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An Iraqi Army Soldier from the 3rd Brigade, 5th Division, smiles at Iraqi schoolchildren while handing out school supplies in Hamrin. HAMRIN -- For many Iraqis, the only face of the Iraqi Security Forces they see is the one entering their house looking for suspected insurgents. To help children see a more human side of those responsible for protecting their country, Soldiers from the 3rd Brigade, 5th Iraqi Army Division visited two schools in this lakeside village in northern Diyala Province to hand out school supplies and talk to the children about the importance of staying in school. They’re the...

A British Army officer serving with the NATO Training Mission Iraq has been helping the Iraqi Army to train the next generation of Army officers. Colonel Jon Mulroy, who leads the NATO Training Team at the Iraqi Military Academy Al Rustamiyah (IMAR) near Baghdad, has been overseeing the training of officers who served with the former Iraqi Army. Mulroy has been helping them to reintegrate into military life as part of the new Iraqi Army. Mulroy recently had the privilege of witnessing more than 80 new officers graduate from the 3-week intensive Returning Officers' Course. Returning Officers undergo training in...

An Iraqi boy looks up to Sgt. Michael D. Grant in his house Husayba, Iraq, during Operation Rubicon. Department of Defense photo. HUSAYBA -- Marines in this western border town say that if there is no other reason why they are in Iraq it is that they are here for the kids. Stopping through during Operation Rubicon, Marines assigned to the 2nd Marine Regiment met with neighborhood kids in this small city near the border with Syria to show them there is a bright future for Iraq. With the water treatment facility in the town damaged by insurgents, the Marines...

Women like Germaine Greer who want to age disgracefully forget why we need moral laws, writes Miranda Devine. Like Ken Park's director, Larry Clark, Germaine Greer deliberately provokes controversy with the cheapest trick. If there's a taboo left, she'll break it, and since one of the few remaining taboos in Western liberal democracies is pedophilia, that's the arena she's most recently entered. Her upcoming glossy book, The Boy, full of pictures of "ravishing" pre-adult boys with hairless chests, wide-apart legs and slim waists, is an "art book", Greer, 64, told this newspaper last week. She wouldn't say exactly how young...

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague David Biello made a blog entry highly critical of nuclear power. Now, in the September issue of the magazine we have an article with a more positive outlook. John M. Deutch and Ernest J. Moniz of MIT present an analysis of how nuclear power generation might triple, in the U.S. and globally, by 2050. The discussion draws heavily on a 2003 MIT report that they co-chaired, The Future of Nuclear Power. Such a tripling would result in approximately a terawatt (a million megawatts) of generation capacity and would avoid 0.8 to 1.8 billion...

PacifiCorp may agree to removing dams But such a step to help Klamath salmon runs wouldn't be taken if higher power rates resulted, the utility says The new president of PacifiCorp's power generating division says the utility could agree to remove five dams from the Klamath River to help restore salmon if customers don't have to pay more for electricity. "We have heard the tribes' concerns," PacifiCorp Energy President Bill Fehrman said in a statement posted Wednesday on the utility's Web site. "We are not opposed to dam removal or other settlement opportunities as long as our customers are not...

Town Sees Nuclear Plans as a Boon, Not a Threat More than a quarter century after the accident at Three Mile Island and two decades after Chernobyl, America's utilities stand at the early edge of what promises to be the first large-scale wave of nuclear plant construction since the 1980's.

Next Generation Cruise Missile Meets Warfighters' Needs One of the newest weapons in the Air Force's arsenal, the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile is truly an incredible piece of technology that gives the warfighter an affordable standoff cruise missile capable of taking out the enemy's air defenses early on in a conflict. By Staff Sgt. Ryan Hansen / Air Armament Center Public Affairs EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., March 9, 2006 – Since the late 1970s the Department of Defense has tried and failed numerous times to give the warfighter an affordable standoff cruise missile capable of taking out the...

EW YORK - They partied and protested, then grew up to dominate America with their chutzpah and sheer numbers. Yet now, as the oldest of the baby boomers prepare to turn 60, there are glimmers of doubt within this "have it all" generation about how they will be judged by those who come next. ADVERTISEMENT The ferment of the '60s and '70s — when boomers changed the world, or thought they did — faded long ago. Nostalgic pride in the achievements of that era now mixes with skepticism: Have the boomers collectively betrayed their youthful idealism? Have they been self-centered...

Battleship film revives Japan's pride in wartime generation (Filed: 28/11/2005) Sixty years after the colossal battleship Yamato was sunk, the pride of Japan's wartime navy is once again an object of fascination. Almost 400,000 visitors have flocked to see a full-scale replica of the deck of the Yamato in Onomichi, western Japan. The ship was reconstructed for the shooting of a film, Men of the Yamato, which will be released next month. The £3million replica deck, made for the film Men of the Yamato, has attracted 400,000 Japanese visitors The Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, was considered indestructible by...

