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The U.S. Naval Academy will prohibit transgender students from enrolling at the school starting in fall 2020. The academy currently allows transgender students but will be forced to comply with the Trump administration's new transgender military policy that went into effect Friday, the Capital Gazette reported. Transgender students enrolled for the fall 2019 school year will be covered by the previous policy, which allowed transgender students to serve openly, Defense Department spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell told the newspaper. A Pentagon spokesperson referred inquiries to the Naval Academy, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill. The...

Navy football lost one of its legends Thursday when Joe Bellino died in his home state of Massachusetts at the age of 81. Bellino, the 1960 Heisman Trophy winner as a standout halfback for the Midshipmen, had been in failing health for some time. Bellino was nicknamed the “Winchester Rifle” – a reference to his hometown and high school as well as his explosive running style. He was described by one newspaper reporter as “the player who was never caught from behind.” He starred at Navy from 1958-1960 under head coach Wayne Hardin, rushing for 1,664 yards on 330 carries...

John McCain was laid to rest Sunday on a green hill at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, Md. alongside the classmate who was his “wing man” and lifelong friend. The Vietnam War hero, maverick senator and two-time presidential candidate was bid farewell in a private ceremony beside the Severn River by his closest family members and friends, along with military dignitaries and members of his academy Class of 1958. The Arizona senator’s final resting place is the cemetery near the fields and classrooms where he and his friend, Admiral Chuck Larson, met as young men six decades ago....

John McCain is being laid to rest at the U.S. Naval Academy after a five-day procession that served as a final call to arms for a nation he warned could lose its civility and sense of shared purpose. The private ceremony in Annapolis, Maryland, was as carefully planned as the rest of McCain's farewell tour, which began in Arizona after he died Aug. 25 from brain cancer and stretched to Washington.

Sunday's funeral and burial of the late Sen. John McCain at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis are private, but here's what will happen . . .

A former Naval Academy soccer star who led her squad to an undefeated league season has been named to another team that goes above and beyond. NASA announced Friday that it had assigned Marine Corps Lt. Col. Nicole Mann to a new crew of astronauts who will fly a privately developed spaceship, marking a return of U.S.-manned space flight after the shuttle program ended in 2011. Since then, Americans have relied on Russian spacecraft for space travel. Mann will be a part of a three-person crew to fly Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on a mid-2019 mission, the spacecraft’s first manned flight....

President Donald Trump will speak at the Naval Academy commissioning ceremony next month in Annapolis, city officials confirmed Wednesday. It will be Trump’s first time speaking to the academy’s graduating class, as last year Vice President Mike Pence gave the address. Graduation will be held at the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium at 10 a.m. May 25 with a Blue Angels fly-over to begin the ceremony. The City of Annapolis will be cooperating with the secret service to provide security for Trump’s visit, said Susan O’Brien, city spokeswoman. The city is not yet confirming which roads will be closed for the...

Arizona Sen. John McCain took another swipe at Trump administration policy in a speech to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he slammed both isolationism and nationalism, ideas he said are ascendant within the President Trump’s White House. In the speech to the midshipmen in Annapolis, Maryland, on Monday, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman ripped into the Trump administration’s policies, although — taking a Voldemort-like approach that’s become habitual among anti-Trump conservatives — he never mentioned the president’s name. McCain contrasted the “hopeful atmosphere of 1991” after the fall of the Soviet Union with “the current circumstances of our world,”...

FAIRFAX, Va. - A Virginia teenager has been appointed to all four American military service academies. Timothy Park, 18, beat the odds with stellar grades, test scores, leadership, community service and fitness. "I'm feeling amazing right now," Park said. In fact, the odds are so great, it's a rare reality for anyone to get into all four schools. "It's about one percent, if not less," Park said. "Of the whole country."

The U.S. Naval Academy is preparing to open its screening process for Navy SEAL training next year to women who are juniors at the academy, the superintendent said Monday. Vice Adm. Walter 'Ted' Carter told the academy's Board of Visitors at their quarterly meeting that the school is waiting for specific guidance from the Navy before definitely opening next spring's screening. He noted it could take longer before female midshipmen will take part in the rigorous 24-hour marathon screening process. 'We'll be ready to put women through the screener as early as next year,' Carter said. 'I don't know that...

