National & World Headlines
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Canada confirmed Tuesday that 950 soldiers and support staff will remain in Afghanistan in a training role after Canada\'s combat mission ends in 2011. Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said they will be stationed in the Kabul area and will stay until 2014. The pledge of support may help plug a critical shortage of trainers for NATO\'s year-old mission to bolster Afghan security forces. The training mission would be confined to military bases.
November 17, 2010 -
National Defense University\'s iCollege professor Andy Gravatt explains the lessons on his course syllabus, from communication to risk management.
November 17, 2010 -
Young children from military families are more likely to seek mental and behavioral health care when a parent is deployed than when a parent is at home, a military study has concluded.
November 17, 2010 -
Ashton Carter, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, described the future state of military contracting. He said vendors should look at several current examples including the Littoral Combat Ship and the replacement for the Ohio Class Submarine.
November 17, 2010 -
To save money in contracting, DoD will have to spend money to build the acquisition workforce, former DoD Comptroller Dov Zakheim said.
November 16, 2010 -
The Defense Information Systems Agency will hang on to its old National Gateway Center Messaging System for a while longer, despite the face the system is very old. The system runs very slowly compared with…
November 16, 2010 -
The Army and the U.S. Transportation Command are investigating whether updated airships can be revived for both combat and humanitarian troop movement.
November 16, 2010 -
In theory, plants could be the ultimate \"green\" factories, engineered to pump out the kinds of raw materials we now obtain from petroleum-based chemicals. In reality, its been an elusive goal. Now, in a first step toward achieving industrial-scale green production, scientists from the Department of Energy\'s Brookhaven National Lab and their collaborators report engineering a plant that does produce the levels of compounds that could potentially be used to make plastics. The raw materials for most precursors currently come from petroleum or coal-derived synthetic gas. Additional technology is needed, but researchers say they\'ve now engineered a new metabolic pathway in plants for producing a kind of fatty acid that can be used as a source of precursors to chemical building blocks for making plastics such as polyethylene.
November 15, 2010 -
The Department of Commerce and National Telecommunications and Information Administration have released a report called \"Digital Nation II,\" that analyzes broadband Internet access across the United States. The study is the the most comprehensive of its kind. It finds that even after accounting for socioeconomic differences, large gaps persist along racial, ethnic, and geographic lines. The report analyzes data collected through a survey of 54,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau. It shows that while virtually all demographic groups have experienced increases of broadband Internet use at home, and 64 percent of households overall have the service, there are still historic disparities among demographic groups. Officials worry that Americans who lack broadband Internet access are cut off from educational and employment opportunities.
November 15, 2010 -
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just completed a major update of the agency\'s primary education resource portal; the website Education.noaa.gov. The aim is to better connect educators and students interested in NOAA\'s education and science resources. The website serves as a portal to lesson plans, educational multi-media, data sources, career profiles, and other education content from across the agency. The content contains five themes. Teachers can find information about hurricanes, tides, climate change, the water-cycle or other earth science topics on the site. The site also provides information on professional development, academic scholarships, career exploration, and education grants. NOAA\'s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth\'s environment, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine resources.
November 15, 2010 -
It\'s the latest innovation by international drug traffickers. U.S. prosecutors say South American gangs are buying old jets and other planes, filling them with cocaine and flying them more than 3,000 miles across the ocean to Africa. At least three gangs have struck deals to fly drugs to West Africa and from there to Europe, according to U.S. indictments. Most of the cocaine flown to Africa is bound for Europe, where demand has been rising over the last decade.
November 15, 2010 -
Almost 100 years after his death, a black Union Civil War vet from South Carolina finally has a veterans marker on his grave. The Associated Press reports, the white gravestone for Henry Benjamin Noisette was dedicated Thursday during a Veterans Day ceremony at a small black cemetery near an interstate. Noisette\'s military past was not discovered until recently by a researcher with the African American Historical Alliance, a nonprofit working to increase awareness of the role of blacks in the war and Reconstruction in South Carolina. Noisette escaped slavery and joined the U.S. Navy in 1862.
November 15, 2010 -
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Video teleconferencing is more than an alternative to travel at the Defense Information Systems Agency. In fact, the demand for the agency\'s VTC facilities is exceeding expectations. It\'s no wonder then that the agency announced last week that it was re-awarding AT&T a contract to continue maintaining DISA\'s Video Services - Global (DVS-G) VTC system. \"Telepresence is quite effective, in lieu of face-to-face meetings, in reducing the requirement for frequent travel,\" said Julia Brown, project manager for Defense Information Systems Network Video Services at DISA, said in an email to Federal News Radio. \"Our challenge is keeping up with current level of demand.\" The agency has two telepresence options for employees to use. The Defense Connect Online (DCO) system allows employees to connect using equipment located at their desks. DCO is available to all authorized Defense Department employees DISA\'s other option is their VTC system that connects employees through rooms containing video teleconferencing equipment that function much like television studios, Brown said. The rooms are linked electronically allowing the participants in one room to see and hear the participants in the other rooms. Participants schedule a meeting through VTC coordinators and DISA maintains VTC facilities at military bases around the world. \"It saves travel time and expenditures while allowing all participants to engage fully in meetings across the world,\" Brown said. \"Our senior leaders use it for high-level meetings with other senior leaders in the DoD, but DISA also uses it for when we need all our agency employees around the world to meet for important issues, such as an all-hands meeting with our director.\" AT&T, which currently owns a majority of and maintains all of equipment and software under the DVS-G contract, has been DISA\'s vendor since 1997. The company currently is on its second contract with the agency. The current contract is worth up to $244.8 million. In early November, DISA announced that they would award AT&T a new sole-source contract, continuing the company\'s stewardship of VTC services for up to another five years. The new contract has a two-year base, with three one-year options. The new contract will be awarded effective Nov 30. \"VTC has proven useful across the world, allowing our senior leaders to see the body language of meeting participants, assisting in a better understanding of objections, reservations, or approval,\" Brown said. Next week, the Video Teleconferencing Center takes an in-depth look at DISA\'s DCO system.
November 15, 2010 -
The Washington D.C. VA Medical Center is hosting an evening of music, pampering and health information just for female veterans. We get details from the VA\'s Diane Phillips
November 15, 2010