10/31/2005 - SOUTHWEST ASIA (AFPN) -- It was to deliver a message of inspiration and support that led five members of the famed Tuskegee Airmen to visit the members of the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing here Oct. 29. However, during a question-and-answer session here at their last stop in the region before returning home, the Tuskegee Airmen admitted they were as inspired by the troops as the other way around. “We were asked to bring inspiration to you. Instead, we found something extraordinary here on this trip,” said retired Col. Dick Tolliver, a second-generation Tuskegee Airmen who served from 1963-1989....

Renewable Energy Problems ? Berlin: A German inventor, who says he has developed a way to make crude fuel oil from paper, rubbish, and plastics has found himself under attack. A local newspaper reporter somehow concluded he was making oil from dead cats ,and the published story set off a geyser of protest. “No, nay, never !” , responds the inventor. “It’s all paper , plastics, and rubbish.” “At worst “, he concedes , “the odd toad may have jumped into the batch.” Sidney: An Australian man, who was wearing a woolen shirt and a nylon/synthetic jacket , is reported...

After at least five years of media hype warning that a tectonic societal shift was slowly taking place, it has hit home. Millions of parents who used to worry vaguely about what they'd do when their kids fled the nest are now fretting about the opposite: how to get them to leave. An estimated 18 million fledgling adults are now out of college but not out on their own. Parental nests are packed with offspring whose costly college educations so far have not equipped them to assume the traditional markers of adulthood: moving out on their own, finding jobs good...

My fellow Americans, my parents’ generation is known as the Greatest Generation. But it was not because they were the Greatest Generation that they prevailed in World War II. Rather, they became the Greatest Generation because of the struggles and hardships they were willing and able to endure — in order to win World War II. Their struggle then was against the forces of totalitarianism and terror. Our struggle today is — once again — against the forces of totalitarianism and terror. Their challenge was immense and the stakes were historic. Our challenge is immense and the stakes are historic....

By MARTHA IRVINE, AP National WriterSun Jun 26, 4:43 PM ET Evan Wayne thought he was prepared for anything during a recent interview for a job in radio sales. Then the interviewer hit the 24-year-old Chicagoan with this: "So, we call you guys the 'Entitlement Generation,'" the baby boomer executive said, expressing an oft-heard view of today's young work force. "You think you're entitled to everything." Such labeling is, perhaps, a rite of passage for every crop of twentysomethings. In their day, baby boomers were rabble-rousing hippies, while Gen Xers were apathetic slackers. Now, deserved or not, this latest generation...

Generation to Generation: Nuturing the Faith in Our Homes    KIMBERLY HAHN From the moment we hold our child for the first time, we care for his physical needs. We feed him, clothe him, and clean him. Yet he has deeper needs than physical care — he has a soul that needs to be fed, clothed, and cleansed. "If I become a Catholic, will my children be believers?" That may sound like a strange question, but it was the agony of my heart as I considered accompanying Scott on his faith journey into the Catholic Church. I knew how to...

Russia to test PAK-FA in 2007KUBINKA, Moscow Region, June 8 (Itar-Tass) -- The development of the fifth generation fighter proceeds in strict compliance with the schedule and the plane will be flight-tested in 2007, the commander-in-chief of the Air Force, Vladimir Mikhailov has said.About the condition of the Russian Air Force’s fleet of aircraft Mikhailov said, “the Air Force receives planes in sufficient numbers, there are aircraft at the reserve bases, too.”“We are also receiving new planes, including Su-34 and Su-27SM, and others still being tested. There is nothing we can criticize these planes for.”Russian presidential adviser Alexander Burutin told...

"Descent" ? designed by August Development Corp. of Warminster, Pa. ? is largely unremarkable it its gameplay. However, it is unusual in that it is a "game-film." Instead of accumulating wealth or points while navigating the first-person game, players are rewarded with clips of the films produced by the student teams. At the game's conclusion, be it victory or death for the hero attempting to save his beloved, players can watch the assembled clips documenting their successes and failures along the way. More striking than the game itself, however, is the growing potential of high-speed communication over the Internet 2...

Something I do while perusing the morning Internet is read the military obituaries in the British press, mainly The Daily Telegraph. Invariably, these write-ups mark the passing of a veteran of World War II in the kind of scope and detail, as critic James Bowman has noted, rarely found in an American paper. Sometimes, I feel compelled to save them in a file. Last summer, there was Wing Commander David Penman, 85, the pilot of one of five (out of twelve) Lancaster bombers to return in 1942 from a daring, low-flying, daylight raid on a German engine plant; the year...

LONDON (AFP) - Britain may need one more generation of nuclear power stations to help meet a target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the fight against global warming, the government's top science advisor has said. The comments by Sir David King in an interview with The Independent will anger green campaigners and raise concerns about a greater potential for nuclear accidents. "I've never been a great nuclear protagonist, because of concerns of waste and leakage, the cost of disposal, the decommissioning issue and the whole question of public acceptability," King told the newspaper. But he said the question of...