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The United States and Canada have cut a last minute trade deal Sunday night ahead of the midnight deadline for Canada to join the United States and Mexico in a trilateral trade arrangement.... Today is Election Day in Canada's second most populous province, Quebec. Four political parties are expected to be dividing up the 125 seats in Quebec's National Assembly.... A political party committed to reducing US military presence has won the election in the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa.... There's a lot of political drama in the UK amidst the Conservative Party conference with many of the faithful dismayed by...

Hermit who escaped civilization to live naked on a desert island is forced to return to Japan by authorities after 29 YEARS 82-year-old Masafumi Nagasaki 'escaped' civilisation in 1989 for life of solitude He stayed on rarely visited Sotobanari island — even fishermen don't go there But Japanese authorities moved him back to mainland after he was found 'weak' Nagasaki can't return to the island and lives 60km away in a house in the cityJapanese authorities denied a man the chance his wish to die a castaway on an island he called home for three decades. Masafumi Nagasaki was the...

As we celebrate Easter Sunday and the Jewish Passover, we should keep in our prayers and remembrances the many Americans who fought and sacrificed during that same time 73 years ago in the Battle of Okinawa. The event was Operation Iceberg. It was the bloodiest battle and the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater of World War II. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, the Navy’s Fifth Fleet under Admiral Raymond Spruance attacked the Japanese-held island. They were joined by a British, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian naval task force and more than 180,000 Army soldiers and Marines. This...

Japan's Coast Guard says 4 Chinese patrol ships temporarily entered Japanese territorial waters near the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea on Friday. Coast Guard officials said the ships breached the territorial waters off Uotsuri Island in Okinawa Prefecture shortly after 10 AM. Foreign Ministry officials lodged a protest with the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo. They said intrusions into Japan's waters are an infringement of its sovereignty, and demanded that the vessels leave the area at once. The 4 ships stayed in Japan's waters for about 90 minutes before moving away. Japan controls the Senkaku Islands. The Japanese government...

Fidel Castro claims US sank South Korean warship Posted: 05 June 2010 0201 hrs HAVANA: US navy commandos sank a South Korean warship in March in order to blame North Korea, raise tensions and convince Japan to keep US forces in Okinawa, Cuban former president Fidel Castro wrote in an editorial on Friday. Castro, who based his information on press reports, blasted Washington's "cynicism" and "lack of scruples" in the incident. According to Castro, US Navy SEALS torpedoed South Korea's Cheonan corvette in a bid by Washington to sway Japan to allow a US military base to remain on Okinawa...

Japanese archaeologists said Wednesday they have for the first time unearthed ancient Roman coins at the ruins of an old castle. The discovery of 10 bronze and copper coins -- the oldest dating from about 300-400 AD -- in southern Okinawa caught researchers by surprise. It was the first time Roman Empire coins have been discovered in Japan, thousands of kilometres from where they were likely minted. "At first I thought they were one cent coins dropped by US soldiers," archaeologist Hiroki Miyagi told AFP. "But after washing them in water I realised they were much older. I was really...

A U.S. Navy sailor was sentenced Friday to two-and-a-half years hard labor for raping a Japanese tourist in Okinawa. Justin Castellanos, 24, who was based in the district's Camp Schwab, pleaded guilty in May to raping the 40-year-old victim in his hotel room in Naha, south Japan on March 13. The serviceman had found the woman, who was drunk and asleep in the hotel lobby, and taken her up to his room where he assaulted her. 'I am sorry for what I have done,' he told the court. 'My heart is filled with regret,' Stars and Stripes reports.

YOKOSUKA, Japan (NNS) – Commander, U.S. 7th Fleet (C7F) and Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Japan (CNFJ) announced temporary liberty curtailment and restrictions on alcohol consumption for all Sailors in Japan as a response to a recent trend of alcohol-related incidents detrimental to the U.S.-Japan Alliance. Effective immediately, Sailors are prohibited from drinking alcohol, on and off base. Additionally, all off-base liberty will be curtailed. Sailors who live off base will be permitted to travel to and from work and engage in official actions such as childcare drop-off and pickup, trips to the grocery store, gas stations or the gym. The...

