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YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — Thousands of people crowded onto Yokosuka Naval Base’s Pier 12 on Thursday to welcome the aircraft carrier USS George Washington to its new home in Japan. The historic significance of the event was repeatedly emphasized by U.S. Navy and Japanese military officials, as the George Washington is the only nuclear-powered ship to be forward deployed to Japan. "I think this is beautiful," said Chief Petty Officer Cleo Bowie, who was among a smaller group of George Washington sailors who arrived ahead of the ceremony. "A lot of people maybe haven’t really taken it in yet,...

TOKYO — Groups opposed to Thursday’s arrival of the USS George Washington to Yokosuka Naval Base say demonstrations will grow in size and number in upcoming days. "We want to express our opposition to America," Masahiko Goto, a lawyer and leader of a Yokosuka citizen’s group, said Tuesday. "We want a withdrawal of the deployment." On the day of the ship’s arrival to its new forward-deployed base, a rally will be held at 6 a.m. at Kannonzaki Park near Uraga station, where protesters can watch the carrier as it approaches, organizers said. Protesters also will embark on boats to follow...

WASILLA — Responding to news reports about then-Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin asking a librarian how she would feel about banning books, a San Francisco man has donated two children’s books dealing with homosexuality to the Wasilla Library. Mike Petrelis, a 49-year-old who files Freedom of Information requests for a living, said he was aghast to read reports of Palin’s 1996 inquiry about banning certain books at Wasilla’s library. The news — old news in the Mat-Su Valley, but new in the Lower 48 — prompted Petrelis to send to Wasilla “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “Daddy’s Roommate,” both children’s books...

He survived the battle, three months of hiding and a prison camp. After 63 years, former Japanese sailor Tsuruji Akikusa has come back to Iwo Jima to deliver a message to his friend. Tsuruji Akikusa had always kept a journal. So at 18, when he returned from war to Japan in 1946, he wrote it all down. The young seaman apprentice wrote about joining the Imperial Navy at 15, sailing from Yokosuka to the Bonin Islands, then arriving on Iwo Jima in the summer of 1944. His tale, like the war itself, grew more harrowing. It expanded from his time...

The first returns show Republican Rep. Don Young and Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell in a dogfight and in a virtual dead heat for the Republican nomination. With nearly a third of the precincts in, Young leads Parnell by 92 votes of nearly 40,000 cast. Gabrielle LeDoux trailed far behind the two leaders. In the U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent Ted Stevens had a comfortable lead over several challengers including self-financed Vic Vickers and banker Dave Cuddy.

The Anchorage Daily News has issued this memo to its employees: "The Anchorage Daily News continues to manage through an economic downturn that is having an unprecedented negative effect on revenues, and, therefore, our financial health. While we have taken many steps to reorganize and streamline operations to respond to changing business models and these economic challenges, we need to do more to control expenses. As an important part of that effort, we are implementing an across-the-board, one-year wage freeze effective Sept. 1, 2008." The wage freeze comes after Daily News managers told employees last month that the paper will...

Volcanic ash stranded at least 5,000 travelers Sunday night and early Monday morning when a shift in the wind moved a giant ash plume into flight routes, causing Alaska Airlines to cancel 44 flights into and out of Alaska. "The entire state is unflyable," Alaska Airlines staff told passengers at Seattle's airport Sunday, according to Chelsea Harms, an Anchorage woman who was booked on flight 111 to Anchorage. Alaska has added flights today to try to accommodate the stranded passengers, according to Caroline Boren, Alaska Airlines spokeswoman. It was not immediately how other airlines were affected, but but Boren said...

Brenda Smith and her husband became curious last winter about the workers who showed up in their neighborhood around Old Providence Road in Virginia Beach. Without any notice to her, the largely Hispanic crew began digging trenches in her front yard and shoving orange tubing into the ground. She tried to ask them questions, but they didn't speak English. Concerned about the growing number of illegal immigrants in Virginia, Smith decided to find out whether the men in her yard were here legally. She learned they were part of a $23 billion Verizon fiber-optic project intended to bring state-of-the-art television...

A Japanese foreign affairs official said Thursday the ministry was reassured by the U.S. Navy's "serious stance" after the two top officers on the USS George Washington were removed from duty in response to a May fire aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. "The government of Japan believes that stringent measures taken to relieve the two (officers) showed a serious stance from the U.S. side in regards to the fire," said Hiroshi Suzuki, assistant press secretary at Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Suzuki said ministry officials believe the removal of commanding officer Capt. David C. Dykhoff and executive officer Capt. David...

US VISIT needs fixing — an opportunity for McCain. Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential hopeful, says he has learned his lesson on immigration. His vision of a “comprehensive reform” in which at least some illegal aliens would be rewarded with legal status must, he now knows, await major deposits in the credibility bank by a government Americans do not trust to enforce the law. He says it’s time to get serious, and that the way to do that is “Border Enforcement First.” Unfortunately, that’s not very serious. Long before September 11, 2001, the government well knew that smuggling across...

