Maverick Republican John McCain dies aged 81

Washington : US Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who ran for president in 2008 as a maverick Republican and became a prominent critic of President Donald Trump, died on Saturday. He was 81. An Arizona senator for more than three decades, McCain had been suffering from brain cancer since July 2017 and had not been at the U.S. Capitol this year.

He died on Saturday afternoon at his ranch in Arizona with his wife Cindy and other family members at his bedside. McCain frequently battled with Trump and his family has said he did not want the president to attend his funeral. Flags flew at half-staff at the White House on Sunday. Trump has tweeted his “deepest sympathies and respect” to McCain’s family, although he added no words of praise for McCain himself.

All five living former presidents — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — paid tribute to McCain’s courage and character. McCain will lie in state in the Arizona Capitol on Wednesday and also in the Capitol rotunda in Washington, DC. Alternatively affable and cantankerous, McCain had been in the public eye since the 1960s when, as a naval aviator, he was shot down during the Vietnam War and tortured by his North Vietnamese Communist captors.