Helene Cooper

A Navy officer who became a naturalized U.S. citizen has been charged with providing classified information to China, U.S. officials said.

An Islamic State detainee currently in U.S. custody at a temporary detention facility in Erbil, Iraq, is a specialist in chemical weapons whom U.S. military officials are questioning about plans to use the banned substances in Iraq and Syria.

The strikes hit a camp where officials said fighters with the militant group al-Shabab were preparing an attack against U.S. troops and their allies.

Recent gains against the Islamic State in eastern Syria have helped sever critical supply lines to Iraq and set the stage for what will be the biggest fight yet against the Sunni militancy, the battle to retake Mosul, Pentagon officials said Monday.

President Barack Obama plans to substantially increase the deployment of heavy weapons, armored vehicles and other equipment to NATO countries in Central and Eastern Europe, a move that administration officials said was aimed at deterring Russian from further aggression in the region.

Pentagon officials have concluded that hundreds more trainers, advisers and commandos from the United States and its allies will need to be sent to Iraq and Syria in the coming months as the campaign to isolate the Islamic State intensifies.

A crisis over the seizing of two U.S. patrol boats in the Persian Gulf was averted Wednesday when Iran returned the craft and released their crews as Pentagon officials struggled to explain how the boats had ended up near a major Iranian naval base.

The move was meant to reassure allies in Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines that the United States would stand up to China’s efforts to unilaterally change facts on the ground by building up artificial islands in the Spratly Island chain.

A U.S. naval destroyer was approaching waters near the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea late Monday, the Pentagon said, directly challenging China’s claims that the artificial island chain is within its territorial borders.

The Obama administration acknowledged the failure of its $500 million campaign to train thousands of fighters and announced that it will instead use the money to provide ammunition and some weapons for groups already engaged in the battle.

The Obama administration has ended the Pentagon’s $500 million program to train and equip Syrian rebels, administration officials said Friday, in an acknowledgment that the beleaguered program had failed to produce any kind of ground combat forces capable of taking on the Islamic State in Syria.

Alarmed by the speed and scale of Russia’s intervention in Syria, Western officials said Thursday that they had stepped up military exercises and deployed a small number of logistics personnel in Eastern and Central Europe.

In the military's case against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the charge of desertion, with a maximum penalty of imprisonment for five years, is the lesser count and the easier one to prove, legal experts say.

The United States and allies launched airstrikes against Sunni militants in Syria early Tuesday, unleashing a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from the air and sea on the militants' de facto capital of Raqqa and along the porous Iraq border.