SAN DIEGO – The skipper of the San Diego-based Pearl Harbor has been relieved of command after the amphibious landing-dock ship ran aground last week in the Persian Gulf, Navy officials said Monday. Cmdr. Xavier Valverde has been reassigned to the staff of the Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain while the July 21 incident is investigated. The Pearl Harbor apparently hit a shoal while conducting a well-deck drill off the coast of Kuwait, a Navy spokeswoman said. The ship backed off the sand bar without sustaining damage. Valverde, a 26-year Navy veteran, took command of the Pearl Harbor in...

A top U.S. military commander says American navy ships off Myanmar's coast will leave the area after failing to get the junta's permission to help with cyclone relief efforts. Adm. Timothy Keating says that he wants the USS Essex and accompanying vessels to resume their previously scheduled duties on Thursday. The ships were in the region for international exercises. Keating made them available to help with relief efforts for last month's cyclone and they were deployed near Myanmar in case they obtained permission to enter the country's waters. But Myanmar allowed only limited U.S. military aid flights to the country,...

NORFOLK A 20-year Coast Guard veteran was sentenced today to 9 months in federal prison for passing confidential information to his mistress, the owner of a fishing fleet who was convicted of hiring illegal immigrant workers. Morris Wade Hughes of Chesapeake, a petty officer, also was ordered to serve 150 days of home confinement after his release from prison. U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson imposed a $2,000 fine as well. During a three-year affair with Michelle Peabody, whose family runs Peabody Corp., a commercial fishing company based in Newport News, Hughes passed confidential information to Peabody regarding the location...

Fresh off a successful campaign to get polar bears declared a threatened species, a conservation group today petitioned to provide Endangered Species Act protections to the bears' main prey because of global warming. The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service to list ringed seals and two other species - spotted and bearded seals - as threatened or endangered. All three seals live in the Bering, Chukchi or Beaufort seas off Alaska's coast and depend on sea ice that is receding rapidly, according to the petition. "Ice is essential for them to give birth and rear their...

A conservation group gave notice Tuesday that it will sue to force federal action on a petition to list the Pacific walrus as a threatened species because of threats from global warming and offshore petroleum development. The deadline was May 8 for an initial 90-day review of the petition by the U.S. Department of the Interior, according to Center for Biological Diversity attorney Brendan Cummings. The group filed the petition in February. Shaye Wolf, a biologist and lead author of the petition, said Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than the best predictions of climate models. "As the sea ice...

Double checking my spam box before deleting it today I found out I've been dead since precisely December 30th, 2003...and my wife too. And the daughter we never knew we had. Apparently I was never knew I was well off either, since I left "...an estate of 10.2 million Us Dollars". This may explain why I've been feeling so poorly lately.

KUMAMOTO — Fifty-four people have received medical treatment after a man taken to a hospital in Kumamoto City Wednesday night for attempted suicide threw up and toxic fumes from his vomit filled the hospital’s emergency care unit, police said Thursday. The man, a 34-year-old farmer, died. None of the other patients are in life-threatening condition, police added. A 72-year-old female pneumonia patient, who was nearby, is reported to have suffered a serious deterioration in her condition. The mother of the man who killed himself and eight other people were also checked into the Japanese Red Cross Kumamoto Hospital or other...

Insights into war and life from the last U.S. veteran of World War I "I realize now I was very young." Frank Buckles was 16 and lied about his age to the Army so he could enlist and go to Europe. It was 1917 and the country was facing the "war to end all wars." Now, at 107, he is America’s last living World War I veteran. At his farmhouse in West Virginia, he looks back at it all — driving ambulances in WWI, working on ships all over the world and surviving WWII in a prison camp — and...

ON THE NBC nightly news there was a heart-throb report of an attractive British teen-ager who had skied across the North Pole with her father to demonstrate how the Arctic ice pack is receding in the face of global warming. Oh, horror. Oh, how terrible. The pictures were beautiful: Her pretty face, her gentle smile, her soft voice, her snow-crusted parka, the blue skies, the brilliant white ice, the cascading chunks of ice calving from glaciers, the two penguins standing on an ice flow. Wait a minute. Penguins? At the North Pole? Not that we ever heard of. So much...

NORFOLK - The vice president of a Newport News fishing company was sentenced today to 90 days in prison on top of nearly $7 million in fines and forfeitures that she and her company have agreed to pay to settle charges that the company employed illegal immigrants on its vessels. Yvonne Michelle Peabody, who runs the day-to-day operations of the Peabody Corp., previously pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges and has cooperated with the government in several other criminal matters, including a drug case, a prosecutor said. U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson also sentenced her to 120 days of...