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Warships off Okinawa and other incidents with an increasingly far-roaming and competent Chinese navy likely a harbinger of shocks to come. Tokyo's shock, horror and alarm at the sighting a few days ago of a flotilla of 10 Chinese warships off Japan's southern Okinawa island is undoubtedly contrived. It has been evident for the past two decades as it invested huge amounts of money, time and effort into military modernization that Beijing intends to be able to project military power that supports its growing economic and diplomatic supremacy. Just a few days before the latest encounter, a helicopter from a...

<p>A Navy captain turned the Pacific into the world's strangest drag strip -- ordering two warships to stage a bizarre race that one sailor said nearly ended in tragedy, a high-ranking military official told The Post yesterday.</p> <p>"Multiple witnesses interviewed by the [inspector general] and the commanding officers of both ships all stated that the ships were racing," said Pacific Fleet spokesman Cmdr. Jeff Davis.</p>

HE remembers the women sunbathing naked on the deck of a passing yacht. He remembers, too, the lurking menace of a Russian intelligence-gathering trawler, watching from afar as one of the most audacious American coups of the cold war unfolded on the ocean floor, 16,500ft beneath the Pacific surface. David Sharp recalls every detail of the 1974 mission known as Project Azorian, one of the most ambitious, expensive and politically volatile clandestine operations launched by the CIA. As one of the CIA’s agents in charge of recovering a sunken Soviet submarine and its cargo of nuclear-tipped missiles, Sharp spent 63...

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the first time has revealed details about an ultra-secret Cold War-era project to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the depths of the Pacific Ocean in 1974. The high-risk salvage operation, code-named ‘Project Azorian’, had been shrouded in secrecy for decades but the spy agency broke its silence in newly-declassified documents published yesterday by an independent watchdog, the National Security Archive. The documents, drawn from a 50-page article written for an in-house CIA journal, recount the daring bid approved by then-president Richard Nixon to raise the submarine using a specially-designed ship, the Glomar Explorer....

HUNTSVILLE, AL, Nov. 25 Christian Newswire -- Two creation films called "inappropriate" were denied the opportunity to be shown in government facilities this week--which marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species". While the intelligent design film "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record" has not been granted permission for a showing in California, "The Mysterious Islands", a new 90-minute Vision Forum film that challenges Darwin's evolution by taking audiences back to engage the enchanted Galapagos Islands, has enjoyed a victory and will premiere as previously scheduled tonight, Nov. 25, at 6:30 PM, at...

M7.9 - Samoa Islands region - 2009 September 29 17:48:19

PAGO PAGO, American Samoa – A powerful Pacific Ocean earthquake spawned towering tsunami waves that swept ashore on Samoa and American Samoa early Tuesday, flattening villages, killing at least 34 people and leaving dozens of workers missing at devastated National Park Service facilities. Cars and people were swept out to sea by the fast-churning water as survivors fled to high ground, where they remained huddled hours later. Hampered by power and communications outages, officials struggled to assess the casualties and damage. The quake, with a magnitude between 8.0 and 8.3, struck around dawn about 20 miles below the ocean floor,...

Fox News Alert: Pacific side residents told to get to higher ground.

WASHINGTON — Old toothbrushes, beach toys and used condoms are part of a vast vortex of plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, threatening sea creatures that get tangled in it, eat it or ride on it, a new report says. Because plastic doesn't break down the way organic material does, ocean currents and tides have carried it thousands of miles to an area between Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast, according to the study by the international environmental group Greenpeace. This swirling vortex, which can grow to be about the size of Texas, is not far from...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. - The governors of Oregon, Washington and California announced an agreement Monday to press the federal government to give greater support to state efforts to combat threats to the ocean, such as pollution, climate change and declining fisheries. Noting two national panels had identified the need to act quickly to protect the nation's oceans, the West Coast Governors' Agreement on Ocean Health, announced at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, said oceans need to be managed on an ecosystem level that crosses political boundaries, which demands increased coordination between states and the federal government....

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SEATTLE, March 31 (UPI) -- Testing by U.S. scientists finds that the Pacific Ocean is getting warmer and more acidic, while the amount of oxygen is decreasing. Scientists with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and the University of Washington say the ocean is becoming increasingly acidic because of its absorption of carbon dioxide, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Friday. "You don't have to believe in climate change to believe that this is happening," said Joanie Kleypas, an oceanographer with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a non-profit organization based in Boulder, Colo. "Acidification is more frightening than...

India-USA military agreement in offing (Original Article) Asia-Pacific | China | Intelligence Reports | Navy | USA 7 June 2005: In return for access to sixteen US bases in the South Pacific, India will offer refueling, berthing, maintenance and R&R facilities to the American forces in Mumbai, Kochi, Vishakapatnam, and possibly the Andamans, and prime minister Manmohan Singh may agree to this when he visits the United States shortly. First proposed in 1999, this agreement hung fire, until defence minister Pranab Mukherjee and the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, accepted this in principle, while clarifying each side’s goal in this,...

“In 1990 they found that the Earth goes through abrupt temperature changes from deep ice samples in Greenland of about 10,000 years ago the Earth’s temperature dropped 19 degrees” (research found by weather channel) taking 5-10 years (weather channel) but from analytical data, I intend to show this could take for the most part one year (Robert T Bailey) and more shocking a large part of the temperature change will happen this year! The End of the World as we known it is coming; an ice Age will change the face of the Earth. We have a crisis here. In...

EL NIÑO MAKES ITS OFFICIAL RETURN, NOAA REPORTS July 11, 2002 — It's now official: El Niño is back. It's not the powerful, climatic juggernaut of 1997-98, but a milder, weaker version that may begin affecting weather in the United States by Fall 2002, according to NOAA's National Weather Service. (Click NOAA satellite image for larger view of sea surface temperatures taken July 8, 2002. Click here for the NOAA image without grids. Click here to see the latest sea surface temperatures.) The agency's climate experts today said mature El Niño conditions likely will develop in a few months....