pre-set position," Mattis said.

Trump is expected to add 4,000 troops to those already in Afghanistan, who are advising, training and assisting Afghan forces. The U.S. now has 8,400 troops in the country as part of the longest conflict in U.S. history.

Trump has been working on a new strategy for Afghanistan for some time.

Advisers have offered conflicting advice, with former White House senior strategist Stephen Bannon even suggesting the U.S. hire mercenaries to fight in the country.

Bannon, who like Trump has questioned the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, lost his job on Friday. He had been in conflict with H.R. McMaster, Trump's national security adviser and a key voice on Afghanistan.

Afghan government forces have control over less than 60 percent of the country, with the rest being contested or underAn Italian teenager may be the first known case of a painful thyroid infection caused by the new coronavirus, doctors report.

A research team from Pisa, in northern Italy, said the 18-year-old woman's thyroid became sore and enlarged a few weeks after testing positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus in late February. The condition, called thyroiditis, cleared up completely within a week after she was treated with the steroid prednisone.

Still, the doctors believe that "physicians should be alerted about the possibility of this additional clinical manifestation" tied to the new coronavirus, study leader Dr Francesco Latrofa, an endocrinologist at the University Hospital of Pisa, said in a news release from the Endocrine Society. He and his colleagues published the findings on 21 May in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology &