Carney sidestepped questions on whether Obama backs a proposal to strip sexual assault cases from the chain of command.

Members of the House on Thursday voted in favor of a rule that allows a marathon session of debate and votes on 172 amendments to the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The House voted 238-189 in favor of the rule, after which members were to start considering changes to the bill, likely until late into the night. Only eight Democrats voted for the rule.

The Kentucky Republican said at the Faith and Freedom Conference foreign aid should be slashed to Egypt, Libya and Pakistan.

Counterintelligence officials at the National Security Agency are conducting a “damage assessment” to see what other top-secret information former National Security Agnecy contractor Edward Snowden leaked about the agency’s intelligence programs. 

Two proposed amendments to the defense authorization bill that would remove the decision to prosecute sexual assault cases from the chain of command will not receive votes on the House floor.

The House Rules Committee declared the two amendments out of order on Wednesday, which meant they were not among the list of 172 amendments that will be considered to the bill on the floor beginning Thursday.

One of the amendments was identical to a proposal from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) that would have given the decision to prosecute major criminal cases to military lawyers, and not commanders.

Getting key Taliban leaders to the negotiating table will be critical to the American handover of security operations to Afghan forces over the next year, according to the top U.S. commander in the country. 

"At this point, [U.S. and NATO] have made significant progress, but we are not yet at the point where it is completely sustainable," Gen. Joseph Dunford, head of all allied forces in Afghanistan, said in an interview with the BBC on Wednesday. 

The death toll in Syria is nearing 100,000, the United Nations said in a new report Thursday that comes as the Obama administration struggles with how to respond to Bashar Assad's gains in the civil war.

Some 93,000 were killed between the start of the conflict in March 2001 and the end of April 2013, the U.N. Human Rights Office said in a report released Thursday. The report found that 5,000 people are being killed every month, 82.6 percent of them male and many of them non-combatants.

“This extremely high rate of killings, month after month, reflects the drastically deteriorating pattern of the conflict over the past year,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement. “As clearly indicated in the latest report by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, civilians are bearing the brunt of widespread, violent and often indiscriminate attacks which are devastating whole swathes of major towns and cities, as well as outlying villages.”

The House on Thursday will start work on 172 amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2014, H.R. 1960.

The House Rules Committee approved a rule for the bill very early Thursday morning, which makes in order 70 GOP amendments, 64 Democratic amendments and 38 bipartisan proposals — descriptions of all the amendments are here. The committee made most amendments in order, as members had offered 299 of them.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said Wednesday that despite efforts by the House to reduce sexual assault in the military, the problem will only be resolved when leaders work to change the culture of the U.S. Armed Forces.

"No piece of legislation is going to fix this," Smith said at the start of floor debate on the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).