This report discusses whether the current food safety system has the resources, authority, and structural organization to safeguard the health of American consumers, who spend more than $1 trillion on food each year. Also at issue is whether federal food safety laws, first enacted in the early 1900s, have kept pace with the significant changes that have occurred in the food production, processing, and marketing sectors since then.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Each year, billions of dollars in arms and "dual-use" items--items that have both commercial and military applications--are exported to U.S. allies and strategic partners. To further national security, foreign policy, and economic interests, the U.S. government controls the export of these items. Over the past 10 years, we have reported on numerous weaknesses in the export control system, including poor coordination among the multiple agencies involved, which have led to jurisdictional disputes and enforcement challenges, and the lack of systematic assessment of the overall effectiveness of the export control system. As a result, since 2007 the arms and dual-use export control systems have been included as part of our high-risk area on ensuring the effective protection of technologies critical to U.S. national security interests. We have also called for a strategic reexamination of existing programs within the U.S. export control system to identify needed changes and ensure the advancement of U.S. interests. In August 2009, the President announced that he had directed a comprehensive review of the U.S. export control system and, in April 2010, proposed a framework under which the current system would be streamlined to include …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Health care delivery in the United States often lacks coordination and communication across providers and settings. This fragmentation can lead to poor quality of care, medical errors, and higher costs. Providers have formed integrated delivery systems (IDS) to improve efficiency, quality, and access. The Health Care Safety Net Act of 2008 directed GAO to report on IDSs that serve underserved populations--those that are uninsured or medically underserved (i.e., facing economic, geographic, cultural, or linguistic barriers to care, including Medicaid enrollees and rural populations). In October 2009, GAO provided an oral briefing. In this follow-on report, GAO describes (1) organizational features IDSs use to support strategies to improve care; (2) approaches IDSs use to facilitate access for underserved populations; and (3) challenges IDSs encounter in providing care, including to underserved populations. GAO selected a judgmental sample of 15 private and public IDSs that are clinically integrated across primary, specialty, and acute care; they vary in their degree of integration, specific organizational features, and payer mix (e.g., extent to which they serve Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries and the uninsured). GAO interviewed chief medical officers or other system officials …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In light of longstanding problems with delays and backlogs, Congress mandated personnel security clearance reforms through the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), which requires, among other things, that executive agencies meet objectives for the timeliness of the investigative and adjudicative phases of the security clearance process. Since 2005, the Department of Defense's (DOD) clearance program has been on GAO's high-risk list due to timeliness delays and GAO continued that designation in 2007 and 2009 also due to concerns about quality. Based on prior and ongoing work, this statement addresses DOD's progress in (1) reducing the timeliness of initial personnel security clearances at DOD and (2) building quality into the processes used to investigate and adjudicate security clearances. GAO reviewed Performance Accountability Council timeliness data and has begun a preliminary analysis of available DOD data, examined key clearance reform documents, and conducted interviews with DOD and the Performance Accountability Council officials about timeliness and efforts to improve the quality of investigations and adjudications. GAO plans to continue examining the timeliness and quality of personnel security clearances in DOD. This work will help inform the Comptroller …

This report provides a brief overview of the Peace Corps and discusses how the 111th Congress is considering the President's annual funding request for the Peace Corps and efforts to reauthorize the Peace Corps. Current issues for Congress include the extent to which there is available funding for Peace Corps expansion, whether the Peace Corps has the institutional capacity to expand, and whether volunteers are able to function in a safe and secure environment.

Iraq's political system, the result of a U.S.-supported election process, is increasingly characterized by peaceful competition rather than violence, but sectarianism and ethnic and factional infighting continue to simmer. This report discusses the current state of Iraq, concentrating primarily on the actions of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, efforts underway to combat sectarian violence, and the projected U.S. troop withdrawal by August 2010.

This report provides information on the current Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) life insurance programs available for servicemembers and veterans, management and administration issues, and associated policy issues and legislation.

