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YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — The U.S. government faces a $1.4 million fine for damage caused to a Philippines national park when the minesweeper USS Guardian ran aground on a coral reef in January, Philippine officials said Monday. The fine total, converted from 58.4 million Philippine pesos, is based on a 2009 law detailing fines based on total area damaged, unauthorized entry and other violations. A statement from Tubbataha Reefs National Park superintendent Angelique Songco called the fine just a “slap on the wrist.” “However, we respect the rule of law, and this is the fine stipulated,” Songco said in...

YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan -- The commanding officer of the former minesweeper USS Guardian and three others have been relieved of duty following the initial investigation into the grounding of the Sasebo-based ship on a reef in the Philippines, Navy officials said Thursday. Lt. Cmdr. Mark Rice, executive officer Daniel Tyler, the ship’s enlisted assistant navigator and the officer of the deck at the time of the ship’s grounding were all relieved because they “did not adhere to the standard navy navigation procedures,” Expeditionary Strike Group Seven spokesman Lt. Brian Wierzbicki said. Rice and the others were relieved by Rear...

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Four officers of a U.S. Navy minesweeper that ran aground on coral reef in the Philippines are being relieved of their duties. The U.S. Pacific Fleet said in a statement Wednesday that initial findings indicate all four sailors failed to adhere to standard navigation procedures at the time of the Jan. 17 grounding of the Guardian. The sailors are the commanding officer, the executive officer and navigator, the assistant navigator and the officer of the deck. They've been reassigned. snip

Jewish? Not, but know a Jew? Please watch and PLEASE SHARE this very warm, uplifting 5-minute presentation that includes musical accompaniment (and translation). It's about the authentic -- and eternal -- message of Passover. Any Jew and, for that matter, believing Christian will be thankful that you did. GUARANTEED!WE CAN MAKE THIS GO VIRAL! It deserves to!

Jim DeMint is retiring from the United States Senate and will take over the Heritage foundation. Heritage is certainly getting one of the conservative superstars of this current era. But what will this mean for the Senate and the future?

Elizabeth Warren on defensive again over heritage claimBy Hillary Chabot Monday, September 24, 2012 - Updated 2 hours ago **SNIP** Warren, during the Jim & Margery show on 96.9 WTKK this morning, addressed the issue when a caller asked her if she felt bad for checking the box in the law school directory and potentially taking an opportunity from a real Native American. “I know what I know from my family. I didn’t check a box to go to college. I didn’t check a box to go to law school. The only box I checked was in a directory to...

This post comes to you from the burning hell of a poolside in Puglia, Italy. If you want a better idea of the kind of ordeal I am currently experiencing, just check out this site. (And it doesn't do it justice, either. Seriously, I think Borgo Egnazia may be the most perfect resort hotel I've ever stayed at. If you can scrape together enough bucks make it your life mission to come here....) But enough of my glamorous life. I wanted to talk - once more - about the Queen's Diamond Jubilee since I think it's jolly important that not...

ROCKINGHAM, N.C. — When Trey Gainey drove his pickup truck to school Monday morning, he didn’t expect to be met in the parking lot by school officials telling him to remove a Confederate flag flying from his antenna. The Richmond Senior High School junior said he flies the flag every weekend, and decided to leave the flag on his truck on his last day of classes before finals start. Gainey has a belt buckle that says “Redneck” and a horn that plays “Dixie,” so there is no mistaking how the teen identifies himself. “It’s just my Southern heritage, you know....

Warren demands an apology from opponent in heritage controversyBy Justin Sink - 05/31/12 02:55 PM ET Elizabeth Warren demanded an apology from Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) Thursday after she said the lawmaker suggested she should not have taken her parent's claims of Native American ancestry at face value. At a campaign stop in Springfield, Mass., Thursday, Brown urged Warren "to tell the truth and answer the questions you guys are asking." "My mom and dad have told me a lot of things too, but it’s not accurate. You know, you have to, especially in these type of things, when you’re...

House Dem: Warren response on heritage 'like water torture'By Cameron Joseph - 05/31/12 06:05 PM ET Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D) has badly botched questions surrounding her Native American heritage and the issue is damaging her campaign, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) told The Hill. "There has to be an answer for this at some point, something that's full and comprehensive and has some closure to it as opposed to the way it's been dragged out — like water torture," Lynch said late Thursday afternoon. Asked if Warren and her campaign should put out all the information to put the...

Elizabeth Warren fumbled through her worst stretch as a Senate candidate this week, setting off a debate among strategists over whether the controversy over her claims to Native American ancestry would linger when the November election is closer. The Warren campaign will not say when top advisers learned that she considered herself part-Native American, but it was an element of her biography that seemed to catch them off guard. When news emerged last Friday that Harvard Law School had publicly touted Warren as a Native American professor in the Harvard Crimson in the 1990s, Warren advisers saw it as a...

