In the News

A 103-year-old World War II veteran has finally been honored for his time in the military - 76 years after he helped save countless lives on the battlefield.

Peter Fantasia, of Somerville, Massachusetts, served as a US Army medic in Company L, 3rd Battalion, 104th Infantry Regiment, 26th Infantry Division.

He was captured one night in 1944 in Rodalbe, France, while tending to wounded men in a foxhole and spent the next six months as a prisoner of war until being liberated by Russian forces in April 1945.

WASHINGTON — Days after China’s navy commissioned its biggest and most advanced surface warship yet, on a path to an estimated 420 ships by 2035, key experts told Congress the U.S. must form a new and creative strategy to deter China, beyond nuclear weapons.

Addressing the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, former Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell Director Andrew Hunter and retired Rear Adm. Michael McDevitt warned that China is on track to outpace America technologically and at sea.

BOSTON — President Donald Trump is vowing to veto a bill to remove contamination from cancer-linked "forever chemicals" in groundwater, drawing criticism from environmentalists and members of the state's congressional delegation.

Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton told MSNBC's Katy Tur on Wednesday that information presented to Congress during an intelligence briefing regarding Iran was "quite vague."

After Iran's Tuesday missile attack against an airbase in Iraq that housed U.S. soldiers, Iran seemed amenable to de-escalating the tensions between the U.S. and Iran. President Donald Trump announced Wednesday morning that sanctions would be levied against Iran and would remain in place "until Iran changes its behavior."

Rep. Seth Moulton says he can relate to the position that President Donald Trump was in ahead of his decision to order the killing of Iran’s top military leader, Qassem Soleimani.

“We get it — he’s a terrible, evil man,” Moulton told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell in an interview Monday night. “He killed a lot of Americans. I saw friends die from Iranian weapons.”

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but after authorizing military force against Al Qaeda in 2001 and Saddam Hussein in 2002, lawmakers have been happy to cede all decisions to the White House on whether U.S. troops live or die.

Now, after an airstrike that killed Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it's worth asking whether Congress will step in for oversight or sit back and watch as a new war festers in the Middle East.

SALEM — Congressman Seth Moulton said Friday that the killing of Iran’s top military official in a drone missile strike ordered by President Donald Trump has created an “incredibly dangerous” situation.

Gen. Qassem Soleimani, believed to be the second most powerful man in Iran, was one of at least three Iranian officials killed in the drone missile strike, the Pentagon announced late Thursday. Soleimani was in a convoy leaving Baghdad International Airport when the car he was in was struck by a missile.

Response to the strike has been split largely along political lines.

Of the most feared terrorist leaders the United States has hunted and killed this century—from Osama bin Laden to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—no death ever had the significance of the one America just dealt. The killing of Iran’s Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani, in a U.S. strike yesterday in Baghdad wasn’t just the targeted assassination of a state military leader. It marked a dangerous new chapter in a roiling region Soleimani has helped shape for more than a decade, and moved the U.S. and Iran’s cycle of proxy violence and sabotage closer to outright war.