Congressional interest in facilitating U.S. technological innovation led to the passage of P.L. 96-517, Amendments to the Patent and Trademark Act, commonly referred to as the "Bayh-Dole Act" after its two main sponsors former Senators Robert Dole and Birch Bayh. Under this 1980 law, as amended, title to inventions made with government support is provided to the contractor if that contractor is a small business, a university, or other non-profit institution. This report discusses the rationale behind the passage of P.L. 96-517, its provisions, and implementation of the law.

This report discusses the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which provides economic assistance through a competitive selection process to developing nations that are pursuing political and economic reforms in three areas: ruling justly, investing in people, and fostering economic freedom. This report also discusses several concerns related to MCC implementation, including the level of funding to support MCC programs.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Navy's four public shipyards--Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and Puget Sound Naval Shipyard--are critical in maintaining fleet readiness and supporting ongoing operations worldwide. The Navy requests funds for the shipyards' restoration and modernization as infrastructure condition may affect their mission and workforce. GAO was asked to review (1) the extent to which the shipyards have plans for their restoration and modernization needs; (2) the extent to which the Navy has a process to capture and calculate these needs; (3) the Navy's process to prioritize and fund projects to meet these needs; and (4) the extent to which the shipyards resolve infrastructure-related safety, health, and quality-of-life issues. GAO assessed the Navy's shipyard plans against elements of a federal strategic planning framework; evaluated its process for determining its restoration and modernization needs and addressing safety, health, and quality-of-life issues; visited the shipyards; and interviewed Navy command and shipyard officials."

This report discusses the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans all nuclear explosion and was in 1996 adopted by the U.N. General Assembly but rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1997. This report discusses the Obama Administration's stated goal of pursuing U.S. ratification of the CTBT, although the Administration has mainly focused on securing Senate consent to ratification of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). This report also discusses other nuclear weapons-related issues as well as the long history of nuclear testing.

In recent years, analysts and U.S. policymakers have noted Africa's growing strategic importance to U.S. interests. On February 6, 2007, the Bush Administration announced the creation of a new unified combatant command, U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM, to promote U.S. national security objectives in Africa and its surrounding waters. This report provides information on AFRICOM's mission, structure, interagency coordination, and its basing and manpower requirements. The report also gives a broad overview of U.S. strategic interests in Africa and the role of U.S. military efforts on the continent as they pertain to the creation of Africa Command.

Production of H{sup -} beam for accelerators applications by charge exchange of high brightness hydrogen neutral beam in a sodium jet cell is experimentally studied in joint BNL-BINP experiment. In the experiment, a hydrogen-neutral beam with 3-6 keV energy, equivalent current up to 5 A and 200 microsecond pulse duration is used. The atomic beam is produced by charge exchange of a proton beam in a pulsed hydrogen target. Formation of the proton beam is performed in an ion source by four-electrode multiaperture ion-optical system. To achieve small beam emittance, the apertures in the ion-optical system have small enough size, and the extraction of ions is carried out from the surface of plasma emitter with a low transverse ion temperature of {approx}0.2 eV formed as a result of plasma jet expansion from the arc plasma generator. Developed for the BNL optically pumped polarized ion source, the sodium jet target with recirculation and aperture diameter of 2 cm is used in the experiment. At the first stage of the experiment H{sup -} beam with 36 mA current, 5 keV energy and {approx}0.15 cm {center_dot} mrad normalized emittance was obtained. To increase H{sup -} beam current ballistically focused hydrogen neutral beam will …

A number of the Commercial Building Partnership Projects (CBPs) will require metering, monitoring, data analysis and verification of savings after the retrofits are complete. Although monitoring and verification (M&V) agents are free to use any metering and monitoring devices that they chose, the data they collect should be reported to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in a standard format. PNNL will store the data collected in its CBP database for further use by PNNL and U.S. Department of Energy. This document describes the data storage process and the deliver format of the data from the M&V agents.

An important diagnostic tool for inertial confinement fusion will be time-resolved radiographic imaging of the dense cold fuel surrounding the hot spot. The measurement technique is based on point-projection radiography at photon energies from 60-200 keV where the Compton effect is the dominant contributor to the opacity of the fuel or pusher. We have successfully applied this novel Compton Radiography technique to the study of the final compression of directly driven plastic capsules at the OMEGA facility. The radiographs have a spatial and temporal resolution of {approx}10 {micro}m and {approx}10ps, respectively. A statistical accuracy of {approx}0.5% in transmission per resolution element is achieved, allowing localized measurements of areal mass densities to 7% accuracy. The experimental results show 3D non-uniformities and lower than 1D expected areal densities attributed to drive asymmetries and hydroinstabilities.