Japanese leaders reacted with outrage after a U.S. Marine veteran was arrested Thursday in connection with the death of a Japanese woman near a U.S. air base on the island of Okinawa. Kenneth Franklin Gadson, a 32-year-old civilian contractor at Kadena Air Base, admitted to strangling the woman, his defense attorney told Stars and Stripes — though the attorney questioned the condition under the which the admission was made. Rina Shimabukuro had been missing since last month. The 20-year-old’s body was discovered in a wooded location Thursday after Gadson told investigators where to look, according to the Associated Press.

It’s hard to believe the resolve the United States once showed in defeating enemies. One wonders if in a 24/7 news cycle of “living room wars” whether this nation could have ever mounted the sustained effort it took to join the Allies in stopping Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Americans today would find such will to win at any cost difficult to comprehend. Perhaps with Easter just passed, it is fitting to remember Easter of 1945 when the invasion of Okinawa, the last battle of World War II and the largest sea-air-land operation in history, began. It would also be...

Video at link shows the apology yesterday made by the senior Marine Corps brass in Okinawa, Japan over a increasingly hot situation in the form of an alleged rape of a Japanese woman in a hotel room by a Marine stationed in the island. I believe the alleged perp has been remanded to Japanese custody where he will face the Jaoanwse justice system.

A controversial plan to move a U.S. Marine Corps base within Okinawa in southern Japan has been pushed back by two years, America's top military official in the Pacific said. Adm. Harry Harris, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, said Tuesday that the shift of the Futenma air station to a less congested part of Okinawa island would not happen until 2025 because work on a new facility has been delayed. "It's slowed," he told a congressional committee in Washington. "It's a little over two years late. ... Now we're looking at 2025 before that's done." The project faces stiff...

Two airmen were holding an Air Force nuclear missile crew at gunpoint deep in a top-secret bunker on Okinawa. The crew had just been ordered to launch the island's missiles at targets in the Soviet Union and Asia, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching a harrowing climax in October 1962. But an Air Force launch officer was opposing the order. The officer sent "two men over there with .45's and [they were] told to shoot anybody who tried to launch until the situation was resolved ... so those two men kept that whole crew at bay while we...

TOKYO – The U.S. and Japan said Friday they are hastening the return of some land the American military holds in Okinawa, seeking to soothe local resentment over the issue on the southern Japanese island. U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga announced a plan to return two sites totaling 7 hectares (17 acres) now controlled by U.S. bases to local authorities by the fiscal year that ends in March 2018.

Mel Gibson is returning to his Australian roots to direct his first film in a decade, the true story of a conscientious objector who saved 75 men during the Battle of Okinawa in World War II.

Women in Okinawa have more babies and live longer than women from almost anywhere else in Japan. If data from the statistics bureau and labor ministry are any guide, it has as much to do with work-life balance as the prefecture’s sun-drenched beaches and crystal-clear waters. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare statistics on average number of children per woman, of which the most recent data is from 2013, women in Okinawa give birth to an average 1.94 children over their lifetime, the highest rate in Japan. Tokyo comes in last, with women in the capital on...

WORLD WAR II - THE BATTLE OF OKINAWA - Discovery History Military (full documentary)

Okinawa's ground battle began April 1, 1945, when four American divisions simultaneously assaulted the 65-mile-long island. With two U.S. Marine and two U.S. Army divisions debarking, the attack was one of the Pacific theater's largest amphibious assaults. U.S. commanders, however, were planning another Pacific D-Day, one that would far exceed Okinawa and the Philippines' invasions in scope, complexity and -- yes -- casualties. That would be the war-concluding assault on Japan's home islands. Okinawa's 660 square miles provided America with a big logistics dump and staging area only 350 miles from Kyushu's Southern tip. Japanese leaders knew defeating the U.S....

For more than a decade, the protest movement over the relocation of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to Camp Schwab was largely characterized by smiling elderly Okinawans holding sit-ins. The most provocative action of these Western-friendly protesters was perhaps temporarily blocking a gate or tying colored ribbons on the chain-link fences surrounding the seaside Marine Corps base. But 2014 brought a new development: Local politicians who spoke against the construction of a controversial runway at Oura Bay on the northern part of the island were swept into power. And when those politicians were unable to fulfill campaign promises to put...

Free meals at ocharleys Just met Marine, first time since 1980 use Okinawa, hostage rescue attempt time Way cool Name Brian Dancey