A U.S. Navy SEAL was killed and another was injured in a training accident in Arizona, a U.S. Department of Defense official said Friday.
The SEAL who was killed belonged to SEAL Team Six, the elite squad from which a team was selected to go after Osama bin Laden in Pakistan two years ago, a source said.
The accident occurred Thursday at a U.S. Special Operations Command parachute testing and training facility at Pinal Airpark, Arizona.
The SEALs were transported to the University of Arizona Medical Center, where one remains hospitalized, the official said.
The accident is under investigation, the official said.
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The bow of a U.S. Navy warship that grounded on a Philippine reef in January was cut from the rest of the hull on Tuesday, lifted by a massive crane, and dropped on a waiting barge.
"The bow section of the USS Guardian was lifted out of the water around 2:45 p.m.," said Enrico Efren Evangelista, head of the Philippine coast guard Palawan District, according to the official Philippine News Agency.
The removal of the bow of the U.S. Navy minesweeper followed that of the ship's auxiliary engine room, a 200-ton piece that was removed a little more than an hour earlier.
With the removal of the two sections, about 900 tons of the formerly 1,300-ton warship remain on Tubbataha Reef, the news agency reported.
FULL STORYThree Navy crew members died when their EA-6B Prowler crashed Monday morning about 50 miles west of Spokane, Washington, the service said.
The Navy has yet to release the names of the three service members.
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The remains of two U.S. Navy sailors, recovered in 2002 from the wreck of the service's first ironclad warship, the USS Monitor, will be interred in Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, the Navy said Tuesday.
"These may very well be the last Navy personnel from the Civil War to be buried at Arlington," Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said in a statement. "It's important we honor these brave men and all they represent as we reflect upon the significant role Monitor and her crew had in setting the course for our modern Navy."
The Monitor sank during a storm on New Year's Eve 1862 off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, with a loss of 16 sailors.
Yemeni authorities working with the U.S. Navy intercepted a ship carrying a "substantial" cache of "illegal arms" such as surface-to-air missiles, potent explosives and rocket-propelled grenades, a U.S. official and Yemen's government said Monday.
The incident took place in Yemeni territorial waters in the Arabian Sea last Wednesday, according to a statement issued five days later from Yemen's embassy in Washington.
The tanks of a U.S. Navy warship stuck on a Philippine reef have been pumped full of seawater to keep the vessel stable while salvage ships make their way to the site of the grounding, officials said Monday.
Navy-led salvage teams have also removed most of the materials from the minesweeper USS Guardian that could pose environmental problems for Tubbataha Reef, a Philippine national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Those materials include paint, solvents and lubricants, according to a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Manila.
FULL STORYThe U.S Navy minesweeper that grounded on a Philippine reef last week has taken on water and sustained too much damage to be towed off, the Navy says.
"It's got hull penetrations in several places, and there is a significant amount of water inside the ship," Rear Adm. Tom Carney said at a briefing Thursday.
The Navy said it will use ship-borne cranes and heavy-lift vessels to lift the minesweeper, the USS Guardian, off the Tubbataha Reef.
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The U.S. Navy has evacuated all 79 crew members from a minesweeper that ran aground Thursday on a reef in the Philippines, the Navy's Seventh Fleet said in a statement Friday. Initial efforts to free the Avenger-class mine countermeasures ship at high tide were unsuccessful, and the crew was transferred by small boats to other support ships, the Navy said.
The 224-foot-long,1,312-ton ship is stuck on the Tubbataha Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Sulu Sea, the Navy said.
FULL STORYA U.S. Navy sailor has been found dead with a head injury at a Japanese train station, local police said Monday.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Samuel Lewis Stiles was discovered surrounded by seven or eight alcoholic drink cans on the platform in Haiki Station in Nagasaki Prefecture at 5 a.m. Sunday, Haiki police said. FULL POST
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A U.S. Air Force officer hopes to soon release a database of bombs dropped from American military aircraft since World War I – a tool he says can be used to shed new light on old conflicts and perhaps even help locate unexploded ordnance.
Lt. Col. Jenns Robertson says he began working on THOR, or Theater History of Operations Reports, in his spare time in 2006. It combines information from numerous sources – thousands of paper reports, punch cards and magnetic tape records for older conflicts, and digital databases for others – across nearly 100 years.
The database, already being used by the Defense Department and other government agencies, for the first time allows users to search and find on a map nine decades of U.S. bombings. THOR was first reported on this week by The Boston Globe.
Robertson started the database when he was part of a briefing team for the Air Force’s chief of staff at the Pentagon.
