Afghan President Hamid Karzai “strongly condemns” a video apparently showing US Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters.

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Karzai condemns ‘urination’ video

HONOLULU — President Obama on Sunday paid tribute to U.S. service members and to his faith, marking his third Christmas as commander in chief by making phone calls to troops and attending church with his family. Having recently hailed the end of the U.S. war in Iraq, Obama spent Christmas Eve speaking by phone to 10 members of the armed forces — thanking two from each service, White House aides said. The president and his family were scheduled Sunday evening to visit Marines stationed at a base here . Read full article > >

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Obama pays tribute to U.S. troops on Christmas

In the accounting of what was won and lost in America’s Iraq war, this sleepy farming town deep in the western desert will rank as a place where almost everything was lost. It was here, on Nov. 19, 2005 , that a group of Marines went on a shooting spree in which 24 Iraqi civilians were killed. Their patrol had been hit by a roadside bomb and one of their comrades was dead. They ordered five men out of a taxi and gunned them down. Then they went into three nearby homes and shot 19 people, including 11 women and children. Read full article > >

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Civilian killings created insurmountable hurdle to extended U.S. troop presence in Iraq

MEXICO CITY — On Dec. 1, 2006, within hours of taking office after the closest real election in Mexican history, President Felipe Calderon ordered his military and police to confront the drug-trafficking and criminal organizations flourishing in his home state. Joint Operation Michoacan began immediately. In a blunt demonstration of force, the government threw everything it had into play: 4,260 soldiers, 1,054 marines and 1,400 federal police officers, along with dozens of airplanes and helicopters. Read full article > >

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After 5 years, Mexico’s drug war still rages

Women are to be allowed to serve on Royal Navy submarines, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has confirmed.

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Women to serve on UK submarines

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea threatened Thursday to turn Seoul’s presidential palace office into a “sea of fire,” stepping up its rhetoric one day after South Korea conducted large-scale military drills near a front-line island attacked by North Korea last year. On Wednesday, South Korea mobilized aircraft, rocket launchers, artillery guns and naval boats for the first anniversary of the artillery attack on a military garrison and fishing community on Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea. Two marines and two construction workers were killed in the attack, the first on a civilian area since the 1950-53 Korean War. Read full article > >

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NKorea steps up rhetoric, threatens to turn SKorea’s presidential office into ‘sea of fire’

Before departing for Bali, Indonesia, Thursday for a summit, President Obama extolled Darwin, Australia, as “the perfect place” to base U.S. Marines, signaling an American effort to counterbalance a rising China in Asia.

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Obama Addresses Troops at Final Stop in Australia

CANBERRA, Australia — The United States will establish a permanent military presence in Australia beginning next summer, sending up to 250 Marines to bases here for six-month tours and eventually building up to 2,500 troops rotating through the country. President Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the new partnership at a joint news conference Wednesday shortly after holding a bilateral meeting. Read full article > >

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Obama: U.S. to send 250 Marines to Australia in 2012

The event was a Wall Street gala that raised millions of dollars for homeless veterans in New York City. Kid Rock sang a ballad about helplessness, frustration and loss. On cue, several hundred soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines strode into position around him. The black-tie crowd rose to its feet and cheered. Read full article > >

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Troops feel more pity than respect

They met for the first time in the cold and the dark on Sunday morning with 26.2 miles to go. Carlos Evans was nervous. He’d never done a marathon before. Jimmy King, competing in his seventh Marine Corps Marathon, told him he’d be all right. He said he’d watch out for him. They were strangers brought together by the race and by circumstance. Both are 32 years old. Both served with the Marines in war. Both had been wounded. King lost his left leg in Iraq in 2004. Evans lost both legs and his left hand in Afghanistan last year. Read full article > >

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Two wounded warriors practice true ‘Semper Fi’ in Marine Corps Marathon

Memorial bracelets have become a regular reminder that the country is at war. President Obama wears one . Most soldiers wear them. So do a lot of Marines. And that has turned into something of a problem.  Read full article > >

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Policy on KIA bracelets stokes Marines’ fury

A Royal Marine from 42 Commando Royal Marines has died in Helmand, Afghanistan, after he was shot in an ambush while on patrol.

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Royal Marine shot dead in Helmand

