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For decades, Jonathan Winters entertained audiences on stage, on screen and as a voice-over artist. Legendary are his improvisational humor, voice character abilities and improv. He is known for his ability to impersonate John Wayne, Cary Grant, Jimmy Cagney, and many more. He inspired such performers as Jim Carrey, Tracey Ullman, Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, Jimmy Kimmel, Johnny Carson and Billy Crystal. He strongly supported military veterans and the USO, which likely stems from his service in the Marine Corps during World War II in the Pacific.

In a world…where movie trailers blend together and The Voice of God can be heard, stars the man himself, Don LaFontaine. He is a legend for voice acting, especially for film trailers, with over 5000 to his credit and then hundreds of thousands of hours for advertisements, promotions, and video game trailers. He worked in the industry from 1962 until his untimely passing in 2008. He has been called Thunder Throat and The King of Movie Trailers as well. Before he hit in big in advertising and trailers he grew up in Minnesota and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1958.

Junior enlisted service members will see a 14.5% pay increase in the next year, in the latest effort to address cost of living concerns and boost enlistment and retention inside the ranks.
The pay boost comes as part of a deal by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to finalize policies in the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2025. The negotiated deal, announced on Saturday, Dec. 7, reconciles differing policy points in the $883.7 billion defense act, including topics pertaining to pay and housing.

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees signed off on a provision paving the way for an independent study assessing the potential creation of a sixth armed service focused on cyber.
Both houses of Congress passed nearly identical provisions in their respective versions of the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) earlier this year and both made it into the final conferenced bill that was reconciled between both chambers and released Saturday evening.

Bob Fernandez thought he’d go dancing and see the world when he joined the U.S. Navy as a 17-year-old high school student in August 1941.

Four months later he found himself shaking from explosions and passing ammunition to artillery crews so his ship’s guns could return fire on Japanese planes bombing Pearl Harbor, a U.S. Navy base in Hawaii. “I felt kind of scared because I didn’t know what the hell was going on there,” said Fernandez, who is now 100 and lives in Lodi, California, where he now lives with his nephew.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The Pentagon announced Saturday that it selected five small, non-traditional defense contractors to receive funding to help move their emerging technologies into production.
Each company will receive $10 million under the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) pilot program overseen by Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. The awards mark the first batch of APFIT funding distributed in fiscal 2025 and they’re being bankrolled through continuing resolution appropriations.

Seaman 2nd Class John C. Auld was buried on Friday, Dec. 6, nearly 83 years to the day after he was killed during the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II. 
The Navy sailor was one of the last sailors killed on the USS Oklahoma who had not been accounted for. On Thursday, Dec. 5, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the military office responsible for recovering and identifying the remains of servicemembers killed in past conflicts, announced that Auld had been identified.

An American soldier who claims to have deserted from the military 16 years ago was arrested this week at the Port of Buffalo, Rainbow Bridge border crossing. The soldier, identified by the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division as Sgt. Christopher M. Vassey, arrived at the border crossing that links the United States and Canada at Niagara Falls on Dec. 3. 
In a release, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that Vassey arrived at the border crossing to “turn himself in” for deserting from the U.S. military.

Eighty three years ago, on Dec. 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack against the United States Naval base at Pearl Harbor in what would become a date that would live in infamy.
It was 7:55 AM on a Sunday morning in Hawaii when large groups of Japanese aircraft took the naval base by surprise and attacked with devastating results. Five battleships, three destroyers, and seven other ships were sunk or critically damaged. More than 200 aircraft were destroyed. Over 2400 Americans were killed with over twelve hundred more wounded.

Francis P.