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      2 Who Went Missing After Crash Near Mount Rainier Are Dead, Navy Says

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      Two crew members were onboard a Navy aircraft when it crashed during a routine training flight on Oct. 15 in Washington State, officials said.Two U.S. Navy crew members who were missing after their aircraft crashed near Mount Rainier in Washington State during a training flight last week were declared dead on Sunday, according to Navy officials.The jet that crashed was known as a “Zapper,” or VAQ-130, the oldest electronic warfare squadron in the U.S. Navy.“It is with a heavy heart that we share the loss of two beloved Zappers,” Cmdr. Timothy Warburton, commanding officer of Electronic Attack Squadron, which is stationed on Whidbey Island near Seattle, said in a statement posted to social media by the Navy, referring to the crew.The names of the aviators were not released on Sunday pending notification of next of kin.The crash took place after 3 p.m. on Oct. 15 during a routine training flight. The crew members were onboard a Boeing EA-18G Growler, a specialized electronic attack aircraft that is part of the Navy’s “first line of defense in hostile environments,” according to its website.“Our priority right now is taking care of the families of our fallen aviators, and ensuring the well-being of our Sailors and the Growler community,” Commander Warburton added.The Navy said that the wreckage was found at about 6,000 feet altitude in “a remote, steep and heavily-wooded area east of Mount Rainier.”Search and rescue teams from the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, supported by Army soldiers stationed at nearby Joint Base Lewis–McChord, responded to the crash site and looked for the crew members for several days.The Navy said on Sunday that efforts had shifted “from search and rescue efforts to recovery operations.” The cause of the crash remained under investigation, the Navy said.Before the training mission that led to the crash, the squadron had returned to Whidbey Island from a recent deployment in the Middle East, the Navy said in a statement last week.The squadron had conducted operations in the Southern Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden to “maintain the freedom of navigation in international waterways,” the Navy said in another statement about the deployment.Shipping in the region has been disrupted by attacks by the Houthis, a Shiite militant group based in Yemen.The squadron had performed nearly 700 combat missions to “degrade the Houthi capability to threaten innocent shipping” during its nine-month deployment, the release said. More

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      2 Missing After Navy Fighter Jet Crashes Near Mount Rainier

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      The two crew members who were onboard the aircraft remain missing, Navy officials said, after it crashed during a routine training flight.Searchers were looking on Wednesday for two crew members who had been onboard a Navy aircraft that crashed near Mount Rainier in Washington State during a training flight a day earlier, according to Navy officials.The condition of the two people was not known as of Tuesday, according to the Navy, and on Wednesday it said that it had no additional updates. It did not identify the two crew members.The cause of the crash, which took place after 3 p.m., was being investigated, the Navy said. Search and rescue teams from the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, along with an MH-60S helicopter, headed to the crash site east of Mount Rainier to look for the crew members, it said.The Boeing EA-18G Growler, a specialized electronic attack aircraft, is part of the Navy’s “first line of defense in hostile environments,” according to its website. It is used by the VAQ-130 squadron, the oldest electronic warfare squadron in the U.S. Navy, known as the “Zappers.”An unveiling ceremony for the Boeing EA 18G Growler at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in 2008. It is used by the oldest electronic warfare squadron in the U.S. Navy.Scott Terrell/Skagit Valley Herald, via Associated PressThe squadron had returned to Whidbey Island from a recent deployment, the Navy said in its statement on Tuesday. It had carried out operations in the Southern Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden to “maintain the freedom of navigation in international waterways,” the Navy said in an earlier statement about the deployment.During the nine-month deployment, the squadron had conducted nearly 700 combat missions to “degrade the Houthi capability to threaten innocent shipping,” the release said.The Houthis, the de facto government in northern Yemen that is backed by Iran, have launched attacks on ships sailing through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, a crucial shipping route.All but one of the squadrons using the EA-18G Growler are based at the naval station on Whidbey Island, which is about 30 miles north of Seattle. The station had notified the public of scheduled training operations this week.Military training flights have led to dangerous and even fatal crashes in recent years. In August, an Army helicopter crashed during a routine training at a military base in Alabama, killing a flight instructor and injuring a student pilot. In 2021, a military training jet crashed into a backyard in Lake Worth, Tex., injuring the plane’s two pilots, and damaging several homes. More

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      Pentagon to Give Honorable Discharges to Some Kicked Out Under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

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      More than 800 service members administratively separated from the military under the now-repealed policy will receive discharge upgrades.The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that more than 800 service members who were kicked out of the military under the now-repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy will receive honorable discharge upgrades.Pentagon officials said they had completed a review of about 2,000 cases, as Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered last year.Mr. Austin said in a statement that the military would “continue to honor the service and the sacrifice of all our troops — including the brave Americans who raised their hands to serve but were turned away because of whom they love.”About 13,500 service members were separated from the military because of their sexual orientation while the policy was in effect from 1994 until 2011. About a third of them were not considered for discharge upgrades because they were separated during their initial military training and had not served long enough to qualify.Some groups that work with veterans said the Pentagon should review those cases as well.“We don’t have a ton of clarity about how the Department of Defense went about its process here,” said Renee Burbank of the National Veterans Legal Services Program, which provides legal assistance to veterans on a wide array of issues.Ms. Burbank, who serves as the group’s director of litigation, said that about 7,000 of the 13,500 people ousted under “don’t ask, don’t tell” had already received honorable discharges.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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      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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      Stranded Mariner Seemingly Floated in the Gulf for Hours After the Hurricane

