A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program to collect, maintain, and share data on selected foreign nationals entering and exiting the United States at air, sea and land ports of entry (POEs). These data, including biometric identifiers like digital fingerprints, are to be used to screen persons against watch lists, verify visitors' identities, and record arrival and departure. GAO was asked to review implementation at land POE facilities and in doing so GAO analyzed: (1) efforts to implement US-VISIT entry capability; (2) efforts to implement US-VISIT exit capability; and (3) DHS's efforts to define how US-VISIT fits with other emerging border security initiatives. GAO reviewed DHS and US-VISIT program documents, interviewed program officials, and visited 21 land POEs with varied traffic levels on both borders."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed homes and displaced millions of individuals. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) continues to respond to this disaster, GAO's previous work identified significant control weaknesses--specifically in FEMA's Individuals and Households Program (IHP) and in the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) purchase card program--resulting in significant fraud, waste, and abuse. Today's testimony will address whether FEMA provided improper and potentially fraudulent (1) rental assistance payments to registrants at the same time it was providing free housing via trailers and apartments; (2) duplicate assistance payments to individuals who claimed damages to the same property for both hurricanes Katrina and Rita; and (3) IHP payments to non-U.S. residents who did not qualify for IHP. This testimony will also discuss (1) the importance of fraud identification and prevention, and (2) the results of our investigation into property FEMA bought using DHS purchase cards. To address these objectives, GAO data mined and analyzed FEMA records and interviewed city officials, university officials, and foreign students. GAO also traveled to Louisiana and Texas to inspect selected property items and to investigate improper housing payments to individuals living in FEMA-provided …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses highlights from GAO's report entitled "End-Stage Renal Disease: Bundling Medicare's Payment for Drugs with Payment for All ESRD Services Would Promote Efficiency and Clinical Flexibility." The report examines Medicare payments for certain drugs provided to patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), a condition of permanent kidney failure."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The latest data show continued increases in rates of childhood obesity. For example, obesity rates for children 6 to 11 years old are estimated to have increased from 15.1 to 18.8 percent between 1999 and 2004. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 20 percent of children and youth in the United States will be obese by 2010. There are numerous negative health outcomes and financial consequences related to childhood obesity. Researchers have found that childhood obesity is associated with a number of disorders including hypertension, insulin resistance, sleep apnea, menstrual abnormalities, and orthopedic problems. According to one estimate, insured children treated for obesity are approximately three times more expensive for the health system than the average insured child. Some researchers have suggested that childhood obesity is largely the result of a decline in regular physical activity. In our October 2005 report, we surveyed experts on the key strategies to include in the design or implementation of a program to prevent or reduce childhood obesity. The program strategy identified by experts as most important was "increasing physical activity." Congress asked us to provide information on the …

On December 5, 2006, the reference case projections from 'Annual Energy Outlook 2007' (AEO 2007) were posted on the Energy Information Administration's (EIA) web site. We at LBNL have, in the past, compared the EIA's reference case long-term natural gas price forecasts from the AEO series to contemporaneous natural gas prices that can be locked in through the forward market, with the goal of better understanding fuel price risk and the role that renewables play in mitigating such risk (see, for example, http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/EMS/reports/53587.pdf or http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/54751.pdf). As such, we were curious to see how the latest AEO gas price forecast compares to the NYMEX natural gas futures strip. This brief memo presents our findings. As a refresher, our past work in this area has found that over the past six years, forward natural gas contracts (with prices that can be locked in--e.g., gas futures, swaps, and physical supply) have traded at a premium relative to contemporaneous long-term reference case gas price forecasts from the EIA. As such, we have concluded that, over the past six years at least, levelized cost comparisons of fixed-price renewable generation with variable-price gas-fired generation that have been based on AEO natural gas price forecasts (rather than …

This report presents the final hazard categorization (FHC) for the remediation of the 118-D-1, 118-D-2, and 118-D-3 Burial Grounds located within the 100-D/DR Area of the Hanford Site and the 118-H-1, 118-H-2, and 118-H-3 Burial Grounds located within the 100-H Area of the Hanford Site.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Rusk, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

Funeral program for Mrs. Carrie Lee Cleveland Byars, born May 15, 1926 and died November 28, 2006. The funeral was held Wednesday, December 6, 2006 at Second Baptist Church, officiated by Dr. Robert L. Jemerson, Pastor. Funeral arrangements were made through Sutton-Sutton Mortuary, Incorporated and she was buried in San Felipe Cemetery in San Felipe, Texas.

This report presents a brief description f the five methods used to bring proposed legislation to the House floor for consideration.

This report is about Amendments between the houses.

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Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

This report discusses major policy approaches, provides a conceptual framework for categorizing energy policy proposals, and briefly describes energy issues that remain current in the debate after the enactment of EPACT.

