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A group of LGBTQ veterans who sued the Department of Defense last year for denying them honorable discharges because of their sexuality said Monday they had settled with the Pentagon.

The agreement, which still needs a federal judge’s approval, streamlines the process for veterans discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” and predecessor policies to eliminate references to their sexual orientation from their discharge paperwork.

Doing so can be a burdensome undertaking that under current standards can stretch on for years. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and its predecessors prevented LGBTQ people from serving openly in the military.

The deadly New Year’s Day terrorist attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas have brought renewed attention to the scourge of extremism in the US military, but efforts to tackle it wilted in the later years of the Biden administration, and are unlikely to be revived once Donald Trump begins his second term this month.

Both the New Orleans vehicle attack that killed 14, and the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas in which the driver died, were perpetrated by discharged or serving members of the armed forces.

Though investigators have yet to officially link the events, they follow a pattern of active or veteran military personnel involvement in acts of domestic terrorism, including the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot; a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017; and the 2009 mass shooting at the former Fort Hood army base in Texas that killed 13.

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The highly decorated Special Forces soldier who died by suicide in a Cybertruck explosion on New Year’s Day confided to a former girlfriend who had served as an Army nurse that he faced significant pain and exhaustion that she says were key symptoms of traumatic brain injury.

The person who died when a Tesla Cybertruck packed with explosives burst into flames outside the hotel in Las Vegas part-owned by Donald Trump was a highly decorated US army Green Beret who was deployed twice to Afghanistan, officials have said.

The driver and lone occupant of the electric-powered Tesla Cybertruck that caught fire and exploded has been identified as Matthew Livelsberger, from Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Livelsberger, 37, died, while seven bystanders were wounded. Livelsberger was first identified in media reports. On Thursday afternoon the FBI said it believed the suspect was Livelsberger – his military ID was found in the vehicle, and officials said tattoos gave a strong indication the body was his – and was waiting for DNA tests to confirm this.

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The U.S. military said it mistakenly shot down one of its own fighter aircraft over the Red Sea early on Sunday, forcing both pilots to eject.

Both were rescued, one with minor injuries, after the "apparent case of friendly fire," which is being investigated, U.S. Central Command said in a statement.

The fighter was an F/A-18 Hornet flying off the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. One of the carrier's escort ships, the missile cruiser Gettysburg, "mistakenly fired on and hit" the plane, the statement said.

The Red Sea has been a hotbed of military activity for more than a year as U.S. forces battle Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi militia, which has carried out attacks against shipping in the region. The U.S. military said it had fired on Houthi drones and missiles over the Red Sea on Saturday, and had attacked command-and-control and missile storage sites in Sanaa.

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The world’s most famous fictional Top Gun is now a decorated naval hero.