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    Her Brother Disappeared in War 80 Years Ago. She Finally Got to Say Goodbye.

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    Margery Hop Wong last saw her older brother Sgt. Yuen Hop in 1943. He was a soldier missing in action, until researchers solved the mystery behind his death.When Margery Hop Wong bade her older brother goodbye in 1943, she was just a 12-year-old girl who loved it when he took her for joy rides in his used convertible around the apple orchards their family worked.Yuen Hop left their home in Sebastopol, Calif., a small town 55 miles north of San Francisco, at 19 to join the U.S. Army. His little sister never saw him again. She knew he had died in the war, but she did not know how. Or where. Or what had happened to his body.On Friday, Ms. Wong, now 94, sat in the front pew of a mortuary just south of her home in San Francisco, her brother’s remains in a casket draped in an American flag. Younger generations of the Hop family and military veterans filled the rows behind her as a singer led the group in “Amazing Grace.”For 80 years, Sergeant Hop was lost. Now, he was found.Yuen Hopvia the Hop familyMs. Wong was the youngest of seven children born to Gin and Chan Hop, immigrants from China who spoke Cantonese and struggled to communicate with their American-born children, who grew up speaking English.Life was difficult because of anti-Chinese sentiment fueled by the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882 to dramatically restrict Chinese immigration. Chinese immigrants were regularly prohibited from living or working where they wanted, Ms. Wong recalled in an interview. She said her brother was proud to have scraped together money working as a mechanic and drying apples to buy a used convertible and tried to make life fun for his brothers and sisters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Colonel Found Guilty of Sexual Harassment in Trial Seen as a Milestone

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      The conviction is considered one of the first of its kind since Congress required the military to change how its legal system addresses sexual assault and harassment.A former Army battalion commander has been found guilty in a military court of sexually harassing a subordinate, one of the first cases of its kind brought after an overhaul of the military’s legal system that established sexual harassment as a criminal offense.The officer, Lt. Col. Herman West of Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State, was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a female officer in his command, making unwanted comments and touching her inappropriately. He faced additional charges over his treatment of other female officers at the base.A court-martial judge on Friday found him guilty of sexual harassment, conduct unbecoming of an officer and maltreatment. Colonel West, who had been removed from his leadership role in the battalion as a result of the case, was fined over $92,000 and received a written reprimand in his personnel file. The conviction is considered to be a felony-level offense.According to court documents, Colonel West used sexually suggestive language when talking with the officer in his command. The documents also said that he had unbuttoned his pants in front of her, in addition to the inappropriate touching.During a Friday afternoon sentencing hearing, Colonel West apologized to the victims. According to a local television station in Washington, he looked directly at the female officer at the center of the case and said, “My actions were despicable.” He added, “You’ve done nothing wrong.” The woman’s name has not been publicly released.Criminalizing sexual harassment in the military was part of a broader set of changes mandated by a bipartisan law passed by Congress in 2021, the largest overhaul in generations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (Previously, the military’s legal system did not specifically include sexual harassment as an offense, and prosecutors had to rely on other misconduct charges to bring criminal cases.) The changes also stripped commanders’ authority to decide whether to pursue charges in sexual abuse cases and other serious crimes, transferring that responsibility to specialized prosecutors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Brings Hegseth to Watch Army-Navy Game

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump made a public show of support for his choice to lead the Defense Department.President-elect Donald J. Trump attended the annual Army-Navy football game in Maryland on Saturday with Pete Hegseth, his embattled choice for defense secretary, sending a message of support ahead of Senate confirmation hearings that are likely to take place next month.Allies and aides of Mr. Trump’s posted video of the president-elect and Mr. Hegseth on the social media site X. In one video, the two men, along with Vice President-elect JD Vance, can be seen standing for the national anthem.In another video, Mr. Trump can be seen arriving in a suite at the stadium, pumping his fist into the air as fans cheer and applaud his presence at the game.The Army-Navy game pits the football teams of the two military services against each other in one of the highlights of the college football season. Saturday’s game was the 125th meeting of the rivals — the Army Black Knights and the Navy Midshipmen. They played at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Md., the home of the Washington Commanders football team.National politicians rarely take sides in the rivalry. The service academy team with the best record at the end of the season wins the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy.But the game is often a good place for a president to be seen looking patriotic. President Barack Obama attended the 112th game between the two teams in 2011, and performed the coin toss at the beginning of the game to determine who had the first possession of the ball. The next year, in 2012, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. attended the game.Mr. Trump has spent most of his time since Election Day out of the spotlight as he assembles the personnel he wants to fill his new government and plans actions he will take when he assumes office next month.Mr. Trump was also accompanied at the game by Daniel Penny, a former Marine who was acquitted this week on a charge of criminally negligent homicide after putting a man in a chokehold in a New York subway car. Other allies of Mr. Trump’s, including Elon Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson, were also at the game.Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News host and military veteran, faces numerous questions about his qualifications to head the Defense Department, allegations of personal misconduct toward women and reports that he has abused alcohol while on the job. He has called the accusations baseless and has vowed not to withdraw from consideration.Mr. Trump initially appeared willing to consider an alternative choice for defense secretary if Mr. Hegseth proved too controversial. But even as several senators voiced concern about Mr. Hegseth, the president-elect issued a statement forcefully backing Mr. Hegseth for the job.The appearance of the two men at the football game appeared calculated to put to rest any questions about whether Mr. Trump still supports Mr. Hegseth to lead the Pentagon. More

