...The White House said the president would meet Saturday with his national security team to consider possible next steps by the United States. Officials say once the facts are clear, Obama will make a decision about how to proceed.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel declined to discuss any specific force movements while saying that Obama had asked the Pentagon to prepare military options for Syria. U.S. defense officials told The Associated Press that the Navy had sent a fourth warship armed with ballistic missiles into the eastern Mediterranean Sea but without immediate orders for any missile launch into Syria.

U.S. Navy ships are capable of a variety of military action, including launching Tomahawk cruise missiles, as they did against Libya in 2011 as part of an international action that led to the overthrow of the Libyan government.

"The Defense Department has a responsibility to provide the president with options for contingencies, and that requires positioning our forces, positioning our assets, to be able to carry out different options - whatever options the president might choose," Hagel told reporters traveling with him to Asia....

Samantha Power, the newly confirmed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, didn’t attend the Security Council’s emergency meeting on the alleged chemical-weapons attack in Syria on Thursday (a deputy instead represented the U.S. as one of the veto-wielding permanent members; no action was taken).

Over the last couple days, when pressed, the State Department offered little information about Power’s absence, but it turns out she was in Ireland, her place of birth. U.N. sources revealed to Fox News that she was in the country for a personal trip.

Power assumed the office on August 2. Officials say that her trip was preplanned and that she couldn’t have returned in time; the ambassador apparently was in constant contact with her staff and the White House throughout the week....