The U.S. accepted the remains of the 1st Cavalry Division soldier Thursday during a repatriation ceremony hosted by the South Korean military and United Nations Command at Yongsan Garrison.

Gov. Roy Cooper has ordered that all U.S. flags at state facilities be lowered to half-staff in remembrance of a North Carolina soldier killed in Afghanistan.

Trump administration officials, anticipating the defeat of the Islamic State in its de facto Syrian capital of Raqqa, are planning for what they see as the next stage of the war.

The White House says President Donald Trump will sign a bill Friday to make it easier to fire Department of Veterans Affairs employees.

A Virginia man caught with $16,500 in cash in his carry-on luggage was charged Thursday with transmitting top-secret documents to an apparent Chinese agent.

A North Carolina man who fired an assault rifle inside a District of Columbia restaurant during his investigation of a conspiracy theory dubbed "pizzagate" was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison.

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Hundreds of mourners gathered Thursday to celebrate the life of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was detained in North Korea for over a year and died shortly after being returned home to Ohio in a coma.

The House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee’s portion of the fiscal 2018 defense authorization bill, released on Tuesday, calls for a separate service dedicated to defending space, a responsibility that currently falls under the Air Force’s purview.

A psychologist who helped design the CIA's harsh interrogation methods in the war on terror has said his participation in the program that involved torturing suspects caused him "great, soulful torment."

President Donald Trump appeared to cast doubt on the assessment of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies that blame Russia for election meddling, questioning Thursday why the Obama administration didn't try to stop it.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi defended her leadership on Thursday in the face of needling from President Donald Trump and grumbling from fellow House Democrats exasperated after a high-profile special election loss.

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Senate Republicans released their long-awaited bill Thursday to dismantle much of Barack Obama's health care law, proposing to cut Medicaid for low-income Americans and erase tax boosts that Obama imposed on high-earners and medical companies to finance his expansion of coverage.

Military update

Special to Stars and Stripes

A Canadian man from Tunisia shouted in Arabic before stabbing a police officer in the neck at a Michigan airport, and made reference to people being killed overseas during the attack that's now being investigated as an act of terrorism, federal and court officials said.

A recent insurance study links increased car crash claims to legalized recreational marijuana. The Highway Loss Data Institute, a leading insurance research group, said in study results released Thursday that collision claims in Colorado, Washington, and Oregon went up 2.7 percent in the years since legal recreational marijuana sales began when compared with surrounding states.

Gulf Coast states were in for a third day of rough weather as Tropical Storm Cindy sloshed ashore early Thursday in southwestern Louisiana.

A questionable uniform choice by the Afghan military has probably cost taxpayers an unnecessary $28 million since 2008, according to a new watchdog report released Tuesday.

An RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft crashed Wednesday in an uninhabited area in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range.

James Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral and the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, believes that several factors led to the collision between a container ship at the USS Fitzgerald — and that these factors could result in possible punishment for the captain of the Navy vessel.

Lawyers for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl said Wednesday they want to ask prospective jurors in the soldier’s court-martial about their opinions on President Donald Trump to ensure their client receives a fair trial.

When President Donald Trump signs a bill into law creating more repercussions and a faster firing process for VA employees, Mike and Sarah Verardo said the moment will signal a promise kept.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is reaching out to Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin for help to stop the deportation of veterans.

Army Spc. Brian Arsenault, dreamed of swimming with sharks when he finished serving his country. Thought the 28-year-old never got that chance, the soldier's memory continues to live on through a shark named in his honor.

The Army will deploy hundreds of paratroopers to the Baltics this fall to allay concerns among some allies that a large-scale Russian war game scheduled to commence in September could serve as a pretext for aggression in the region.

Col. Kirk R. Slaughter, 49, of Lyons, Neb., was remembered as a positive influence who loved his wife and four kids, was big into sports, and had a “thousand-watt smile” and infectious laugh.

The National Guard plans to drop funding for its Operation Snowbird visiting-unit training program, operated at Davis-Monthan Air Force base by the Air National Guard 162nd Wing, according to court documents.

Trump, no stranger to victory laps, seemed poised to turn his visit to a battleground state he captured in November into a celebration of his resilience despite the cloud of investigations that has enveloped his administration.

