President Trump announced on Friday that the U.S. will leave 400 soldiers in Syria.
Half of the troops will serve as part of a multinational force — which could end up consisting of as many as 1,500 soldiers — in the northeastern part of the country, while the other half will be stationed at an outpost in the southeast.
On Friday, Trump denied that the decision is a reversal from his previous rhetoric, in which he said he would pull all U.S. troops from Syria. "It's a very small, tiny fraction of the people we have, and a lot of people like that idea," he said.
The decision is part of a joint plan by the U.S. and its NATO allies to assemble a "monitoring and observing force" in northeastern Syria, with the hope of providing a buffer between Turkey and U.S.-allied Syrian opposition forces, particularly Kurdish resistance forces. The remaining soldiers will attempt to prevent an Islamic State resurgence in the area.
Per The New York Times, the United States' European allies refused to deploy troops if the U.S. did not. Tim O'Donnell
Kami Rita Sherpa makes climbing Mount Everest look easy.
The 49-year-old reached the top of the world's tallest mountain for a record 24th time on Tuesday, less than a week after he last successfully conquered the peak on May 15. Kami Rita climbed Mount Everest for the first time in 1994, and told BBC News he "actually never knew that you could make a record. Had I known, I would have made a lot more summits earlier."
Sherpas not only guide people up the mountain, but also prepare everything, from setting the route to creating ladder-bridges to fixing ropes to delivering oxygen and supplies. "In every mountain, there is a goddess," Kami Rita told BBC News. "It's our responsibility to keep the goddess happy. Months before I start an ascent I start worshiping and ask for forgiveness because I will have to put my feet on her body." He doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon, saying he wants to "keep going until I am 60 years old. With oxygen, it's no big deal." Catherine Garcia
After serving 17 years of a 20-year sentence, John Walker Lindh, the American captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and convicted of providing support to the Taliban, is set to be released from an Indiana federal prison on Thursday.
Lindh was 20 when he was arrested. After converting from Catholicism to Islam at 16, he left the U.S. to study Arabic in Yemen at 17. He made his way to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he was a Taliban volunteer at an al-Qaeda training camp. Because he is an American citizen, Lindh was tried in federal court, and at his sentencing decried acts of terrorism and said he was wrong to join the Taliban.
Two leaked documents show that the government questions whether Lindh has shed his extremist views, The New York Times reports. A May 2016 memo said Lindh "continued to advocate for global jihad and to write and translate violent extremist texts," and a 2017 Federal Bureau of Prisons intelligence assessment states he made positive comments about the Islamic State.
Under his terms of release, Lindh will not be allowed to go online or own a device that can access the internet without permission from his probation officer, the Times reports. He also can't travel internationally or communicate with "any known extremist," and must go through mental health counseling.
Seamus Hughes, deputy director of George Washington University's program on extremism, told the Times the government doesn't have a system in place to deal with people like Lindh, and the best move would be to "team him up with a mentor, somebody who perhaps had the same experiences as he may have had and came out on the other side better off because of it." Catherine Garcia
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has constructed just 1.7 miles of fencing along the southern border with the $1.57 billion Congress appropriated last year for the project, a lawyer for the House of Representatives told a federal judge on Tuesday.
In a court filing, House General Counsel Douglas Letter told Judge Haywood Gilliam that this information is current as of April 30, Bloomberg reports. Letter also said this was three-quarters of a mile more than had been reported to Congress in February.
Gilliam is the judge in a lawsuit brought by 20 Democratic state attorneys general and the Sierra Club; they are trying to block Trump from using unauthorized money from the Treasury and Defense departments to fund his border wall. Gilliam requested the information during a hearing on May 17. Catherine Garcia
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) revealed on Tuesday that U.S. fighter jets intercepted six Russian warplanes off the coast of Alaska on Monday.
The four bombers and two fighter planes were intercepted by F-22 jets after they entered an area known as the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone, NBC News reports. In a statement, NORAD said the Russian planes "remained in international airspace and at no time did the aircraft enter United States or Canadian sovereign airspace," and the U.S. jets kept an eye on the Russian planes until they left the region.
Russia's Ministry of Defense said the planes were conducting planned exercises, which took place "over the neutral waters of the Chukotka, Bering, and Okhotsk Seas, as well as along the western coast of Alaska and the northern coast of the Aleutian Islands." Catherine Garcia