Twenty months after taking office and promising the Americans and the world he would end the war in Iraq, President Barack Obama announced yesterday the seven-year combat mission is ending this month, with a complete drawdown of U.S. troops by Aug. 31. Over the last 18 months, more than 90,000 U.S. troops have left Iraq. [...]
Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra acknowledged the federal government has to “stop the madness” when it comes to wasting money on ineffective data centers and other IT resources, according to InformationWeek. Speaking at the NASA IT Summit held Aug. 16-18, Kundra highlighted accomplishments the federal government has achieved in slashing costs of IT operations. [...]
Department of Defense officials yesterday released a letter the Pentagon’s top lawyer sent to a man purported to be an attorney for the WikiLeaks website, which previously published tens of thousands of classified documents and plans to release 15,000 more. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters Wednesday afternoon Timothy J. Matusheski was a “no show” [...]
NASA may be known best for its work beyond the blue skies, but in September the space agency will host a Green Aviation Summit to highlight its contributions to creating environmentally friendly aviation technologies. The two-day meeting at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will bring together experts from the space agency, other [...]
The Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau yesterday announced it will hold a speaker series event to discuss the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s role in enhancing public-safety communications. The event will be held Aug. 31, 2010 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in the Commission Meeting Room. The event will [...]
The U.S. Agency for International Development, NASA, the Department of State and NIKE, Inc. have partnered on a initiative called LAUNCH, which seeks to identify, showcase and support innovative approaches to humanity’s sustainability challenges. The second event in the LAUNCH series, LAUNCH: Health, will focus specifically on health issues related to the first 20 years [...]
Pentagon officials are working with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to disband private security contractors in Afghanistan, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman announced yesterday. “We share a common goal with President Karzai, and that is the elimination of the need for private security contractors in Afghanistan,” Whitman told reporters. “But while we share that goal, we also [...]
To help the nation’s healthcare industry transition into the digital age in an effective and meaningful fashion, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has published approved procedures for testing IT systems that work with electronic health records. Released in draft form earlier this year, the approved and finalized testing procedures are now available for [...]
The President’s Task Force on Space Industry Workforce and Economic Development, co-chaired by NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr. and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, today released recommendations to boost economic-development strategies along Florida’s Space Coast. The task force is responsible for developing a plan for how best to invest $40 million in transition assistance [...]
The Department of Veterans Affairs Department last week began posting reports on its website detailing security breaches Employing thousands of contractors nationwide and being the world’s largest healthcare organization, VA experiences various breaches every month. However, with the exception of a few incidents every year, most of its security and data breaches are not significant, [...]