“I think Putin has probably given up on his effort to capture the capital city and is now focused on the south and east of the country,” says U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
When he resigned as defense secretary last December, Jim Mattis thought it might take two months to install a successor. That seemed terribly long at the time.
A federal judge on Thursday ordered $34.8 million in restitution from the owner of a company that committed what a prosecutor calls the nation’s worst-ever dumping of military explosives — a case stemming from a huge 2012 munitions blast. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Foote also ordered David Alan Smith to spend 4 years and 7 months in prison.