popular morning talk show “The View,” delivered an eloquent defense of her father, who is battling brain cancer at home in Arizona.
“I don’t understand what kind of environment you’re working in when that would be acceptable and then you can come to work the next day and still have a job,” she said at the time.
Her father is “all about character and bipartisanship and something greater than yourself,” Meghan McCain said, before adding a stinging message to the critics: “Nobody’s going to remember you.”
Members of Congress also rallied behind their ailing, war-hero colleague.
Trump, for his part, once mocked McCain’s war service, saying during the presidential campaign that “I like people that weren’t captured.”
Trump fires aide who joked about ‘dying’ war hero John McCain
Trump fires aide who joked about ‘dying’ war hero John McCain
- Kelly Sadler is no longer employed within the Executive Office of the President
- Lawmakers demanding an apology from Trump that never came
UK police to arrest those chanting ‘globalize the intifada’
- Pro-Palestinian groups say the move will infringe on the right to protest and misunderstands the meaning of the word
- UK police say the context surrounding the chants has changed after the Bondi Beach attack
LONDON: People publicly chanting pro-Palestinian calls to “globalize the intifada” will be arrested, UK police warned Wednesday, saying the “context had changed” in the wake of Australia’s Bondi Beach attack.
The announcement by the police forces of London and the northwest English city of Manchester swiftly prompted accusations of political repression by some campaigners.
The move follows father-and-son gunmen killing 15 people Sunday at a Hanukkah festival on the Sydney beach and an October attack on a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
“We know communities are concerned about placards and chants such as ‘globalize the intifada’,” the UK capital’s Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police said in a joint statement vowing to “be more assertive.”
“Violent acts have taken place, the context has changed — words have meaning and consequence. We will act decisively and make arrests.”
Jewish groups welcomed the announcement, with the UK’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis calling it “an important step toward challenging the hateful rhetoric we have seen on our streets, which has inspired acts of violence and terror.”
But Ben Jamal, from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said in a statement that it infringes on the right to protest.
“The statement by the Met and GMP marks another low in the political repression of protest for Palestinian rights,” he said, ahead of a planned central London pro-Palestinian protest Wednesday evening.
He criticized the lack of consultation over the move, adding “the Arabic word intifada means shaking off or uprising against injustice.”
‘Sickening’
“It came to prominence during the first intifada which was overwhelmingly marked by peaceful protest that was brutally repressed by the Israeli state,” Jamal said.
The intifada refers to Palestinian uprisings against Israel. The first raged from 1987 to 1993, while the second flared between 2000 and 2005.
UK police have already stepped up security around the country’s synagogues, Jewish schools and community hubs in the wake of this year’s violent incidents.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar urged Australia to act against a “surge” of antisemitism after Sunday’s atrocity, echoing similar previous demands aimed at Britain.
In a social media post, Saar branded slogans heard at pro-Palestinian protests such as “Globalize the Intifada” “Death to the IDF,” the Israeli military, as antisemitic and violent incitement.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose wife is Jewish, denounced the weekend gun rampage in Australia as “sickening,” saying it was “an antisemitic terrorist attack against Jewish families.”
Chief prosecutor Lionel Idan said Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was “already working closely with police and communities to identify, charge and prosecute antisemitic hate crimes.”
“We will always look at ways we can do more,” he added.
Hate crime referrals and completed prosecutions rose by 17 percent to 15,561 in the year to June 2025, according to the CPS.