The Ocean Springs police officer who works with a drug-sniffing dog is being called up for military duty and Chief Mark Dunston said the 2 ½-year- old dog, Axel, would be better off going to a new handler.

Officials say a pilot ejected from an F-16 fighter jet that caught fire and crashed during takeoff from Ellington Airport in Houston while on a training flight.

Republicans on a key House panel Wednesday agreed on a budget outline that would give the military more money than President Donald Trump requested while paving the way for Congress to tackle an overhaul of the tax code this fall.

The contraction at Interior, which manages a fifth of all U.S. land, is one of several plans to downsize the number of employees across the government since President Donald Trump took office.

A sinister portrait of Russia's cyberattacks on the U.S. emerged Wednesday as current and former U.S. officials told Congress Moscow stockpiled stolen information and selectively disseminated it during the 2016 presidential campaign to undermine the American political process.

The Senate proposal largely mirrors the House measure with some significant differences, according to a discussion draft circulating Wednesday among aides and lobbyists.

While serving as an Army infantryman in Iraq, Richard Martinez III’s fellow soldiers laughed when he said he planned to go to Harvard University one day. They couldn’t imagine a soldier also being a scholar. Martinez never doubted that he could be both.

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn may have aided a Russian company the U.S. government opposed during a 2015 visit to Saudi Arabia in which he pushed to be part of an ambitious nuclear-power project, raising new questions about his previously undisclosed trip.

A boy on an Alabama beach was struck and killed Wednesday by a log washed ashore by storm surge from Tropical Storm Cindy, which spun bands of severe weather ashore from the Florida panhandle to east Texas as it churned ever closer to the Gulf coast.

About 5,000 mourners attended Wednesday's funeral of a Muslim girl whose beating death, blamed by police on a motorist's road rage, has some people in her community fearing for their safety.

A Canadian man shouted in Arabic before stabbing a police officer in the neck at the Flint airport on Wednesday, and referenced people being killed overseas during the attack that's now being investigated as an act of terrorism, federal officials said.

The U.S. pushed China Wednesday to rein in companies that deal with North Korea after President Donald Trump tweeted ahead of the high-level talks that Beijing's efforts to sway its wayward ally weren't working.

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Adrift and nearly out of money after three months of living out of his van in the Washington area, the gunman who shot a top House Republican and four others on a Virginia baseball field didn't have any concrete plans to inflict violence on the Republicans he loathed, FBI officials said Wednesday.

When a Kansas strip-mall bank with possible mob ties folded in the mid-1980s, federal authorities investigated whether a shareholder, Iranian-born aviation magnate Farhad Azima, should face criminal charges.

The White House plans to privately negotiate a massive overhaul of the tax system with Republican leaders in Congress, possibly giving rank-and-file members little if any say over the finished product, according to a top aide to President Donald Trump.

The key question in the case of Keith Barry is whether the Navy’s top lawyer Vice Adm. James Crawford III and Rear Adm. Patrick Lorge illegally conspired against the SEAL.

President Donald Trump's choice for deputy defense secretary had a rocky confirmation hearing Tuesday, with Sen. John McCain at one point threatening to withhold his nomination from a vote.

Republicans hoped to extend their hold on the district, where Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in November by more than 18 percentage points.

The measure would peel away much of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul and leave government with a more limited role in providing coverage and helping people afford it.

The report by the Center for Public Integrity comes as the lab is under orders to ramp up production of the plutonium “pits” that serve as triggers for nuclear bombs.

The goal, Forrest Fenn has said, was to get people off the couch and into the wilderness, and tens of thousands have followed suit, writing the man with tales of their harrowing attempts and regretful failures.

Tropical Storm Cindy has formed in the Gulf of Mexico and is threatening to spread heavy rain across a wide area of the central Gulf coast. It's the third tropical storm of 2017.

Sen. John McCain said Tuesday that Americans who are "stupid" enough to still want to travel to North Korea should be required to sign a waiver absolving the U.S. government of any blame should they be harmed while there.

The facilities are either vacant or mostly vacant, according to a VA news release. Some of the buildings will be demolished, while others will be prepared for a different use. VA Secretary David Shulkin said the closures would come “as swiftly as possible.”

Islamic leaders are questioning Virginia detectives' insistence that the beating death of a teenage Muslim girl appears to have been a case of road rage, saying the attack looks all too much like a hate crime.

