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In a victory rare to U.S. military aviation, two widows of Marine Corps pilots have won a 16-year fight to lift blame from their husbands’ shoulders for a 2000 Osprey crash that killed 19 people, including 15 Marines from San Diego County. Test pilots Lt. Col. John Brow and Maj. Brooks Gruber were at the controls of the MV-22 aircraft when it crashed in the Arizona desert during an exercise. The revolutionary aircraft -- which travels like an airplane but lands vertically like a helicopter -- was still in the operational evaluation stage. The Marine Corps had a lot of...

Hey there! Been missing your bird threads. Looked out the window this morning and saw several doves fighting over the bird feeders. Inspired me to ease up the road a bit to an osprey nest I've been keeping an eye on. The pair there have raised their fledges for at least the past four years. This is likely their time using this nest as the rotting pine sways precariously in even the slightest breeze. At any rate, I thought about you. Hope you are well and able to get out. Enjoy!

A number of European countries have shown interest in the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, Navy Recognition has learned during the Surface Navy Association's (SNA) National Symposium held last week near Washington DC. Among them are the UK, France, Italy and Spain. Artist impression showing a US Navy V-22 in a COD mission. Image: Bell "We will brief a number of European countries on the V-22 in February. If international partners orders can be added to the US order as part of Multi Year 3, it could drive the V-22 price down" said John R. Parker, Senior Manager, Tiltrotor Global Sales...

After the media inexplicably dubbed Hillary Rodham Clinton the “winner” of the Benghazi hearings, her apologists dismissed a line of questioning into her unofficial adviser, Sidney Blumenthal. So he was sending her e-mail offering advice on Libya and other matters of state. In the immortal words of Clinton at an earlier Benghazi hearing, “What difference does it make?”

Revelations from emails purloined by a Romanian hacker show that Hillary Clinton was being secretly advised about Libya -- before and after the Benghazi terrorist attack -- by an off-the-shelf private spook group associated with controversial former Clinton confidante Sydney Blumenthal that claimed to be helping the Libyan opposition and considered placing ground operatives near the border. What's this all about? It's not completely clear, but apparently the goal of the rogue group, which included a former high level CIA covert operative and a former U.S. General, was, at the very least, to gather and provide sensitive reports to the...

The MV-22 Osprey gets $6.5 billion vote of confidence by "Defense Secretary" Chuck Hagel. Naval Air Systems Command has given Textron and Boeing Co. $6.5 billion for 99 Ospreys Israeli special forces want up to five Ospreys and will pay $70 million apiece, all of will come out of our + $3 billion Israel military U.S. annual assistance. More than 30 Marines and an un-known number of contractors have died in MV-22 use and development anomalies to date. Some lawmakers and Defense Department officials sought unsuccessfully to cancel the program. to date. Some lawmakers and Defense Department officials have sought...

And you thought Sidney Blumenthal was shady. Few people have heard of Cody Shearer, the unsanctioned diplomat, private eye, and Clinton flunky whose name surfaced in connection with the so-called intelligence reports Sidney Blumenthal was channeling to Hillary Clinton during her time at the State Department. But this shadowy fixture of the Clinton machine was everywhere in the 1990s — including war-torn Bosnia, where he became the subject of a State Department investigation after he represented himself as an agent of the U.S. government and took cash from a genocidal warlord. Now evidence suggests Shearer, working with his partner Blumenthal,...

Imagine a hotel room at the Plaza Hotel, shopping at Bloomingdales and dining at the Rainbow Room in Benghazi. Yes Benghazi, after all the most feared leader, Muammar Gaddafi is dead and all is calm after the attack on American interests in 2012. So, never let a good crisis go to waste. Libya had and has a deadly history where some elites had high aspirations for a new Libya. Trey Gowdy, the Chairman of the Benghazi Commission likely has some documented trails on Hillary’s future dreams for Libya, but you don’t and should know even more of the story. Libya,...

Jeff Gerth and Sam Biddle explore an important sidebar both to the affair of the Hillary Clinton homebrew email server and to the Benghazi scandal: “Private emails reveal ex-Clinton aide’s secret spy network.” Long story short: enter Sid Blumenthal, one of the most unsavory characters of the Clinton era. Enter Sid Blumenthal along with Tyler Drumheller and Cody Shearer, that is. Mark Hemingway reviews the triumvirate in “Meet the men behind Hillary Clinton’s private ‘spy network’” Ed Morrissey finds NBC’s Chuck Todd commenting regarding Blumenthal that “nothing regarding Blumenthal surprises me,” but Blumenthal enters the story from left field. Gerth...

