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A South Carolina man believes he may have discovered the plane Amelia Earhart was flying when she vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. Former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo turned his fascination with the legendary pilot into an adventure when he embarked on an ambitious search for Earhart's lost plane. Romeo, who sold his commercial property investments to fund his search, managed to take a sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object on the ocean floor in December. Earhart and her Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Electra vanished at the height of her fame, a mystery that has spawned decades...

Thirty-six people on a flight from Fiji tested positive on landing about a week ago on the first plane to arrive since the nation reopened its borders this month. All 54 passengers were isolated at a facility, but at least four cases were since reported in the community, including a security guard at the isolation center.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — For decades, the tiny Marshall Islands has been a stalwart American ally. Its location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean has made it a key strategic outpost for the U.S. military. But that loyalty is being tested amid a dispute with Washington over the terms of its “Compact of Free Association” agreement, which expires soon. The U.S. is refusing to engage the Marshallese on claims for environmental and health damage caused by dozens of nuclear tests it carried out in the 1940s and ’50s, including a huge thermonuclear blast on Bikini Atoll.... ... China...

Legendary aviator Amelia Earhart was attempting to become the first female pilot to fly around the world when her plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. Last month, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) proposed the theory that she landed her plane safely on a remote island and died as a castaway. Now, scientists say a new discovery shows a striking similarity between the pilot and the partial skeleton of a castaway found on an island of Kiribati in 1940.

Ioane Teitiota has been battling deportation to Kiribati since 2011, when he overstayed his visa. He argues he faces indirect persecution from global warming in his home country. In its decision, the Supreme Court said while Kiribati undoubtedly faces challenges, Mr Teitiota did not face serious harm if he was returned there. The court said there was no evidence the government of Kiribati was failing to take steps to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation. Kiribati's president, Anote Tong, recently described climate change as the biggest humanitarian challenge of our time. He said Kiribati and other low-lying...

Tantalizing new clues are surfacing in the Amelia Earhart mystery, according to researchers scouring a remote South Pacific island believed to be the final resting place of the legendary aviatrix. Three pieces of a pocket knife and fragments of what might be a broken cosmetic glass jar are adding new evidence that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed and eventually died as castaways on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati. The island was some 300 miles southeast of their target destination, Howland Island. "These objects have the potential to yield DNA, specifically what...

Film to reveal heroine as a spy who helped JapanBy Jack Webster   American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, did not die at sea in 1937. Rather, she became a Japanese collaborator after being caught spying for the US during second world war. This and other amazing revelations are to be the basis of a Hollywood film that aims to uncover the strange truth behind her mysterious disappearance. Earhart was already an American heroine when, at midnight on July 2, 1937, she and navigator Fred Noonan took off from New...

TIGHAR is able to share details of our search for a conclusive answer to the Earhart mystery thanks to the international agreement signed in Washington, DC on March 20, 2012. The Republic of Kiribati, the sovereign nation of which Nikumaroro is a part, has granted TIGHAR the exclusive right to conduct research, search, and recovery operations related to the Earhart disappearance within the national borders of Kiribati. No one is authorized to undertake Earhart related search, recovery of artifacts or research within the boundaries of Kiribati (including Nikumaroro) without authorization from both the government of Kiribati and TIGHAR.

A small cosmetic jar offers more circumstantial evidence that the legendary aviator, Amelia Earhart, died on an uninhabited island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati. Found broken in five pieces, the ointment pot was collected on Nikumaroro Island by researchers of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 75 years ago. When reassembled,‭ the glass fragments ‬make up a nearly complete jar identical in shape to the ones used by Dr.‭ ‬C.‭ ‬H Berry's Freckle Ointment. The ointment was marketed in the early‭ ‬20th century as...

US aircraft history buffs are hopeful that tiny bones along with artefacts from the 1930s found on a remote Pacific island may reveal the fate of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart. In one of aviation's most enduring mysteries, Earhart took off from Lae, in what is now Papua New Guinea, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe via the equator in 1937 and was never seen again. A massive search at the time failed to find the flyer and her navigator Fred Noonan, who were assumed to have died after ditching their Lockheed Electra aircraft in the ocean, according to the Amelia...

The WikiLeaks uproar has folks jumping all over President Obama's administration for a variety of alleged sins of omission and commission. Sarah Palin weighed in big time on Facebook, blasting the administration for "incompetently handling the whole fiasco," and for not going after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with greater urgency. She tweeted that the administration might have gone to court to stop the disclosures. "Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book 'America by Heart' from being leaked," she wrote, "but US Govt can't stop Wikileaks' treasonous act?" Probably not. We're told there's a big legal difference between...

The president of the low-lying Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati said Thursday his country may already be doomed because of climate change. President Anote Tong said communities had already been resettled and crops destroyed by seawater in some parts of the country, made up of 33 coral atolls straddling the equator. Although scientists are still debating the extent of rising sea levels and their cause, Tong told a press conference marking World Environment Day that changes were obvious in his country of 92,000 people. "I am not a scientist but what I know is that things are happening we did...

Visitor puts Pacific nation on terrorism alert Nick Squires in Sydney Last Updated: 1:40am GMT 16/11/2006 An unlikely new front has opened up on the war on terrorism — the scattered South Pacific archipelago of Kiribati, one of the world's smallest nations. United States authorities are alarmed over a plan by a German citizen, linked to the September 11 terrorist attacks, to build a flying school on one of the former British colony's outlying islands. Wolfgang Bohringer has been linked to Mohammed Atta, the mastermind of the attacks on America in 2001. Mr Bohringer arrived in Kiribati (pronounced "Kiribas") a...

TOKYO, March 27 (UPI) -- China's insatiable appetite for energy and natural resources, and its desire to secure the sea lanes through which such resources are transported, are propelling the country's outreach to even the smallest of the Pacific Islands, leaders from the island nations heard last week at a convention in Tokyo. China's determination to undermine Taiwan's influence in the South Pacific is prompting generous assistance in infrastructure projects, such as building sports complexes in Fiji and Kiribati, and providing cargo ships to Vanuatu. Representatives from 22 island nations gathered in Tokyo at the Asia-Pacific Island Nations Summit from...