The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on more Russian companies and individuals as well as separatists in rebel-held areas of eastern Ukraine as President Donald Trump held White House talks with Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko.

The State Foundation on Culture and the Arts will appoint an artist to design and build a World War II Filipino Veterans Monument under a bill signed into law by Gov. David Ige on Monday.

Tick numbers are on the rise across New England this spring, raising the prospect of an increase in Lyme and other diseases associated with the blood suckers later this year.

Georgia voters steadily streamed into suburban Atlanta polling places Tuesday to decide the most expensive House race in U.S. history and put weeks of television ads, phone calls and ringing doorbells behind them.

A gate inspection Thursday at Tinker Air Force Base revealed 715 pounds of raw marijuana as well as thousands of containers of marijuana oil.

ANALYSIS

The death of 22-year-old Otto Warmbier in Ohio on Monday has dashed any hopes of a quick detente between the U.S. and North Korea.

Mary Matiella, a native of Southern Arizona, made her announcement during the weekly Democrats of Greater Tucson meeting, telling the audience she was the best candidate to face McSally next year in the November general election.

Headquartered in Bethesda, Lockheed Martin is one of the top defense contractors in the world and showed off a range of products in its own pavilion at the air show.

ANALYSIS

What happened to Otto Warmbier, an American college student who died just days after North Korea released him from detention in a coma, is difficult to make sense of.

A man said to be a former decorated U.S. Navy SEAL and CIA special agent has been arrested in connection with an ongoing national federal marijuana smuggling investigation.

A bipartisan group of policy experts issued an open letter Monday urging members of Congress to drop their opposition to what would be the first round of BRAC in more than a decade, saying it could save billions of Pentagon dollars and offset spending on other military needs.

The commander of the U.S. Southern Command has ordered an investigation into claims that somebody was illegally recording attorney-client meetings at Guantanamo from September 2015 to April 2017, a discovery that prompted a general to warn war court defense attorneys that their privileged communications were at risk.

Gallery

Some 75 objects were found in a collector's home in Beccar, a suburb north of Buenos Aires, and authorities say they suspect they are originals that belonged to high-ranking Nazis in Germany during World War II.

The precision and volume of the information, including dozens of data points on individual Republicans, Democrats and independent voters, highlights the rising sophistication of the data-mining efforts that have become central to modern political campaigns.

The North Korean delegation had been attending the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities at the United Nations. According to a U.S. official who asked not to be named, members of the group had made a trip to Arizona in an attempt to buy technology-related items that are possibly banned under sanctions law.

Two top House Democrats are questioning whether Michael Flynn failed to report a 2015 trip to the Middle East to federal security clearance investigators, a potential omission that could add to the legal jeopardy President Donald Trump's former national security adviser faces over the truthfulness of his statements to authorities and on government documents.

The Trump administration is seeking to spur negotiations to end Venezuela's political crisis, pressing Western Hemisphere nations meeting in Mexico this week to set up a mechanism for new talks to resolve a threat to regional stability.

Across the country, scientists — card-carrying members of an elite that prizes expertise — are exiting their ivory towers to enter the political fray.

The U.S. Navy has found $500 million to buy a second Littoral Combat Ship in next year's budget after scrounging that was required because the vessel was left out of the Trump administration's proposed budget sent to Congress last month.

Hamilton County 's Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco's office released a statement saying Otto Warmbier's family objected to an autopsy so only an external exam of his body was done.

A 16-year-old boy who was fatally mauled by a black bear during a weekend mountain race in Alaska reportedly called his brother while he was being chased by the animal in a rare predatory attack, a race official said Monday.

The Supreme Court declared Monday that it will consider whether gerrymandered election maps favoring one political party over another violate the Constitution, a potentially fundamental change in the way American elections are conducted.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Monday he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming, a statement at odds with mainstream scientific consensus but in line with the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

President Donald Trump welcomed the president of Panama to the White House on Monday, pointing to the United States' role in the construction of the Panama Canal at the start of his first face-to-face meeting with the Central American leader.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law that prohibits the government from registering trademarks that "disparage" others violates the First Amendment, a decision that could impact the Washington Redskins' efforts to hang on to its controversial name.

Comedy writer and performer Bill Dana, who won stardom in the 1950s and '60s with his character Jose Jimenez, has died.