“What drove the development of THOR was ... the data may have been out there, but it was a pain in the rear end to find it and make it useful,” Robertson said by phone Tuesday.
[Updated at 6:17 p.m. ET] The U.S. Navy's new class of carriers will be the first to go without urinals, a decision made in part to give the service flexibility in accommodating female sailors, the Navy says.
The change heralded by the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers – starting with the namesake carrier due in late 2015 – is one of a number of new features meant to improve sailors' quality of life and reduce maintenance costs, Capt. Chris Meyer said Wednesday.
Omitting urinals lets the Navy easily switch the designation of any restroom – or head, in naval parlance – from male to female, or vice versa, helping the ship adapt to changing crew compositions over time, Meyer said.
The Navy could designate a urinal-fitted area to women, of course, but the urinals would be a waste of space. Making the areas more gender-neutral is a relatively new consideration for the service, with most of its current carriers commissioned before it began deploying women on combat ships in 1994.
But it wasn't the only reason for the move.
North Korea has reacted angrily to the use of its flag during live-fire drills by South Korea and the United States, calling it "a grave provocative act."
The comments from Pyongyang on Sunday came after the allies held military drills last week less than 50 kilometers (30 miles) away from the North Korean border, involving more than 2,000 military personnel.
An unidentified North Korean foreign ministry spokesman accused South Korea and the United States of firing "live bullets and shells" at the flag, according to a report by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
The act was "the most vivid expression of their hostile policy," the spokesman said.
The North Korean flag was put on an elevated hill but was not directly used as a target during the exercises, an official for the South Korean Defense Ministry said, declining to be identified.
"It was used only as a symbol of North Korean territory and the drill was a defensive one," he added.
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The battleship USS Iowa was at anchor off the coast of Los Angeles on Wednesday morning, completing a four-day journey south from San Francisco.
The World War II-era ship will become a museum and tourist attraction in San Pedro, with a grand opening planned for July 7.
The Iowa had spent more than a decade docked in the Port of Richmond near San Francisco before being towed down the California coast.
It will be operated as a museum by the nonprofit Pacific Battleship Center.
The group's Facebook page said Wednesday that the ship will undergo a complete cleaning of its hull while anchored off Los Angeles and then be towed to a temporary berth in port Saturday.
A bar patron's toast to a fallen sailor has become a phenomenon on Facebook.
On March 28, Hannah Hobbs, a waitress at a Bennigan's restaurant near Borger in the Texas Panhandle, posted a photo of a glass of beer, with a handwritten note from the customer that read:
In memory of Lt. j.g. Francis Toner, USN.
Killed in action 27 March 2009,
Baikh Province, Afghanistan
"Non Sibi Sed Patriae"
NOT FORGOTTEN!
In her photo caption Hobbs explained:
"This guy came in today and asked if it was ok if he left this on the bar.. I cried 
I left it there until like 1130 tonight.... I didn't want to pour it out but I had to. So I'm posting this pic so it can stay forever!! So can I get some likes people??"
Yes, yes she could get some likes. As of 10 p.m. ET Monday, Memorial Day, 1,239,045 people had clicked the "Like" button, and the numbers were continuing to skyrocket as the image was shared more than 117,000 times. FULL POST
Decades after transporting President Franklin Roosevelt across the Atlantic and fending off kamikazes in the Pacific during World War II, the USS Iowa passed Saturday under the Golden Gate Bridge en route to its final home and duty as a living museum.
Fireboats shot water into the air to salute the battleship around 3 p.m. Saturday, as it was towed through San Francisco Bay and into the Pacific Ocean. Scores of people watched from nearby - some on ferries, others from onshore and on the iconic bridge - under blue skies dotted with puffs of clouds.
The USS Iowa fired nearly 12,000 rounds over its more than 50 years in service for the U.S. Navy before being decommissioned for a third and final time in 1990.
After more than a decade docked in the Port of Richmond near San Francisco, the ship is heading south to the Port of Los Angeles in the care of the Pacific Battleship Center, which plans to transform the ship into a museum by July, according to the nonprofit group's website.
[Updated 1:23 p.m. ET] A weather system affecting the West Coast has delayed plans to tow the battleship Iowa from the San Francisco Bay to the Port of Los Angeles, the tow boat operator said in a statement on Sunday.
Crowley Maritime Corp. said all activities related to the movement of the Iowa will be rescheduled once the weather system passes later in the week.
[Posted 12:50 p.m. ET] The battleship Iowa begins what its expected to be its final voyage on Sunday, being towed from Richmond, California, south to San Pedro, where it will open as a museum this summer.