This project is concerned with the PF.WRF model as a means to enable more accurate predictions of wind fluctuations and subsurface storage. As developed at LLNL, PF.WRF couples a groundwater (subsurface) and surface water flow model (ParFlow) to a mesoscale atmospheric model (WRF, Weather Research and Forecasting Model). It was developed as a unique tool to address coupled water balance and wind energy questions that occur across traditionally separated research regimes of the atmosphere, land surface, and subsurface. PF.WRF is capable of simulating fluid, mass, and energy transport processes in groundwater, vadose zone, root zone, and land surface systems, including overland flow, and allows for the WRF model to both directly drive and respond to surface and subsurface hydrologic processes and conditions. The current PF.WRF model is constrained to have uniform spatial gridding below the land surface and matching areal grids with the WRF model at the land surface. There are often cases where it is advantageous for land surface, overland flow and subsurface models to have finer gridding than their atmospheric counterparts. Finer vertical discretization is also advantageous near the land surface (to properly capture feedbacks) yet many applications have a large vertical extent. However, the surface flow is …

Excavation and operation of an underground facility is likely to produce an extensive suite of seismic signals observable at the surface for perhaps several km. Probably a large fraction of such signals will be correlated, so the design of a monitoring framework should include consideration of a correlation processing capability. Correlation detectors have been shown to be significantly more sensitive than beam-forming power detectors. Although correlation detectors have a limited detection footprint, they can be generalized into multi-rank subspace detectors which are sensitive over a much larger range of source mechanisms and positions. Production of subspace detectors can be automated, so their use in an autonomous framework may be contemplated. Waveform correlation also can be used to produce very high precision phase picks which may be jointly inverted to simultaneously relocate groups of events. The relative precision of the resulting hypocenters is sufficient to visualize structural detail at a scale of less than a few tens of meters. Three possible correlation processor systems are presented. All use a subspace signal detection framework. The simplest system uses a single-component sensor and is capable of detection and classification of signals. The most complicated system uses many sensors deployed around the facility, and …

While electron beam induced fragmentation (EBIF) has been reported to result in the formation of nanocrystals of various compositions, the physical forces driving this phenomenon are still poorly understood. We report EBIF to be a much more general phenomenon than previously appreciated, operative across a wide variety of metals, semiconductors and insulators. In addition, we leverage the temperature dependent bandgap of several semiconductors to quantify -- using in situ cathodoluminescence spectroscopy -- the thermal contribution to EBIF, and find extreme temperature rises upwards of 1000K.

Training conducted as a part of the United Negro College Fund Special Programs/National Library of Medicine -HBCU ACCESS Project at Howard University, Washington, DC on November 20, 2010.

Precision neutron-induced reaction data are important for modeling the network of isotope production and destruction within a given diagnostic chain. This network modeling has many applications such as the design of advanced fuel cycle for reactors and the interpretation of radiochemical data related to the stockpile stewardship and nuclear forensics projects. Our current funded effort is to improve the neutron-induced reaction data on the short-lived actinides and the specific goal is to improve the neutron capture data on {sup 238}Pu with a half-life of 87.7 years. In this report, the fabrication of a {sup 238}Pu target for the proposed measurement using the DANCE array at LANL is described. The {sup 238}Pu target was fabricated from a sample enriched to 99.35%, acquired from ORNL. A total of 395 {micro}g was electroplated onto both sides of a 3 {micro}m thick Ti foil using a custom-made plating cell, shown in Fig 1. The target-material loaded Ti foil is sandwiched between two double-side aluminized mylar foils with a thickness of 1.4 {micro}m. The mylar foil is glued to a polyimide ring. This arrangement is shown partially in Fig. 2. The assembled target is then inserted into an aluminum container with a wall thickness of …