The U.S. Navy has found $500 million to buy a second Littoral Combat Ship in next year's budget after scrounging that was required because the vessel was left out of the Trump administration's proposed budget sent to Congress last month.

Sgt. Eric Houck's family stood together, embracing, on Sunday as a bugler blew taps. A member of the Gunpowder Veterans of Foreign Wars proceeded forward to hand Houck's wife, Samantha, a folded American flag.

A 19-year-old who died in the Korean War and an 18-year-old who perished on the USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941, are among five identifications announced Friday by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency for return to family.

For more than a half century, a simple headstone beneath a towering shade tree in the Parkdale Cemetery has held a place for George Anderson Coke Jr.

Lt. Gen. James Dickinson, who heads Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said the soldiers from the 100th Missile Defense Brigade in Colorado Springs exemplify his push to put the Army's missile defenses on a wartime footing.

Funeral services have been set for three U.S. soldiers from Fort Campbell who were killed in Afghanistan.

Hundreds of U.S. Navy officers and sailors have lain for decades under the anonymity of inscrutable gravestones at Mount Moriah, a 19th century cemetery whose 380 acres span Southwest Philadelphia and Yeadon Borough. For many of the dead, time wore away their names. For others, long-ago conflicts stole not only their lives but their identities, rendering them “unknown” — though not, as it turns out, for eternity.

Since the three-week exercise started June 3 at Fort McCoy, a military training center in west-central Wisconsin, the 3,000 Illinois Guard members have had to overcome a lot of obstacles. Some of the challenges, like the IED, were part of the exercise, but the soldiers have also endured hot, muggy weather and thunderstorms.

Dozens of majestic vessels from around the globe dazzled crowds Saturday as the ships sailed through Boston's inner harbor for the first time in 17 years.

The Air Force Academy plowed $2.6 million into an unprecedented public relations effort to polish its image after a series of scandals involving athletes at the school.

A voicemail message directed to Arizona Rep. Martha McSally last month warned "our sights are set on you, right between your ... eyes." She's not alone. Since the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise Wednesday, members of Congress have spoken more freely about threats of physical violence or death directed towards them.

An Army officer was ordered held on $150,000 bail for shooting and wounding a motorcyclist following a minor fender bender in the Grand Crossing neighborhood last month.

Terry Jung stood under a tent and faced a group that included community leaders, judges, politicians, businessmen and more hailing from Fayetteville, Fort Bragg and the surrounding communities. Jung, visiting from Texas, was making a pitch.

The church was having a sale in its parking lot and people had dropped off items to be sold, South Whitehall police Chief John Christman said. One of the boxes left overnight contained the suspicious item, he said.

Col. Daniel P. O’Hora, commander of the Marine Corps Engineering School aboard Camp Lejeune, was fired June 6. An investigation into O’Hora has been opened and remains ongoing.

A dozen US Navy servicemembers are safe after billowing smoke in a naval aircraft cabin prompted an emergency landing at Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport in Medford, Ore. earlier this afternoon.

Analysis | Video

The F-35 was billed as a fighter jet that could do almost everything the U.S. military desired, serving the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy – and even Britain’s Royal Air Force and Royal Navy – all in one aircraft design.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service and local police have been searching for Norfolk-based sailor Gage Brady, since his family reported him missing. Brady, 20, of the USS Wasp, was last seen on Sunday when he went to meet a friend.

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Nearly five months into his presidency, Trump flew for the first time Saturday to Camp David, the government-owned retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. A frequent weekend traveler, Trump has favored his palatial residences in Florida and New Jersey over the wooded hideaway used by many presidents for a break from Washington.

In the coming weeks, 1,600 paratroopers are expected to leave Fort Bragg, destined for missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The soldiers belong to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division. And they’ve been preparing to serve in those countries for much of the year.

For Capt. Stoney Grimes, being a paratrooper is a family business. His grandfather spent 25 years in the Army, including several in the 82nd Airborne Division. His father, also named Stoney Grimes, served with the All Americans for five years.

Terry Jung, the executive director of the Lone Survivor Foundation, was looking for support. Months after the foundation announced plans to build a retreat north of Fayetteville, Jung was at the site of the Lone Survivor Foundation’s future East Coast facility in search of something far more important than donations, he said.