The ship, launched in 1942 and decommissioned in 1990, has been part of the mothballed fleet anchored in Northern California's Suisin Bay since 2001, according to a report in the Contra Costa Times. Efforts to turn it into a museum in the Bay Area were unsuccessful over the years, and it was acquired by the nonprofit Pacific Battleship Center for use as a museum in San Pedro, near Los Angeles.
“This is the final journey for the USS Iowa on open water,” Robert Kent, president of the Pacific Battleship Center, said in a statement on the organization's website. “Upon arrival at Los Angeles Harbor, the USS Iowa will be just days away from opening as an interactive museum experience that honors and illustrates the contributions of this battleship and its Navy and Marine crew at critical moments in American history.”
The U.S. Navy for the first time will demonstrate what it calls a Great Green Fleet, a carrier strike group operating in large part on nonfossil fuels, during a larger, 22-nation exercise this summer.
The Navy’s two-day demonstration, which will happen during the biennial Rim of the Pacific exercise around Hawaii from June 29 to August 3, is part of its plan to send such a strike group on a regular, months-long deployment in 2016, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said on Wednesday.
It’s also a step in the Navy’s plan to meet at least half of its energy needs – on shore and afloat – with nonfossil fuels by 2020, Mabus said.
“(This summer’s demonstration) will focus on the fact that we are well down the path of meeting these goals,” Mabus said.
The demonstration strike group will include aircraft operating on 50/50 blends of biofuel and conventional aviation fuel, and noncarrier ships operating on 50/50 blends of biofuel and diesel. Other parts of a strike group – a carrier and submarines – already are nuclear-powered.
You've got about 24 hours to get your bids in on a piece of super-cool Cold War hardware - a stealth warship the government no longer wants.
The General Services Administration is taking bids on the U.S. Navy's Sea Shadow, built by Lockheed Martin in 1983 for the Navy to test radar-evading capabilities and other weapons systems. The ship has outlived its usefulness, and the Navy is trying to unload it to avoid maintenance costs, the Los Angeles Times reports.
"It is not cost-effective for the Navy to maintain the ship in an inactive condition any longer, and the ship no longer serves any operational or research purpose," Navy spokesman Christopher Johnson told the Times. "Our only disposition option is dismantling and recycling."
Which means if you submit the highest bid, you won't be taking the 118-foot-long, 499-ton Sea Shadow for a three-hour tour with Gilligan and the Skipper.
"The ex-Sea Shadow shall be disposed of by completely dismantling and scrapping within the U.S.A. Dismantling is defined as reducing the property such as it has no value except for its basic material content," read the conditions on the GSA auction site.
That seems to have dampened the interest of evil madmen bent on world domination. (The Sea Shadow is said to be the inspiration for the villain's vessel in the 1997 James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies.")
The GSA website reports only 10 bidders so far, with the top bid at $139,100. Bidding started at $10,000.
The winning bidder will have to pick up the prize from the Maritime Administration National Defense Reserve Fleet at Suisun Bay, California.
The Sea Shadow comes complete with a covered barge/floating dry dock, so once you bust it up you will have a keepsake to remind you of what could have been.
Bids are due by 6 p.m. ET Friday. Good luck.
The carrier group is heading to the Gulf and our CNN national security experts note that this is a typical Navy maneuver that happens as carrier groups rotate to new positions around the globe.
This is the final deployment for the Enterprise, which will be inactivated and eventually decommissioned, according to a Navy press release.
This does come at a time that relations with Iran are fraying. We called the Navy today to ask if there is any connection. They did not get back to us right away. If they do, we will update this.
Do you know anything about the mission of the carrier group? Do you have a view on U.S.-Iran relations? Comment below.
Editor's Note: This post is a recap of the top five videos on CNN.com from the past week. So in case you didn't catch our best videos during the week, here is your chance to see what you missed.
This week's top video gained the attention of more than a million CNN.com viewers and featured chilling footage of the Texas tornadoes tossing tractor-trailers into the air. The second most watched video on CNN.com this week was the tragic firsthand account of the Oakland university shooting, followed by video examining Nadya Suleman's welfare application, the crash of an F-18 jet into a Virginia apartment complex and finally the timeline of the Trayvon Martin shooting.
Truck trailers are thrown around violently as a tornado rips through North Texas.
Art Richards shot cell phone video at Oikos University where a gunman killed seven people.
Anger and outrage as "Octomom" Nadya Suleman, admits she's receiving food stamps. HLN's Nischelle Turner reports.
Zack Zapatero describes what he saw when a Navy jet crashed into an apartment building in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Law enforcement expert Alex Manning analyzes a complete time line of the Trayvon Martin shooting, based on 911 calls.
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