That's the name I'm going to use referencing her. Supposedly has a great-grandmother who was a native american. Seriously? when all her immediate closer family names are as anglo-saxon as when white met bread. Geez, what a stretch. Wonder if she's related to that Colorado prof who claimed to be native american too. This is why "Premise Running Thin" fits her spirit and personality perfectly.

BOTTINEAU It wouldn't be surprising if Jonathan Bartlett bleeds red, white and blue. The Bottineau resident has a deepening appreciation for this nation's founding fathers and early citizens and citizen soldiers. A few years ago, Bartlett was introduced to Project Appleseed, a combination heritage and marksmanship program conducted by the Revolutionary War Veterans Association. He was so captured by the experience that he continues to rise through the ranks of RWVA. "It was inspiring. It motivated me to be involved," said Bartlett. "Something really connected with the shooting aspect and the history of our founding. Our founders inspired our free...

..A new genealogical analysis of four Republican presidential candidates by the web site Ancestry.com finds that Perry is a first cousin (six times removed) of Sam Houston, the commander-in-chief of Texas revolutionary forces and twice-elected president of the Republic of Texas. “Texans have that Texas pride,” said Anastasia Harman, lead family historian for Ancestry.com. “That Texas pride is obviously in his blood.” Houston, Texas’ seventh governor, and Perry, the state’s 47th governor, are both related to Captain John Paxton, a hero of the U.S. Revolutionary War who survived the infamous winter encampment at Valley Forge with General George Washington. Paxton’s...

Gingrich: Health Insurance Mandate 'Started As Conservative Effort to Stop Hillarycare' By Terence P. Jeffrey December 11, 2011 (CNSNews.com) - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Saturday defended his previous support of a federal mandate requiring people to buy health insurance by saying that "virtually every conservative saw the mandate as a less dangerous future" than the health-care plan being advanced by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1993 and that the idea of mandating that people buy health insurance "started as a conservative effort to stop Hillarycare in the 1990s." As recently as this May, Gingrich defended what he called...

Israel government scores own goal with US Jewish organisations The Israeli government is facing an unusual backlash from major US Jewish organisations after launching an advertising campaign essentially urging Israeli expats not to marry clueless American Jews or raise their children in the United States. 2:03PM GMT 03 Dec 2011 The first ad shows a young Israeli woman wincing after her boyfriend mistakes candles and music marking Yom HaZikaron, Israel's memorial day, for a romantic night in. The words "They will always remain Israelis. Their partners won't always understand what that means. Help them return to Israel" are read by...

Giving amnesty to illegal immigrants will greatly increase long-term costs to the taxpayer. Granting amnesty to illegal immigrants would, over time, increase their use of means-tested welfare, Social Security, and Medicare. Fiscal costs would rise in the intermediate term and increase dramatically when amnesty recipients reach retirement. Although it is difficult to provide a precise estimate, it seems likely that if 10 million adult illegal immigrants currently in the U.S. were granted amnesty, the net retirement cost to government (benefits minus taxes) could be over $2.6 trillion.

As ever with enviro-scholars, Professor Markham knoweth not what he hath wrought. Highlights: Germany is driving the Climate Change campaign. Many major international enviro-organizations (Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Birdlife International, etc.) are controlled by their German chapters. Several militant leaders of Germany’s confrontational early-1980s environmentalist protests were, a decade later, running government ministries. While Germany’s big enviro-organizations masquerade as citizens’ crusades, they are in fact top-down bureaucracies full of cynical well-paid careerists who work in tandem with state and corporate elites. Only 40 (forty) persons within Greenpeace-Germany’s half million members may vote for the board of directors. WWF-Germany has...

We’ve made a bit of a mistake as a conservative movement fixating so much on the race for the White House. There’s a behind the scenes fight happening in Washington right now. Congressional Republicans are not just selling us out, they are hell bent — and I really do mean hell bent — on destroying the conservative groups raising red flags about what they are doing.For so long the GOP in Washington could hide behind surveys like the American Conservative Union survey, which shows just how much more someone is Republican than Democrat. No one actually did a survey that...

This week, JD Foster and Curtis Dubay from the Heritage Foundation wrote an article arguing that repatriation was a bad idea right now. ATR disagrees with this (and this seems to be a departure from prior Heritage Foundation policy on this, as well). Below are our reasons why: What Is Repatriation? Under U.S. tax law, a company that earns a profit overseas must, in general, pay income tax to the overseas government AND to the IRS if they bring the remaining profit back to the U.S. The company gets a credit for the foreign income tax paid, but the difference...