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      Former U.S. Soldier Is Sentenced to 14 Years for Planning to Help ISIS

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      Pvt. Cole Bridges pleaded guilty in 2023 to charges of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and attempting to murder U.S. military service members.A former soldier in the U.S. Army was sentenced on Friday to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to provide ISIS with information to help plan an ambush he thought would result in the deaths of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, according to the U.S. Justice Department.The soldier, Pvt. Cole Bridges, 24, of Stow, Ohio, also discussed potential locations for terrorist attacks in New York City with an undercover F.B.I. agent whom he believed to be a supporter of the Islamic State.Private Bridges enlisted in the military in 2019 and joined an infantry division in Fort Stewart, Ga. Before enlisting, he had already been persuaded by radical ideologies, according to the Justice Department.“Cole Bridges used his U.S. Army training to pursue a horrifying goal: the brutal murder of his fellow service members in a carefully plotted ambush,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.Beginning in at least 2019, Private Bridges began researching jihadist propaganda and posted his support for ISIS on social media. About a year after joining the Army, he began a correspondence with an F.B.I. agent who was posing as an ISIS supporter in contact with the group in the Middle East.A criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York detailed the soldier’s fervent intent on aiding the Islamic State, describing Private Bridges as “a supporter of ISIS and its mission to establish a global caliphate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Arthur J. Gregg, Trailblazing Army Officer, Is Dead at 96

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      The first Black officer to achieve the rank of lieutenant general, he lived to see an Army post in Virginia renamed in his honor.Arthur J. Gregg, the first African American Army officer to reach the rank of lieutenant general and the only person in modern history to have a military base named for him in his lifetime, died on Aug. 22. He was 96.The Army announced the death on its website, but did not cite a cause or say where he died.In April 2023, Fort Lee in Virginia was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams in honor of General Gregg, who in 1977 became the Army’s first Black three-star general, and Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley, who was the highest-ranking Black woman to serve as an Army officer in World War II.The new name was recommended by a congressional commission charged with rechristening nine military bases named for Confederate officers, as part of a national self-examination around race set off by the murder of George Floyd in 2020.Fort Lee was named for Robert E. Lee, one of eight Virginians at the outbreak of the Civil War who were West Point graduates and U.S. Army colonels. Among them, the renaming commission noted, only Lee chose to take up arms against the United States. “The main difference” separating Lee from the others “was that Lee and his family enslaved other humans,” the commission’s report stated.Fort Gregg-Adams, about 30 miles south of Richmond, has long been a hub of Army logistics, the field in which General Gregg made his 35-year military career. He commanded a 3,700-soldier logistics battalion in Vietnam, based in Cam Ranh Bay, and rose to be deputy chief of staff for logistics for the Army, overseeing support services around the world.He was posted to Fort Lee as a young officer in 1950 to train in logistics. Although President Harry S. Truman had ordered the desegregation of the military two years earlier, the facts on the ground had changed little.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Army Soldier Charged With Lying About Ties to Insurrectionist Group

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      The soldier, Kai Liam Nix, 20, who was stationed at Fort Liberty in North Carolina, is also accused of illegally selling firearms.An active duty U.S. Army soldier has been charged with lying to the military about his ties to a group dedicated to overthrowing the government and with illegally selling firearms, according to federal prosecutors in North Carolina.The soldier, Kai Liam Nix, 20, who was stationed at Fort Liberty in Fayetteville, N.C., was arrested on Aug. 15. A day earlier, a grand jury handed up an indictment accusing him of having lied on his security clearance application in 2022, when he stated he had not been involved in a group “dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States Government.”A redacted copy of the indictment did not name the group to which Mr. Nix was accused of having ties, and neither did a news release issued on Monday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina. He is also accused of stealing and illegally selling firearms at the end of 2023 and at the beginning of 2024.Mr. Nix, who prosecutors said also went by the name Kai Brazelton, is charged with one count each of making a false statement to the government and of dealing in firearms without a license, along with two counts of selling a stolen firearm. If convicted on all counts, he could face up to 30 years in prison.The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment further on the case.At Mr. Nix’s first court appearance on Monday, a judge ordered that he remain in custody until a hearing set for Thursday. He was also assigned a federal public defender, Robert J. Parrott, Jr, who said in an email to The New York Times that “we should avoid rushing to judgment.”“Mr. Nix looks forward to making his presentation in court,” he added.Although the authorities did not specify which group they claim Mr. Nix was affiliated with, his arrest came days before The New Yorker published an extensive article on Sunday about organizations outside of law enforcement that investigate far-right groups. The article mentioned Mr. Nix and his potential ties to Patriot Front, a far-right group that has engaged in white nationalist activism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Texas Woman Is Sentenced to 15 Years in Fraud Scheme