One Marine was killed and 21 others were hospitalized Sunday after an Osprey... had a "hard-landing mishap" at approximately 11:40 a.m. local time. Built by Boeing Co. and Bell, a unit of Textron Inc., the Osprey program was nearly scrapped after a history of mechanical failures and two test crashes that killed 23 Marines in 2000.

Flying a kamikaze drone armed with explosives from the back of an MV-22 Osprey aircraft, and directing it right into the insurgent’s fighting hole. The Marines tested a small unmanned aircraft known as the Switchblade recently at Twentynine Palms, Calif., flying it directly at targets from both the ground and the back of the Osprey, a long-range aircraft that has rotors like a helicopter, but can fly like a plane once they rotate forward. They were “inert,” with no explosives on board, but the mission went off without a hitch, said Col. James Adams, commanding officer of Marine Aviation Weapons...

If the motives to wipe the hard drive on Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server weren’t already crystal clear, a new development last night put it in Ultra HD. Gawker’s Jeff Girth and Sam Biddle uncovered a secret, private intelligence network run by Sidney Blumenthal for Hillary’s benefit, apart from the State Department’s own Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Hackers got e-mails that went through Hillary’s private server between her and Blumenthal, e-mails that show her own private intel group was also warning her that Libya was collapsing in the weeks and months prior to the sacking of the consulate in...

Updated March 27 to include responses from the FBI and the State Department. Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack. Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account. The emails, which were posted on the internet...

The Willys MB – better known as the original jeep – was a game-changer during World War II. Small, agile, versatile and durable, jeeps were easy to deploy, easy to operate and easy to maintain, making them perhaps the Allies’ most important battlefield equipment. More than 70 years later, US aircraft maker and defence supplier Boeing has revisited the original jeep’s winning formula in a stocky little bruiser of a car called the Phantom Badger.

Air Force Tech. Sgt. David Shea sensed no danger as he stood with his .50 caliber machine gun ready at the open ramp of his CV-22 Osprey coming in to land on a small, rutted airstrip in Bor, South Sudan. A crowd of up to 10,000 people milled about a United Nations compound 200 feet below, where 30 U.S. citizens were waiting that sunny Sunday morning for the Ospreys to evacuate them from a country slipping into civil war. The Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) crews and 21 Navy SEALs on board to protect the operation had been told...

The Navy said Thursday it had called off a search for a Marine who had jumped from an MV-22 Osprey aircraft over the Persian Gulf after it briefly lost power, and he is now presumed dead. The Navy had been searching for the Marine, a member of the Osprey’s crew, since the incident occurred Wednesday at 2:10 p.m. He and another member of the crew jumped from the Osprey when it appeared it would crash, but its pilot was able to regain control of it and land aboard the USS Makin Island, an amphibious assault ship, Navy officials said. One...

Bringing back animals which were hunted to extinction in Britain - including the wolf, lynx, beaver and wild boar - would not be difficult, according to a new report. The animals could be brought back to live free in the wild without posing any great threat to people, crops or the environment, it is claimed. A report from the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at Oxford University (WCRU) said while further work needed to be done on their impact, there was no obvious reason to block their return. The animals roaming free in remote areas would enhance the natural environment and...

Rebel gunfire hit a U.S. military aircraft trying to evacuate American citizens caught in a remote region of South Sudan that on Saturday became a battle ground between the country's military and renegade troops, officials said. Four U.S. service members were wounded. The U.S. military aircraft were heading to Bor, the capital of the state of Jonglei and scene of some of the nation's worst violence over the last week. One American service member was reported to be in critical condition.

The US will fast-track delivery of six V-22 Osprey helicopter-plane aircraft to Israel, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Thursday in his address to the Anti-Defamation League's centennial conference in New York. NBC News reported that the Pentagon agreed to send Israel the next batch of Ospreys to come off the production line after Israel requested this week that the delivery of the aircraft be expedited amid threats from Iran and Syria. The next group of Ospreys had originally been slated for assignation to the US Marines, a Pentagon official told NBC. "Israel will get six V-22s out of...

CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa – The Marine Corps said it will delay the deployment of an Osprey aircraft squadron to Okinawa following (yet another) Air Force "helicopter" crash in a military training area Monday. The fiery crash of an HH-60 Pave Hawk sent plumes of smoke into the air near Camp Hansen in central Okinawa and left one crew member still missing early Tuesday.