they were working with afghan commandos targeting the top leader of a terrorist group, which is an isis affiliate in afghanistan. it s unclear if that terrorist leader was killed. the rangers were sent in by helicopter near the spot where the u.s. dropped one of its most powerful bops tmb two weeks ago. they say within minutes they became under heavy fire and it took drone strikes and rangers to get them. and president trump now has 66 positions waiting for confirmation. it barely puts a dent in the 556 key political positions that are still waiting to be filled. all of that absence has career government workers waiting for direction.
that they have? at the moment it s very much in the balance. one of the things that have been agreed was that one of the principal houthi supporters the ousted president would also leave the country and the army there that had been loyal to him, would also put down their weapons. so all of this at the moment john is very much something that could change to this day. but the understanding so far has been that these air strikes will end. and president hadi of yemen addressing his people this morning saying he will come back to yemen and they will hope to rebuild the country and heal the wounds that have occurred over the past few weeks, john. with the situation over the air and the ground the complicated nature of the relationships certainly remain. nic robertson, thank you so much. as we said the bops may have stopped falling on yemeni territory but a tense story
congressman. let me play a little bit of what several members of congress had to say a short time ago regarding the shots fired near the capitol. let s listen in, please. how close did they sound? we were just in the grass out here walking towards sounded like it was right outside of did you see where they were coming from, a car or anything? no. they made us all come back. all i saw were police officers and police vehicles. i didn t see any other i m sorry, you were all walking from the capitol. we saw people drop down to it the ground, not shot. just dropped down. there were already police cars going by us before we heard the bops. there might have been pops before. i don t know that they were shots. they just sounded like pops to me. the cops said get behind this car. we did that.
replaced on this blowout preventer that maybe weren t replaced. i mean, this stuff makes people crazy. it s maddening. did you see this interview i did with mike mason earlier today? who has blown the whistle on bp in the past and told me essentially that they lie and they cheat, especially in their testing of their blowout preventers. let s listen to a little piece of this, and then i want to get your reaction on the back side. they re supposed to pressure up to 5,000 psi on all the different valves, rams, other components of the bops. and what they would do is they were supposed to pressure up on them for five minutes. and what they would do with the paper chart that they use, it would be kind of like a seismograph chart type thing where the ink pen would go on the paper. right. yes. and what they would do is pressure up for 10, 20, 30 seconds and see that it was holding at 5,000, and they would take their finger and move the chart five minutes, and then
with this warning, the stlis delay from anchorage is longer than usual. mr. mason, thank you for joining us. thank you, keith. explain briefly how a blowout reventer works and what testing tells them before you install them? well, blowout preventer works in two different ways. one, to sheer the well off in if the primary way doesn t work which is to seal the pipe off. and to test the b.o.p.s is what they call an integrity test to see if they hold up to the pressures. what exactly is the claim you ve made about the testing that bp and its contractors have done on the b.o.p.s? on the blowout preventers? well, when they test the b.o.p.s they re supposed to hold each test for 5 minutes at 5,000 psi. to cut corners they hold the test for 30 seconds or so on each one and have a spin chart with an ink pen on the spin