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The report opens with brief explanations of the employment-based preference categories and the per-country ceilings governing annual admissions of LPRs. The focus is on the major employment-based preference categories. The report continues with a statistical analysis of the pending caseload of approved employment-based LPR petitions.

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A two-part Delphi Survey was given to transportation experts attending the Asilomar Conference on Transportation and Energy in August, 2011. The survey asked respondents about trends in the US transportation sector in 2030. Topics included: alternative vehicles, high speed rail construction, rail freight transportation, average vehicle miles traveled, truck versus passenger car shares, vehicle fuel economy, and biofuels in different modes. The survey consisted of two rounds -- both asked the same set of seven questions. In the first round, respondents were given a short introductory paragraph about the topic and asked to use their own judgment in their responses. In the second round, the respondents were asked the same questions, but were also given results from the first round as guidance. The survey was sponsored by Argonne National Lab (ANL), the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), and implemented by University of California at Davis, Institute of Transportation Studies. The survey was part of the larger Transportation Energy Futures (TEF) project run by the Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Of the 206 invitation letters sent, 94 answered all questions in the first round (105 answered at least one question), and 23 of those answered all …

The FTA, in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration, produced an analysis of the potential impact, to the environment and to the airport, of extending a DART line to the DFW Airport Central Terminal Area. The FTA report is primarily concerned with environmental factors. It found that the extension would have no significant impact.

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We report preliminary results on the chiral and deconfinement aspects of the QCD transition at finite temperature using the Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) action on lattices with temporal extent of N{sub {tau}} = 6 and 8. The chiral aspects of the transition are studied in terms of quark condensates and the disconnected chiral susceptibility. We study the deconfinement transition in terms of the strange quark number susceptibility and the renormalized Polyakov loop. We made continuum estimates for some quantities and find reasonably good agreement between our results and the recent continuum extrapolated results obtained with the stout staggered quark action.

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This report discusses the current political state of Afghanistan, as well as the Afghan government. This report also discusses Afghanistan's relationship with the United States, particularly U.S. efforts to urge President Hamid Karzai, to address corruption within the Afghan government. The report also includes discussion of election fraud and corruption in Afghanistan.