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      Janet Yamanaka Mello, 57, stole over $100 million from a youth development grant program for children of military families, spending the money on a lavish lifestyle, prosecutors said.A Texas woman who stole over $100 million from a youth development grant program for children of military families and spent the money to fund a lavish lifestyle was sentenced on Tuesday to federal prison, the authorities said.The defendant, Janet Yamanaka Mello, 57, pleaded guilty in March to five counts of mail fraud and five counts of filing a false tax return, according to a criminal court docket.Judge Xavier Rodriguez of the Western District of Texas sentenced Ms. Mello on Tuesday to 180 months, or 15 years, in prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas. According to federal prosecutors, Ms. Mello was a civilian employee for the U.S. Army and worked as a financial manager for a child and youth grant program at the Fort Sam Houston Base in San Antonio. Part of her job was to determine whether funding was available for various organizations that applied to the grant program, called the 4-H Military Partnership Grant.Around the end of 2016 through at least August 2023, Ms. Mello formed a fraudulent business called Child Health and Youth Lifelong Development, which she used to steal Army funds by falsely claiming it provided services to military members and their families, prosecutors said. In some cases, Ms. Mello forged her supervisor’s digital signature on the paperwork, they said.Ms. Mello used her “experience, expert knowledge of the grant program, and accumulated trust,” to swindle her colleagues, prosecutors said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Army Sees No Link to Blast Exposure in Maine Gunman’s Mental Issues

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      Investigators found lapses in the handling of a troubled reservist who went on to kill 18 people, but they rejected suggestions that his Army work had damaged his brain.An Army investigation into the October 2023 mass shooting committed by an Army Reserve soldier, Robert Card II, found that a number of factors contributed to the Army’s inaction as Mr. Card’s mental health careened toward violence, including procedural breakdowns, missteps by commanders and rules that restrict military authority over reserve soldiers when they are out of uniform.But the report said the Army saw no link between his mental health problems and the years he spent working as a grenade instructor, repeatedly exposed to explosions on the practice range.Every summer for eight years, Mr. Card taught cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to use heavy weapons, including machine guns and shoulder-fired anti-tank guns. For five of those years, he worked on the grenade range, where about 2,400 grenades exploded over a two-week period. By age 40, he wore hearing aids.Last July, he was supposed to run machine-gun training for cadets, despite having missed a mandatory training session in the spring, the report said. But he was behaving so erratically in July that his Army Reserve commander had him hospitalized at a civilian psychiatric hospital in New York.Lt. Gen. Jody J. Daniels said the blasts Robert Card II had experienced in his Army Reserve service were “relatively minor.” The general administered an oath to new service members at a football game in 2022.Julio Cortez/Associated PressThe hospital determined that Mr. Card was experiencing psychosis and homicidal thoughts and had a “hit list.” Doctors moved to commit the soldier involuntarily for treatment, but the effort was dropped by the hospital under what the Army report called “questionable circumstances,” and Mr. Card was released after 19 days.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      South by Southwest Cuts Ties to Army After Gaza-Inspired Boycott

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      The festival said it would no longer be sponsored by the U.S. Army or weapons manufacturers, which had prompted artists to withdraw from this year’s gathering.The South by Southwest festival, which dozens of artists withdrew from this year to protest its sponsorship by the U.S. Army and defense contractors in light of their ties to Israel, announced this week that it would no longer accept their support.“After careful consideration, we are revising our sponsorship model,” the festival, which is held each year in Austin, Texas, said in a brief statement on its website. “As a result, the U.S. Army, and companies who engage in weapons manufacturing, will not be sponsors of SXSW 2025.”No further details were offered, and SXSW declined to elaborate on the statement.A group called the Austin for Palestine Coalition said in a social media post in March, at the time of the festival, that more than 80 bands, artists and panelists had declined to attend “in solidarity with Palestine.”The Army hopes to work with SXSW again some day.“We look forward to a chance to work together in the future,” said Lt. Col. Jamie Dobson, the public affairs officer at the Army Futures Command in Austin, which works on technology and innovation. “A.F.C. loves being here in Austin. It’s a great community. And we were very proud of the partnership we had this past year.”She added, “We had a really good experience, especially on the innovation side, connecting with industry partners, technology leaders, everyone that gets pulled in.”Ibrahim Batshon, the chief executive of a digital music licensing platform called BeatStars, participated in the March boycott and said in an interview on Wednesday that he was pleased by the decision from SXSW, which he had attended for nearly 20 years.“We’ve always been huge fans and supporters of this multicultural art and music and film festival that has been a staple in artists’ lives,” he said.Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, had dismissed the protesters in March, writing on social media, “Bye. Don’t come back,” and noting the state’s ties to the military. “We are proud of the U.S. military in Texas,” he wrote. “If you don’t like it, don’t come here.”Numerous cultural institutions around the country and the world have faced protests related to Israel and its conduct during the war in Gaza. More