A video game company is donating $1 million on Tuesday to set up a foundation to help veterans find employment, organizers announced. Activision Blizzard, which produces the popular Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk franchises, said its Call of Duty Endowment (CODE) will support other groups that assist veterans with their careers. Unemployment may have hit double digits in the nation last ...

Happy Friday! The Commerce Department will establish a new Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship to help small businesses grow faster, part of the Obama administration's new $100 billion innovation agenda announced earlier this week. The administration is especially interested in helping small businesses and entrepreneurs as statistics suggest businesses less than five years old accounted for nearly all private sector employment ...

LANSING -- Gov. Jennifer Granholm flexed her veto muscle Monday, wiping out $54 million from a public school budget and putting lawmakers on the spot to come up with more cash for schools or watch deep cuts at 39 select districts, including 26 in Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties. That's certain to stoke debate over higher taxes to pay for schools. ...

WASHINGTON - D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's use of government resources to facilitate his recreational activities isn't limited to a police escort while he trains with his bike team. The mayor has used a federal Homeland Security vehicle to transport himself and his bike to at least 14 races in the past two years. The District's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency ...

A leading government online learning program that serves as a model for job training programs in China soon will allow federal employees to use more social media tools for training. The Agriculture Department's program, AgLearn, is scheduled for an upgrade to a new version of its supporting software, allowing it to provide its employees with blogs and wikis related to their ...

HARTFORD - Surrounded by cheering supporters in city hall this afternoon, Mayor Eddie A. Perez said "Truth is on my side. I committed no crime. I will be vindicated of all the charges that have been levied against me. "I want my day in court." Perez earlier had turned himself in at the Troop H state police barracks in Hartford. According ...

Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the "green revolution," died Saturday at his home in Dallas at age 95. Here is a look at some of the honors he received: -Nobel Peace Prize, 1970 -Election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 1970 -Aztec Eagle, Government of Mexico, 1970 -Outstanding Agricultural Achievement Award, World Farm Foundation (USA), 1971 -Presidential Medal ...

Hiring reform for the entire federal workforce, not just cyber security positions, is the topic of a public meeting the OPM planned for Friday. Participants have been asked to discuss "whether normal, competitive hiring is an effective avenue for bringing recent college graduates into the federal workforce," according to the Federal Register. The hearing follows a May 11 directive from Obama, ...

Progress in promoting women to the top levels of the federal civil service has flowed like the mighty Mississippi River in the springtime. Wrong. Lately, it's been more like a leaky faucet in Uncle Sam's kitchen. While men and women are close to being equally represented in the lower grades of the federal workforce, "at the higher levels women are woefully ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional aides say the Obama administration has chosen a Colorado natural resources official to be the new agriculture undersecretary in charge of the U.S. Forest Service. Harris Sherman, executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, is to be nominated soon, they said. The congressional aides familiar with the decision spoke on condition of anonymity because the ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation's first round of swine flu shots could begin sooner than expected, with some vaccine available as early as the first week of October, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Sunday. Sebelius said she is confident the vaccine will be available early enough to beat the peak of the expected flu season this fall and ...

President Obama will win no fans among federal workers with his action to limit their pay increase next year to 2 percent. That's a long way from the 18.9 percent average raise Obama said many government workers would have received using a complicated statutory formula designed to make federal pay more comparable to private-sector compensation. "Our country continues to face serious ...

If you want to get a sense of the broad range of Defense Department activities, there's no better reading than the 638-page House-Senate conferee report on the fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill released last week. You could start with apparel. Each service has its camouflage uniforms, which are different even within services. What to do? The House wants to standardize uniforms ...

With logic only a lawyer -- and perhaps only a government lawyer -- could love, the Obama administration is refusing to obey a federal judge's order that agrees with a position the administration supports. Last month, Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, ordered the Office of Personnel Management to allow health insurance companies ...

It's ironic, and shameful, that President Obama's point man on his employment initiative for veterans is barred by law from being one. John Berry directs the Office of Personnel Management and is openly gay. No one is more eager about increasing employment opportunities for those who have served in the military, yet his government, but not this administration, says it does ...

If the federal civil service had a flag, it would be flying upside down. The civil service is in distress -- not dead, but in need of rescue. Recognizing this, John Berry, the Office of Personnel Management director, ran some sweeping ideas up the flagpole on Monday to see who salutes. At the same time he heaped praise on the "unsung ...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will look into the quality of agencies' decisions about bias claims, after a new report revealed that during a five-year period, the percentage of those decisions upheld on appeal declined considerably. Click here to read the new report "Federal agencies must step up their efforts to improve complaint processing time, while also focusing on quality results," ...

When it comes to providing employee benefits, Uncle Sam strives to be a model employer. But there's rust on his halo. Take a look at thousands of Forest Service workers who get no health and retirement benefits, despite years of service to the federal government. They are temporary employees. It's not uncommon for temps to go without benefits, but these folks ...

Remember when President Obama said he wanted to make working for the federal government cool again? The government's chief human resources officer told lawmakers Thursday that they need to approve a bill that extends full benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of gay or lesbian federal employees in order to ensure the government's coolness factor. “Young people are looking at this ...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama's national security adviser, retired Gen. James Jones, says decisions on how best to stabilize Afghanistan and beat back the insurgency must extend beyond the issue of troop levels to improved governance and how best to foster economic development. The debate over sending up to 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan is just one element that ...