The Savannah River National Laboratory has developed a 'hybrid' approach to Performance Assessment modeling which has been used for a number of Performance Assessments. This hybrid approach uses a multi-dimensional modeling platform (PorFlow) to develop deterministic flow fields and perform contaminant transport. The GoldSim modeling platform is used to develop the Sensitivity and Uncertainty analyses. Because these codes are performing complementary tasks, it is incumbent upon them that for the deterministic cases they produce very similar results. This paper discusses two very different waste forms, one with no engineered barriers and one with engineered barriers, each of which present different challenges to the abstraction of data. The hybrid approach to Performance Assessment modeling used at the SRNL uses a 2-D unsaturated zone (UZ) and a 3-D saturated zone (SZ) model in the PorFlow modeling platform. The UZ model consists of the waste zone and the unsaturated zoned between the waste zone and the water table. The SZ model consists of source cells beneath the waste form to the points of interest. Both models contain 'buffer' cells so that modeling domain boundaries do not adversely affect the calculation. The information pipeline between the two models is the contaminant flux. The domain …

Specific activation recipes for bulk, 100 nm thick MBE grown and high polarization III-V photocathode material have been developed which mitigate the effects of exposure to background gasses. Lifetime data using four representative gasses were acquired for bulk GaAs, 100 nm unstrained GaAs and strained superlattice GaAs/GaAsP, all activated both with Cs and then Cs and Li (bi-alkali). Each photoemitter showed marked resilience improvement when activated using the bi-alkali recipe compared to the standard single alkali recipe. A dual alkali activation system at SLAC was constructed, baked and commissioned with the purpose of performing spin-polarization measurements on electrons emitted from the bi-alkali activated surfaces. An end station at SSRL was configured with the required sources for energy resolved photoemission measurements on the bi-alkali activated and CO2 dosed surfaces. The bi-alkali recipes were successfully implemented at SLAC/SSRL. Measurements at SLAC of the photoelectron spin-polarization from the modified activation surface showed no sign of a change in value compared to the standard activated material, i.e., no ill effects. Analysis of photoemission data indicates that the addition of Li to the activation layer results in a multi-layer structure. The presence of Li in the activation layer also acts as an inhibitor to CO2 …

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a dangerous Actinobacteria infecting nearly one third of the human population. It becomes dormant and phenotypically drug resistant in response to stresses. An important feature of the M. tuberculosis pathogenesis is the prevalence of latent infection without disease, making understanding of the mechanisms used by the bacteria to exist in this state and to switch to metabolically active infectious form a vital problem to consider. M. tuberculosis dormancy is regulated by the three-component regulatory system of two kinases (DosT and DevS) and transcriprional regulator (DevR). DevR activates transcription of a set of genes, which allow the bacteria to survive long periods of anaerobiosis, and may be important for long-term survival within the host during latent infection. The DevR-regulon is studied experimentally in M. tuberculosis and few other phylogenetically close Mycobacteria spp. As many other two-component systems, the devRS operon is autoregulated. However, the mechanism of the dormancy is not completely clear even for these bacteria and there is no data describing the dormancy regulons in other species.

The HERMES (High Explosive Response to MEchanical Stimulus) model has been developed to describe the response of energetic materials to low-velocity mechanical stimulus, referred to as HEVR (High Explosive Violent Response) or BVR (Burn to Violent Reaction). For tests performed with an HMX-based UK explosive, at sample sizes less than 200 g, the response was sometimes an explosion, but was not observed to be a detonation. The distinction between explosion and detonation can be important in assessing the effects of the HE response on nearby structures. A detonation proceeds as a supersonic shock wave supported by the release of energy that accompanies the transition from solid to high-pressure gas. For military high explosives, the shock wave velocity generally exceeds 7 km/s, and the pressure behind the shock wave generally exceeds 30 GPa. A kilogram of explosive would be converted to gas in 10 to 15 microseconds. An HEVR explosion proceeds much more slowly. Much of the explosive remains unreacted after the event. Peak pressures have been measured and calculated at less than 1 GPa, and the time for the portion of the solid that does react to form gas is about a millisecond. The explosion will, however, launch the confinement …