The House Armed Services Committee received an unusual assignment: in effect, it had to fight over again one of the celebrated naval actions of the War of 1812—the capture of the U.S. frigate Chesapeake by the British frigate Shannon, off Boston Harbor. The American hero in that encounter was Captain James Lawrence. The villain, according to a later Navy court-martial, was 3rd Lieut. William S. Cox. Last week the House Committee had a resolution before it that would reverse the verdict against ...

There are illegal immigrants on the loose in the Midwest. Originally hailing from Asia, they're about 3 ft. long and weigh up to 100 lb. , and are known to resist capture. Once they establish residency, they can eat you out of house and home. They're called Asian carp, and they emigrated to the lower reaches of the Mississippi River in the 1970s. Now they're knocking on the door of the Great Lakes, threatening to destroy ...

Every morning, on her top-rated MSNBC show Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski interviews the most powerful people in the political and entertainment worlds. But in her blunt new book Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You're Worth, Brzezinski reveals that like many women, she found herself underpaid and underappreciated in her job. As recently as three years ago, her male co-host, Joe Scarborough, was making 14 times as much as she was. TIME ...

On a Sunday at their modest, gray ranch house in the Denver suburb of Englewood, Tim and Jeanine Pynes gather with four other Christians for an evening of fellowship, food and faith. Jeanine's spicy rigatoni precedes a yogurt-and-wafer confection by Ann Moore, none of the food violating the group's solemn commitment to Weight Watchers. The participants, who have pooled resources for baby sitting, discuss a planned missionary trip and sing along with a CD by the Christian crossover group Sixpence ...

Shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser outdid himself last week. He came up with two winners, adding a dazzling burnish to the Kaiser legend which delights so many U.S. citizens, baffles and annoys so many experts and businessmen. > In placid Puget Sound, the U.S.S. Casablanca, first of the 50 new small Kaiser aircraft carriers, triumphantly sped through its trial runs, just 236 days after the keel was laid. > In San Francisco, a thousand miles away, a scandal-sniffing House subcommittee ...

When President Barack Obama announced on May 1 that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was among those who headed to the White House. The mood in Lafayette Park was joyous, ebullient, cathartic — though hardly the bacchanal of vengeful jingoism that some in the media have portrayed it to be, or an expression of "orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed" as David Sirota claimed on Salon.com. An outsider would have been struck ...

Europe had a new royal house last week. In Dublin newspapers appeared a personal pronouncement: "I, Prince Michael Neale, landowner, will assume the title of Prince of the Saltees at the conclusion of the war. Also I wish it to be known that no one will be permitted to enter the Saltee Islands without a permit issued by me." Anybody caught interfering with the millions of birds or their eggs which inhabit those islands will be severely dealt with.Prince Michael Neale is Eire's No. 1 ...

After exactly three months in office, President Obama called a Cabinet meeting to announce his first push for federal belt tightening. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had dubbed this initiative "the Dave project," after the movie in which the eponymous presidential body double invites his accountant to the White House to slice waste out of the budget. The American people, Obama said that day, had lost confidence in their government's ability to spend wisely. "We've got ...

The health-care-reform bill the U.S. House of Representatives will debate when it returns from recess next month contains a provision that would have Medicare reimburse doctors for counseling patients on end-of-life care every five years. Opponents of health-care reform have latched onto the provision, claiming it would lead to forced euthanasia or "death panels" to decide whether lifesaving care for the elderly is cost-effective — despite the fact that the bill says nothing about either of these ...

To the members of the National Security Council, seated around the coffin-shaped table in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the President of the U.S. said with quiet anger: "I've gone far enough. I've had enough of this." And so, in response to a murderous series of Communist attacks against U.S. military forces and installations in South Viet Nam, President Lyndon Johnson gave the orders that on three different days last week sent American and Vietnamese warplanes smashing ...