The Obama administration has adopted a policy of rejecting all House appropriations bills until Republicans abandon their budget.

A top U.S. general on Wednesday sought to sooth Russia's concerns over the U.S. nuclear stockpile and a new American missile shield being set up in Eastern Europe.

"We do not view the Russians ... as our enemies," Gen. Bob Kehler, head of Strategic Command, said during a speech at the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington.

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Moscow has emerged again as a key roadblock to any possible military action to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and end the growing violence in the country.

The Pentagon is continuing its push for Congress not to make big changes to the Pentagon’s budget this year, even if the pleas mostly fall flat on Capitol Hill.

Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was the latest Pentagon official to urge Congress to lay off the budget, warning that making changes was a zero-sum game” as the Pentagon prepares for a cut of $487 billion over the next decade.

“Every dollar the U.S. spends on old and unnecessary programs is a dollar we lose from new and necessary strategic investments,” Carter said at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute Wednesday. “When something is added to the budget that’s not needed, we are forced to take out something that matters.”

The House has already approved a sweeping defense authorization bill that creates an East Coast missile defense system.

Rep. Mike Rogers said he's not sure that providing arms to the Syrian insurgents "is the right answer."

Spreading sectarian violence across the Middle East is now the “most probable" scenario as a result of the conflict in Syria, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice told reporters Wednesday following a UN Security Council briefing on the situation.

Susan Rice said the success of UN special representative Kofi Annan's peace plan or, barring that, Security Council agreement on further sanctions could help defuse the situation. But both those scenarios seem unlikely in the wake of last Friday's massacre of more than 100 civilians that the United States and others have pinned on the Syrian government and its proxy forces.

“In the absence of either of those two scenarios,” Rice said, “there seems to me to be only one other alternative – and that is indeed the worst case, which seems unfortunately at the present to be the most probable – and that is that the violence escalates, the conflict spreads and intensifies and reaches a higher degree of intensity and involves countries in the region, it takes on increasing sectarian forms, and we have a major crisis not only in Syria but in the region.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Tuesday that coming automatic budget cuts known as the "sequester" would hollow out the military and particularly hurt South Carolina because it would likely target the F-35 fighter planes based in his state.

"It would be devastating to South Carolina," Graham said, according to The Item of South Carolina. "The F-35 would be terminated. A cut of this magnitude will hollow out the greatest fighting force in the world."

The 33-year prison sentence handed down to Shakil Afridi sparked a backlash in Congress against Pakistan.