ESPER: U.S. TROOPS GOING TO GUARD SYRIA OIL FIELDS
BRUSSELS — The United States will send armored vehicles and combat troops into eastern Syria to keep oil fields from potentially falling into the hands of Islamic State militants, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday.
It was the latest sign that extracting the military from Syria is more uncertain and complicated than President Donald Trump is making it out to be. Though Trump repeatedly says he is pulling out of Syria, the reality on the ground is different.
Adding armored reinforcements in the oil-producing area of Syria could mean sending several hundred U.S. troops — even as a similar number are being withdrawn from a separate mission closer to the border with Turkey where Russian forces have been filling the vacuum.
Felicity Huffman released early
SAN FRANCISCO — Actress Felicity Huffman was released Friday morning from a federal prison in California two days before the end of a two-week sentence for her role in the college admissions scandal, authorities said. A federal judge in Boston last month sentenced her to two weeks in prison, a $30,000 fine, 250 hours of community service and a year probation after she pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy for paying an admissions consultant $15,000 to have a proctor correct her daughter’s SAT answers.
Pentagon hands Microsoft $10B ‘war cloud’ deal, snubs Amazon
SAN FRANCISCO — The Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10 billion cloud computing contract, snubbing early front-runner Amazon, whose competitive bid drew criticism from President Donald Trump and its business rivals. Bidding for the huge project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), pitted leading tech titans Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM against one another. The system will store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.