Worth seeing again.

A patio chair smashed the sandwich shop window. Glass fell around Midshipman Brad Kadlubowski, seated before a window, at the Subway shop in Baltimore. Inside, a father steered his wife and two children to the back of the shop on Saturday. His son has asthma; the father worried about tear gas. Another chair smashed another window. Everyone to the back, the midshipmen instructed. Families and Naval Academy midshipmen had come for dinner before Saturday's Orioles game. Protests over the death of Freddie Gray began peacefully that day, but ended with confrontation. By Monday, the day of Gray's funeral, protests escalated...

President Barack Obama told graduates at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., Friday that they—and he—must “constantly strive to remain worthy of the public trust.” “You will lead this country, and if we want to restore the trust that the American people deserve to have in their institutions, all of us have to do our part, and those of us in leadership—myself included—have to constantly strive to remain worthy of the public trust,” said Obama. … The president urged them to “carry forth the values” that they learned at the Naval Academy, “because our nation needs them now more...

I certainly don't endorse all the comments posted on this blog, nor even all the guest columns. Case in point: I disagree with the argument below, because I don't think we want our corporals and lieutenants to try to be constitutional lawyers weighing each order they receive. (Or even our generals, like Douglas MacArthur, who got fired in part for following by his own reading of the Constitution.) I think people need to be taught that the issue of "legal orders" applies to war crimes and the like, not to whether one believes the executive branch has abided by the...

You have worked long and hard to reach a high profile position, as those who came before you had. You did everything that was asked of you, and more. You believed in a system that told you all you had to do was work hard, pay attention to detail, excel in your efforts, show exceptional dedication, and demonstrate professionalism better than those around you. You also knew that the system was a meritocracy based on fair, established rules that everyone agreed upon. Why wouldn't you believe that? Those in positions of authority, those whose word was gold, those who asked...

The Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead announced in Annapolis recently that "diversity is the number one priority" at the Naval Academy. The Naval Academy superintendent, Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, echoed him. Everyone understands that "diversity" here means nonwhite skins. Fowler insisted recently that we needed to have Annapolis graduates who "looked like" the Fleet, where enlisted people are about 42 percent nonwhite, largely African American and Hispanic. The stunning revelation last week was that the Naval Academy had an incoming class that was "more diverse" than ever before: 35 percent minority. Sounds good, only this comes with a...

With moist eyes, young midshipmen and hardened old warriors alike, stood at attention yesterday as the casket of Vietnam War hero retired Marine Col. John Walter Ripley was taken from the Naval Academy Chapel. One old comrade, who stood with Col. Ripley against a large Communist force on Easter Sunday 1972, flew in from California for the funeral Mass and final commendation. "Col. Ripley worked as my adviser for two years," retired Vietnamese Marine Corps Lt. Col. Le Ba Binh said through a translator during an interview. "He was a genuine guy, very nice, very well spoken. It hit me...

Fifty years ago, 899 young men gathered in the then-new Naval Academy field house to hear a graduation address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After four grueling years of military and academic training, their numbers had dwindled by a quarter,but for those who had survived, promising futures stretched out ahead. [snip] "We're not going out looking for another job, especially one that's as overwhelming as being president of the United States," said Potter, who planned to travel from California to attend the reunion. "Many of us wonder, 'Where does he get the energy to do this?' But those who knew...

When I speak with my liberal friends about the upcoming election, one point they think that they can trump me on is intelligence. They regurgitate the litany of how dumb Reagan was, and connect the dots to how dumb John McCain is because he graduated at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy. It is amazing to me how uneducated liberals are when it comes to education. The world begins and ends with the Ivy League, and class rank must be the only indicator of intelligence. Let's compare the schools the candidates went to, how they were graded,...

A recent Washington Post profile of John McCain’s years at the Naval Academy portrayed him as an unruly, fun-loving, under-achieving Midshipman struggling with his obligation to live up to his family’s brilliant military legacy. It was “a four-year course of insubordination and rebellion,” McCain later wrote. McCain graduated 894th out of 899 in 1958, five spots above the “Anchorman,” the lowest-ranking midshipman. In this respect he did uphold one family tradition; his similarly rebellious father Jack, who would rise to the rank of Admiral and was the Pacific Command CINC while his son was being held prisoner in Hanoi, had...