President Donald Trump called protesters in Los Angeles “animals” and “a foreign enemy” in a speech at Fort Bragg on Tuesday as he defended deploying the military on demonstrators opposed to his immigration enforcement raids.

The Army birthday celebration had already been planned for months. But earlier this spring, President Donald Trump announced his intention to transform the event — which coincides with his 79th birthday — into a massive military parade.

The explosives had been deployed earlier in May, and failed to activate, during a joint military exercise conducted by the Coast Guard and U.S. Air Force off the shore of Milwaukee.

The Qatari government said a final decision hadn’t been made. Still, Trump defended the idea — what would amount to a president accepting an astonishingly valuable gift from a foreign government — as a fiscally smart move for the country.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, which is also known as the fall of Saigon. The conflict killed millions of Vietnamese and 60,000 American service members.

The president said Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve simultaneously as acting national security adviser while maintaining his position at the State Department.

The latest turmoil threatens to engulf the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pushed out top advisers and faces fresh controversy over sharing sensitive information about airstrikes in Yemen outside of classified channels.

The total cost of the U.S. military’s operation against the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen is nearing $1 billion in just under three weeks, even as the attacks have had limited impact on destroying the terror group’s capabilities, three people briefed on the campaign’s progress told CNN.

President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries were among those who stood in respect as hearses carried the bodies of the four young Americans to Vilnius airport before being flown to the United States for burial.

Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the committee, and Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat, signed onto a letter to the acting inspector general at the Department of Defense for an inquiry into the potential “use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.”

The disclosure follows two intense days during which leaders of President Donald Trump’s intelligence and defense agencies have struggled to explain how details that current and former U.S. officials have said would have been classified wound up on an unclassified Signal chat that included Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg,

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth previously called U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unqualified to lead the Defense Department and said he should either step down or be fired.

A magazine journalist’s account of being added to a group chat of U.S. national security officials coordinating plans for airstrikes has raised questions about how highly sensitive information is supposed to be handled.

In his executive order in January, the president wrote that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle” and is harmful to military readiness.

Top national security officials for President Donald Trump, including his defense secretary, texted war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic.

Six transgender active duty service members and two former service members who seek re-enlistment on Tuesday filed the first lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order that calls for revising policy on transgender troops and probably sets the stage for banning them in the armed forces.