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Fluidized Bed Steam Reforming (FBSR) is being considered as a potential technology for the immobilization of a wide variety of high sodium low activity wastes (LAW) such as those existing at the Hanford site, at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), and the Savannah River Site (SRS). The addition of clay, charcoal, and a catalyst as co-reactants with the waste denitrates the aqueous wastes and forms a granular mineral waste form that can subsequently be made into a monolith for disposal if necessary. The waste form produced is a multiphase mineral assemblage of Na-Al-Si (NAS) feldspathoid minerals with cage and ring structures and iron bearing spinel minerals. The mineralization occurs at moderate temperatures between 650-750 C in the presence of superheated steam. The cage and ring structured feldspathoid minerals atomically bond radionuclides like Tc-99 and Cs-137 and anions such as SO{sub 4}, I, F, and Cl. The spinel minerals stabilize Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous species such as Cr and Ni. Granular mineral waste forms were made from (1) a basic Hanford Envelope A low activity waste (LAW) simulant and (2) an acidic INL simulant commonly referred to as sodium bearing waste (SBW) in pilot scale facilities at the …

A study was performed to identify tools needed to support the maintenance of DOE scientific software and libraries destined to operate over a computational grid. The study quickly identified the need for a harness, called the Test Harness, that could evaluate the numeric results obtained from the same software over a variety of computational platforms. The test harness is installed in the application software or library procedures and monitors the results obtained from porting the application software to new platforms or enhancing the software for whatever reason (for

MARYLIE/IMPACT (ML/I) is a hybrid code that combines the beam optics capabilities of MARYLIE with the parallel Particle-In-Cell capabilities of IMPACT. In addition to combining the capabilities of these codes, ML/I has a number of powerful features, including a choice of Poisson solvers, a fifth-order rf cavity model, multiple reference particles for rf cavities, a library of soft-edge magnet models, representation of magnet systems in terms of coil stacks with possibly overlapping fields, and wakefield effects. The code allows for map production, map analysis, particle tracking, and 3D envelope tracking, all within a single, coherent user environment. ML/I has a front end that can read both MARYLIE input and MAD lattice descriptions. The code can model beams with or without acceleration, and with or without space charge. Developed under a US DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) project, ML/I is well suited to large-scale modeling, simulations having been performed with up to 100M macroparticles. The code inherits the powerful fitting and optimizing capabilities of MARYLIE augmented for the new features of ML/I. The combination of soft-edge magnet models, high-order capability, space charge effects, and fitting/optimization capabilities, make ML/I a powerful code for a wide range of beam optics design …

The authors measure the absolute branching fraction for D{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -} {pi}{sup +} using partial reconstruction of {bar B}{sup 0} {yields} D*{sup +} X {ell}{sup -} {bar {nu}}{sub {ell}} decays. Only the charged lepton and the soft pion from the decay D*{sup +} {yields} D{sup 0} {pi}{sup +} are used. Based on a data sample of 230 million B{bar B} pairs collected at the {Upsilon}(4S) resonance with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy B Factory at SLAC, they obtain {Beta}(D{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -} {pi}{sup +}) = (4.025 {+-} 0.038 {+-} 0.098)%, where the first error is statistical and the second error is systematic.

The authors present studies of two-body and three-body charmed baryonic B decays in a sample of 232 million B{bar B} pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II e{sup +}e{sup -} storage ring. The branching fractions of the decays {bar B}{sup 0} {yields} {Lambda}{sub c}{sup +}{bar p} and B{sup -} {yields} {Lambda}{sub c}{sup +} {bar p}{pi}{sup -} are measured to be (2.15 {+-} 0.36 {+-} 0.13 {+-} 0.56) x 10{sup -5} and (3.53 {+-} 0.18 {+-} 0.31 {+-} 0.92) x 10{sup -4}, respectively. The uncertainties quoted are statistical, systematic, and from the {Lambda}{sub c}{sup +} {yields} pK{sup -} {pi}{sup +} branching fraction. They observe a baryon-antibaryon threshold enhancement in the {Lambda}{sub c}{sup +}{bar p} invariant mass spectrum of the three-body mode and measure the ratio of the branching fractions to be {Beta}(B{sup -} {yields} {Lambda}{sub c}{sup +}{bar p}{pi}{sup -})/{Beta}({bar B}{sup 0} {yields} {Lambda}{sub c}{sup +}{bar p}) = 16.4 {+-} 2.9 {+-} 1.4. These results are preliminary.

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The well-known hierarchy between the Planck scale (>> 1019GeV) and the TeV scale, namely a ratio of {approx} 10{sup 16} between the two, is coincidentally repeated in a inverted order between the TeV scale and the dark energy scale at {approx} 10{sup -3} eV implied by the observations. We argue that this is not a numerical coincidence. The same brane-world setups to address the first hierarchy problem may also in principle address this second hierarchy issue. Specifically, we consider supersymmetry in the bulk and its breaking on the brane and resort to the Casimir energy induced by the bulk graviton-gravitino mass-shift on the brane as the dark energy. For the ADD model we found that our notion is sensible only if the number of extra dimension n = 2. We extend our study to the Randall-Sundrum model. Invoking the chirality-flip on the boundaries for SUSY-breaking, the zero-mode gravitino contribution to the Casimir energy does give rise to the double hierarchy. Unfortunately since the higher Kaluza-Klein modes acquire relative mass-shifts at the TeV level, the zero-mode contribution to Casimir energy is overshadowed.