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      The U.S. Coast Guard on Thursday rescued a man who had seemingly done the impossible: he survived for hours in the Gulf of Mexico with nothing but a life jacket and a cooler to cling to.The agency posted a video of a Coast Guard crew member dropping from a helicopter about 30 miles off Longboat Key to grab the man from choppy seas and lift him to safety.The man, the captain of a fishing vessel, had lost contact with the Coast Guard around 7 p.m. on Wednesday as the storm worsened. He wasn’t found until 1:30 p.m. on Thursday.He managed to stay alive despite winds as fast as 90 miles per hour and waves as high as 20 to 25 feet through the night, said Lt. Cmdr. Dana Grady, the St. Petersburg command center chief of the U.S. Coast Guard.“This man survived in a nightmare scenario for even the most experienced mariner,” he said in a statement. The rescued captain, who was not identified, was taken to Tampa General Hospital to receive medical care. More

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      In North Carolina Town Hall, Trump Makes a Series of Promises to Appeal to Veterans

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      At the end of his town hall in North Carolina on Friday, former President Donald J. Trump was asked by a former Air Force pilot whether he would create a panel to keep “woke generals” out of the Defense Department.Mr. Trump not only agreed, but also went a step further. “I’m going to put you on that task force,” he said, to cheers from the crowd.The remark was the last in a series of promises the former president made as he answered preselected questions from voters in Fayetteville, N.C., an area with a large military population. It’s a dynamic that happens often at Mr. Trump’s events, in which he makes direct commitments on small and large issues to appeal to and energize his specific audience.He promised that his proposed missile defense system, an American clone of Israel’s Iron Dome, would be made in North Carolina. He pledged to raise military pay. And before taking a question, he promised to restore the name of nearby Fort Liberty, the largest U.S. military base, back to Fort Bragg, which honored a Confederate general from a slave-owning family. The name was changed in June 2023 as part of the U.S. military’s examination of its history with race.Attendees cheered as Mr. Trump arrived for the town hall at Crown Arena in Fayetteville, N.C.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesSitting onstage at the Crown Arena in front of several thousand people, many of whom said they were active-duty military service members or veterans, Mr. Trump took eight questions from audience members. Like the event’s moderator, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida and a veteran, the participants teed him up to offer lines from his stump speech. Many of the questions echoed his exaggerated and false claims about immigration, approved of his vow to conduct massive deportations of undocumented immigrants and acknowledged his fear-inspiring predictions of global war.All Mr. Trump had to do, largely, was agree. He repeated his false claims that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and made familiar attacks against the media.Mr. Trump earlier in the day toured parts of Georgia hit by Hurricane Helene, and he claimed that reporters were doing little to cover the storm and the Biden administration’s response.Ms. Luna, a proud and combative ally of Mr. Trump, took the ball and ran with it, and claimed that the administration’s response was intentional. “I do believe that they’ve intentionally, this is my opinion, not helped out those residents, because it’s red communities that are impacted,” she said. More

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      House Condemns Biden and Harris Over Afghanistan Withdrawal

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      Ten Democrats joined the G.O.P.-led effort to rebuke 15 senior members of the Biden administration for the failures of the Afghanistan withdrawal in a symbolic vote.A bipartisan House majority passed a resolution on Wednesday condemning President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and 13 other current and former members of the administration over their roles in the chaotic and deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, after 10 Democrats joined all Republicans in delivering the rare and sweeping rebuke.The 219-to-194 vote was the House’s final roll call before members departed Washington to focus on the election, in which control of the chamber is up for grabs. Though the resolution was uniquely broad and direct in condemning the president, members of his cabinet and top advisers in a personal capacity, instead of as an administration, the vote was symbolic because the measure carries no force of law.Still, the participation of 10 Democrats — almost all of them facing tight re-election contests — buoyed the Republicans behind the effort to formally hold senior administration officials primarily responsible for the failures of the withdrawal in the summer of 2021, which left 13 U.S. service members dead. Democratic leaders have dismissed the resolution as a politically biased crusade.“Ten Democrats just joined me in condemning Biden-Harris admin officials who played key roles in the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal,” Representative Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement on social media after the vote. “I am glad these colleagues put politics aside and voted to do what was right — deliver accountability to the American people.”While the bipartisan vote was a political punch to the Biden administration at the height of a critical campaign season, the move stood as a far cry from the sort of legislative consequences that Republicans had threatened to wield against Mr. Biden when they began the various investigations into his administration’s policies and his personal conduct.“After their laughingstock flop of an impeachment investigation, they’re flailing about now to attack the president or the vice president however they can,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who opposed the Afghanistan measure, said after Wednesday’s vote. “The country sees it as cheap election-year antics and games.”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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      For Americans Haunted by Beirut Bombings, a Killing Resurfaces Decades of Pain

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      Two deadly bombings in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed scores of U.S. military personnel more than 40 years ago have cast a long shadow over survivors and victims’ families.A day after the killing of a senior Hezbollah member seen as a key figure in those attacks, many of those Americans welcomed the news but said it stirred painful memories without resolving the past.“It doesn’t bring closure,” said Michael Harris, 59, a Marine veteran who was “blown out” of his barracks in one of the attacks and lives today in Rhode Island. “It wasn’t just one person responsible.”The senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqeel was killed on Friday after Israeli fighter jets bombed a heavily residential area of Beirut’s southern suburbs. Mr. Aqeel has been long been wanted by the United States for his role in two 1983 bombings in Beirut that killed over 350 people, most of them U.S. service members. The United States had placed a multimillion-dollar bounty on his head, but he had survived multiple assassination attempts.The first attack, a bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. Six months later, a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, killing more than 300 people, including 241 American service members.For many survivors and victims’ loved ones, those bombings never go away.Every time Mr. Harris picks up the paper or watches the news about another bombing, he said, “it opens up wounds.”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