North Korea vowed Saturday to respond with "powerful nuclear deterrence" to joint U.S. and South Korean military exercises poised to begin this weekend, saying the drills amount to a provocation that would prompt "retaliatory sacred war."

North Korea routinely threatens war when South Korea and the U.S. hold joint military drills, which Pyongyang sees as a rehearsal for an attack on the communist North. According to an Army Times article, the latest threat comes amid increased tensions on the divided peninsula over the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship that Seoul and Washington blame on Pyongyang.

Maybe there should be warning labels on enlistment contacts, as well as cigarette packs. After looking at 10 years' worth of cancer data, researchers at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center found that service members tend to have higher rates of melanoma, brain, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, breast, prostate and testicular cancers than civilians.

They also found interesting differences across the services, according to an Army Times article. Airmen are more likely to suffer skin cancer than other service members, for example, while sailors are the most likely to have lung cancer. Coast Guardsmen have the highest rates of testicular cancer, while Marines tend to the have the lowest cancer rates overall.

The My Career Advancement Accounts tuition program for military spouses will reopen to new enrollees Oct. 25, with some major restrictions on eligibility and funding, according to an Air Force Times article.

The popular MyCAA program's tuition assistance will be open only to spouses of junior service members in paygrades E1 through E-5, W-1 and W-2 and O-1 and O-2, said Clifford Stanley, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Spouses of National Guard and reserve members in those paygrades are eligible if their service member has been activated on Title 10 orders.

Underpayments of living stipends to 153,000 veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill will be corrected in August when the Veterans Affairs Department issues one-time catch-up checks to anyone who has received the stipend since Jan. 1, according to a Navy Times article.

The checks represent a fix to a problem caused when VA did not update living stipends in January after military housing allowances, on which the stipends are based, increased.