D Day

Sixty-three years ago this week, as Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the nation in an extraordinary moment of mass prayer. "Almighty God," Roosevelt said as millions of Americans gathered around their radios June 6, 1944, "Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity."

Under an overcast sky not unlike the morning 63 years ago that Allied forces stormed the Norman beaches below, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Wednesday pointed to their sacrifice to argue that the U.S. and France have long worked together to defeat tyranny and now must do so again. Speaking at the U.S.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and new French Defense Minister Herve Morin are attending ceremonies today in Normandy to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the D-day landings at Omaha Beach that cracked Nazi Germany's grip on Western Europe.

In an effort to make history come alive, XM Satellite Radio today will begin playing radio accounts of the D-day invasion of Normandy in 1944. Appropriately, the programming will be on the channel that XM devotes to music of the 1940s. Beginning at 9:41 p.m., XM will air NBC's original news bulletins and other reports about the landing of U.S. and Allied troops in France, which marked the beginning of the effort to oust Nazi occupation forces from western Europe during World War II.

Veterans from the U.S. and Britain marked the 62nd anniversary of the D-day landings in France with ceremonies and talks to schoolchildren about the Normandy invasion that changed the course of World War II. Hundreds of relatives and others joined at least two dozen veterans to remember the invasion of June 6, 1944, which helped free France -- and much of Europe -- from Nazi Germany's grip. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and the U.S.

For years, residents of this sugarcane-farming town watched as their lives were torn apart by Somalia's descent into anarchy. Looters in the 1990s burned the mammoth sugar factory, which once provided 1,500 jobs, and peddled the remains as scrap metal. Irrigation canal gates along the muddy Shabelle River rusted shut, flooding thousands of acres of crops and desiccating thousands more.

The UCLA Film Archives' Rediscovery presentation of Stuart Cooper's 1975 "Overlord" on Friday really lives up to the event's title. Jerry Harvey, programming chief of the early pay-cable Z Channel, championed it, and its rediscovery commenced through clips of the film in Xan Cassavetes' recent documentary "Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession."

Bill Shadel, who covered D-day as a CBS Radio reporter during World War II and moderated the third televised presidential debate between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy as an ABC News anchor in 1960, has died. He was 96. Shadel, who had prostate cancer, died Saturday at an assisted living home in Renton, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, said his son Doug. A native of Milton, Wis., Shadel was editor of the National Rifle Assn.

George Russell Barber, one of the last surviving chaplains from the U.S. landing at Omaha Beach on D-day during World War II, has died. He was 90. Barber died Dec. 17 at Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital in Whittier of causes associated with old age, according to his son, Don Barber. On June 6, 1944, as Allied forces landed in Normandy, Barber was one of four chaplains at Omaha Beach with the Army's 1st Infantry Division.