Ebola outbreak spreads to Nigeria

Ebola outbreak spreads to Nigeria

ABUJA, Nigeria

An Ebola outbreak that has left more than 660 people dead across West Africa has spread to the continent’s most-populous nation after a Liberian man with a high fever vomited aboard an airplane to Nigeria and then died there, officials said Friday.

The 40-year-old man had lost his sister recently to Ebola in Liberia, health officials there said. It was not immediately clear how he managed to board a flight, but he was moved into an isolation ward upon arrival in Nigeria on Tuesday and died Friday.

Nigerian Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said it was the first case of Ebola to be confirmed in Nigeria since the current outbreak emerged this year. The disease already has hit Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

McCain: Execution of man was torture

TUCSON, Ariz.

U.S. Sen. John McCain says the execution of an Arizona inmate that lasted two hours was torture.

The Republican who represents the conservative state told Politico that he supports capital punishment for certain crimes but felt Wednesday’s execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood was a “bollocks-upped situation.”

The execution brought new attention to the death- penalty debate in the U.S. as opponents said it was proof that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment.

Arizona lawmakers, however, say the debate is not likely to have an impact on practices in the state.

Sheriff: 300 homes burned in wildfire

TWISP, Wash.

About 300 homes — twice as many as previously estimated — have burned in the largest recorded wildfire in Washington state history, a county sheriff said Friday.

Officials had placed the number of homes destroyed at 150 in north-central Washington’s Carlton fire complex. But Okanogan County Sheriff Frank Rogers said he knew that figure would rise because crews hadn’t been able to reach some of the burned areas.

Teams converge on plane-crash site

PARIS

Aviation experts, criminal investigators and soldiers began converging Friday on an isolated patch of restive Mali to search for clues that might explain why an Air Algerie jetliner fell from the sky in a storm and apparently disintegrated on impact.

French authorities said the catastrophe probably was the result of extreme bad weather, but they refused to exclude other possibilities, such as terrorism, without a full investigation. All 118 people aboard the plane were killed.

The loss of flight 5017 wiped out whole families. Nearly half of the dead were French. The passenger list also included other Europeans, Canadians and Africans. The six crew members were Spanish.

Man, 80, fatally shoots burglar

LONG BEACH, Calif.

Prosecutors Friday were waiting for the results of a police investigation into the killing of a burglar by an 80-year-old California home-owner who says he shot the woman in the back as she fled his home and ran down an alley, the district attorney’s office said.

Long Beach resident Tom Greer, 80, told KNBC-TV that the burglar had said she was pregnant and asked Greer not to fire, but he shot her twice in the back anyway.

An autopsy later found that Andrea Miller, 28, was not pregnant, said coroner’s spokesman Ed Winter.

Prosecutors filed murder, burglary, robbery and weapons charges against Gus Adams, 26, a suspected accomplice of Miller’s. He was being held on bail of more than $1 million.

Associated Press