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• Brennan, President Barack Obama's top counterterror adviser, was grilled for more than three hours Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the drone program he leads, as well as on the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques during the Bush administration, which he denounced, and on leaks of classified information to the media, which Brennan vehemently denied being a part of.
• Despite Brennan's wide-ranging testimony and the White House's release of a top secret memo explaining its legal rationale for the strikes just hours before the confirmation hearing began, some senators afterward said it was time to bring the drone program into the open.
• In a hearing that was interrupted by anti-drone protests that brought it to a brief halt at the outset, Brennan told the committee that missile strikes by the unmanned drones are used only against targets planning to carry out attacks against the United States, never as retribution for an earlier one.
• "Nothing could be further from the truth," he declared.
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• PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea (AP) -- A mob stripped, tortured and bound a woman accused of witchcraft, then burned her alive in front of hundreds of horrified witnesses in a Papua New Guinea town, police said Friday. It was the latest sorcery-related killing in this South Pacific island nation.
• Bystanders, including many children, watched and some took photographs of Wednesday's brutal slaying. Grisly pictures were published on the front pages of the country's biggest circulating newspapers, The National and Post-Courier, while the prime minister, police and diplomats condemned the killing.
• In rural Papua New Guinea, witchcraft is often blamed for unexplained misfortunes. Sorcery has traditionally been countered by sorcery, but responses to allegations of witchcraft have become increasingly violent in recent years.
• Kepari Leniata, a 20-year-old mother, had been accused of sorcery by relatives of a 6-year-old boy who died in the hospital the day before.
• She was tortured with a hot iron rod, bound, doused in gasoline, and then set alight on a pile of car tires and trash in the Western Highlands provincial capital of Mount Hagen, national police spokesman Dominic Kakas said.
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