Mark Memmott

Saying that "those who commit sexual assaults are not only committing a crime, they threaten the trust and discipline that make our military strong," President Obama on Friday urged Naval Academy graduates to help bring an end to a disturbing series of such offenses.

"They've got no place in the greatest military on earth," Obama said during the commencement address he delivered at the academy's Annapolis, Md., campus.

Two men were arrested and removed from a Pakistan International Airlines passenger jet Friday. It had been on its way from Lahore, Pakistan, to Manchester, England, when something that happened aboard led authorities to scramble Royal Air Force fighter jets and divert the passenger plane to London Stansted Airport.

(We most recently updated the top of this post at 6:45 p.m. ET.)

An explosion followed by gunfire in Kabul on Friday claimed the lives of at least two attackers and wounded a small number of civilians. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which appeared to have been aimed at offices of the International Organization for Migration and stretched over several hours as Afghan security forces tried to hunt down those responsible.

As night fell in Kabul, it was unclear whether the incident was over or not.

Representatives of President Bashar Assad's regime have agreed "in principle" to attend an international peace conference aimed at ending more than two years of brutal warfare in Syria, Russia's foreign ministry said Friday.

As the residents of Moore, Okla., and surrounding communities continue to recover from Monday's devastating tornado that killed at least 24 people and injured more than 375, we're keeping an eye on the news from there:

(Most recent update: 5:35 p.m. ET.)

Miracle is the word that comes to Dan Sligh's mind after he and his wife, Sally, survived a plunge off a highway bridge in Washington state on Thursday evening.

New government figures add to evidence of a decline in teen pregnancies across the nation and point to a notably large drop in births among Hispanic teens, NPR's Jennifer Ludden tells our Newscast Desk.

She reports that the overall birth rate among teens is now half what it was at its peak, two decades ago, and that a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics shows:

Ahead of his much-anticipated speech Thursday afternoon at the National Defense University, there's word that President Obama:

Drones

There were 340,000 first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, down 23,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration reports.

Charles Ramsey, the neighbor who helped rescue three young women from a Cleveland home where authorities say they had been held captive and brutalized for about a decade, "will enjoy free burgers for life" in honor of his actions, The Plain Dealer reports.

Ibragim Todashev, the 27-year-old man shot and killed after he allegedly attacked an FBI agent Wednesday in Orlando, may have been involved with Boston bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a 2011 triple murder.

(Most recent update: 1:30 p.m. ET.)

One day after a British soldier was hacked to death on a busy southeast London street by two men who were heard claiming that they wanted to avenge the deaths of Muslims killed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Prime Minister David Cameron declared Thursday that "we will never give in to terror or terrorism in any of its forms."

Funerals began Thursday for the 24 people known to have been killed by the tornado that devastated Moore, Okla., on Monday.