ABOARD THE USS WASP (CNN) – Most chefs strive to get their customers to come back maybe once a week, but Benny Brockington's clientele come for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday, sometimes even a midnight snack. They have to. They are sailors with almost no other options. But as the Food Service Officer, the man in charge of all meals on the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp, Chief Warrant Officer Brockington is the crème de la crème of Navy chefs who sees his captive audience as a challenge. Before was assigned to the Wasp, Brockington was chef to President Clinton and his family at the Camp David presidential retreat, and then went to work for one of the Navy's highest ranking admirals. Now Brockington has switched from cooking small meals for big shots to cooking thousands of meals for the heart and soul of the military. He is in charge of five messes, overseeing all food preparation on a ship that can carry as many 3,000 sailors and marines. The largest mess is for the enlisted men and women on the ship. There's the “chief's mess” for the senior non-commissioned officers and the wardroom for commissioned officers. Capt. Brenda Holdener, the ship's commander, has her own cook as does her boss, Rear Admiral Kevin Scott, who uses the Wasp as his flagship. Feeding that many people on a ship that is tossing and turning in the waves while hundreds of miles from the nearest grocery store isn't easy. And the giant bureaucracy that is US Navy procurement put up some more hurdles. In order to buy enough food for sailors around the world and reduce waste, the Navy uses a 21-day menu cycle. Someone in a Navy office decides what will be served on every ship at each meal, every day, and after 21 days the menus start over. For sailors who often spend six months, things can get old pretty quickly. “The crew gets burned out,” Brockington said. “They tell me 'seems like we have the same thing over and over.'” Even Capt. Holdener says the Navy's system makes the job harder for the man she calls her cook boss and his team. “The Navy provides us with menus, the Navy provides us with 'This is what you shall serve' and they make magic out of that,” Holdener said. The magic involves getting the best from what the Navy allows. “The menu may call for baked chicken, but I can change the recipe and have my cooks make curried chicken.” Brockington said. One day while the Wasp was sailing the waters south of Long Island, NY after Hurricane Irene, the lunch menu included cornbread. That night the dinner menu called for turkey with “bread dressing.” I noticed it wasn't made from your typical white bread, it was a delicious corn bread dressing that raised the quality of the dinner meal. It also wasn't lost on some of us that corn bread was part of the lunch menu and the dinner dressing obviously helped Brockington avoid wasting leftovers. Brockington, who grew up on Florence, South Carolina, didn't start cooking until he joined the Navy and was assigned dish duty. When he showed up for work, sometimes a few of the cooks would be late, so he'd start heating up some bacon. But the man in charge said “you aren't supposed to be cooking.” Still he kept cooking because he didn't want the late cooks to get in trouble. Finally the man in charge let him try his hand in the kitchen instead of the dish room.' His first test was cake decorating. He still considers baking his area of expertise. “I still do a lot of baking. I do hands on. That's how I train and motivate my guys.” Brockington tastes the food coming out of his galleys, so he doesn't have to sit down to eat a meal like other folks on board. Still when he does eat, it's usually in the main mess hall. “I try to eat with the enlisted. If's it's good enough for me to eat, it's good enough for them,” Brockington said. Most of the sailors CNN talked to had good things to say, or were at least luke warm about the food. We did overhear one sailor as he ripped into the plastic wrap around a Meal Ready to Eat (MRE). “I'd rather eat one of these than ship's food any day.” Still, his commander has high praise for the man she calls the ship's cook boss. “My food service team is awesome; I would take them any day over the finest restaurant that exists,” said Capt. Holdener. But even she has some issues with the food on board. She is a vegetarian. And the Navy's 21-day cycle of menus doesn't really accommodate her personal preferences. “The quality is not the challenge. The challenge is the options of availability, for me you can't feed me a salad everyday and call it good. I think that it is challenging to have, not just a vegetarian, but if you are restricted in your diet, whether it's religious or whether it's personal preference, I think if you have a restricted diet, then it becomes very challenging to try to work around the Navy's cycle of food,” Holdener said. “We are not as flexible with that.” Now that she has command of her own ship, she has her own chef who can, within the constraints of Navy rules, make the Captain food that match her diet. On the day we visited, her chef, or “culinary specialist” in Navy terms, Petty Officer 2nd Class Solrosita De Perio, had prepared a dish of tofu, onions, garlic, red, green and yellow peppers mixed with sesame oil. De Perio said preparing vegetarian meals for the captain wasn't easy, because she's from the Philippines, where the diet tends towards “meat, meat, meat.” But after just a few months of cooking for the captain, she's now making vegetarian meals for her own family. As for Brockington, I asked him what he would prepare for his wife on a special occasion. His menu: “Scalloped potatoes, rosemary crusted beef tenderloin, asparagus tips and maybe a béarnaise sauce or red wine demi-glace.” That night, he was serving pizza to the sailors on the Wasp. Most of the pies came to the ship frozen, but back in the galley of the enlisted men's mess, he had about half a dozen pizzas he and his team had made fresh by hand. If they tasted as good as they smelled, some sailors were in for a treat. But Brockington won't be on the Wasp for long. He's due for a promotion and a new job. He will become the officer in charge of the Culinary Specialist A School at Fort Lee Virginia where chefs from all branches of the service go to train and practice their skills. So soon the culinary skills once enjoyed by the Commander in Chief will benefit sailors, marines, airmen and soldiers all over the world.

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Navy chef has captive clientele

There’s a new commander on this sandy, swampy spit of land that has transformed rawboned recruits into macho Marines for nearly a century. Brig. Gen. L.E. Reynolds, a 6-foot-tall Baltimore native and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the latest in a long line of no-nonsense leaders to take charge here. But she’s the first woman. And for the tradition-bound Marine Corps, which endlessly promotes a tough-guy image and built its recruiting on the search for “a few good men,” the idea of all those ruthless Parris Island drill instructors having to salute a leatherneck named Loretta could take some getting used to. Read full article > >

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Marine Brig. Gen. L.E. Reynolds is Parris Island’s first female commander

Some 80 Royal Marines are on standby off the coast of Yemen to assist with the possible evacuation of British civilians, the BBC has learned.

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Marines on UK Yemen exit standby