This report considers the issue of new "fast track" or trade promotion authority (APA) legislation in the 107th Congress. Moreover, the report summarizes the agricultural debates on the issue.

New “fast track,” or trade promotion, authority (TPA), legislation to implement trade agreements is at issue in the 107th Congress. Such authority would enable the Administration to submit negotiated foreign trade agreements to Congress for consideration under expedited procedures. Many agricultural and food industry interests are among the export-oriented enterprises that support TPA, arguing that foreign trading partners will not seriously negotiate with an Administration that lacks it. However, some farm groups argue that fast track ultimately will lead to new agreements that could have adverse effects on U.S. producers, at least in some commodity sectors.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Semiweekly newspaper from Boerne, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Semiweekly newspaper from Brady, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Alloy 22 (UNS N06022) was proposed for the corrosion resistant outer barrier of a two-layer waste package container for nuclear waste at the potential repository site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada (USA). A testing program is underway to characterize and quantify three main modes of corrosion that may occur at the site. Current results show that the containers would perform well under general corrosion, localized corrosion and environmentally assisted cracking (EAC). For example, the general corrosion rate is expected to be below 100 nm/year and the container is predicted to be outside the range of potential for localized corrosion and environmentally assisted cracking.

Multi-pulse radiographic accelerators, such as the DARHT-II facility under construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory, generate X-rays by striking a solid, high-Z ''bremsstrahlung converter target'' with a tightly focused, high-current, relativistic electron beam. In the process, the converter target is heated to a plasma state and significant thermal expansion can occur during the interval between pulses, depleting the beam focus region of target material and reducing the X-ray output. Beam scatter and various other technical constraints prevent using thicker targets, moving the electron beam to a fresh target region, or moving fresh target material into a fixed beam location. The remaining possibility is to optimize the choice of target material to maximize the effective heat capacity while maintaining dose and minimizing scatter. A kinematic model of a ''composite target'' of high-Z material in a low-Z matrix is presented here as a candidate for such an optimized target. The thermal destruction of the target cannot be avoided but can be slowed sufficiently to maintain the necessary output dose. Methods of manufacturing such targets, and their radiographic performance, are being tested at the ETA-II accelerator facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

This report gives a brief overview of the basic elements of music licensing and surveys recent developments n the U.S. Copyright Office's implementation of the DMCA.

Daily newspaper from Perry, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

News release about public meetings to by held by DART concerning service plans for the agency's new light rail stations and bus and rail service adjustments.

We have developed a pulser that is able to generate a simulated signal from a high-purity germanium (HPGe) detector for various plutonium isotopes. In this paper we describe the development of an ''isotopics'' pulser for the simulation of signals that are produced by an HPGe detector. The present pulser generates the waveforms that are produced by an HPGe detector both before and after the preamplifier. These signals have been input into a normal MCA and the result closely simulates a genuine pulse-height distribution.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) faces complex financial and management problems that are deeply rooted in DOD's business operations and management culture. During the past 12 years, DOD has begun several broad-based departmentwide reform efforts to overhaul its financial operations and other key business areas. These efforts have been unsuccessful. GAO identified several key elements that are essential to the success of any DOD financial management reform effort. These include (1) addressing the department's financial management challenges as part of a comprehensive, integrated, DOD-wide business reform; (2) providing for sustained leadership and resource control to implement needed reforms; (3) establishing clear lines of responsibility, authority, and accountability for such reform; (4) incorporating results-oriented performance measures and monitoring tied to the reforms; (5) providing appropriate incentives or consequences for action or inaction; (6) establishing and implementing an enterprise architecture to guide and direct financial management and modernization investments, and (7) ensuring effective oversight and monitoring."

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Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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In this paper we report on the first run II results from the CDF experiment. A brief description of the Tevatron collider and CDF detector upgrades and performance achieved in the first part of run II is followed by the CDF expectations in the fields of beauty, top, electroweak and Higgs physics.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The United States spent $50 billion (2002 dollars) on food aid between 1979 and 2003. Notwithstanding these sizable donations and donations by other countries, the need for food aid in the developing world far exceeds available supply. U.S. food aid is provided through six programs administered by the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). These programs use various methods for providing resources and have different ways of delivering aid to the recipient nations. USAID manages the largest program--P.L. 480, Title II--using annual appropriations to purchase commodities that are then donated to recipient nations principally through private voluntary organizations and the World Food Program. The large fluctuations in U.S. food aid since 1990 are the result of three key factors: U.S. food aid policies, agricultural surpluses, and international events. The success of food aid programs in meeting their objectives is hampered by the competing objectives of the programs and by management weaknesses such as a lack of management attention to monitoring and accountability in food aid programs."

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

In this paper, the most recent results on jet fragmentation obtained at the Collider Detector at Fermilab Tevatron are presented. The multiplicity and momentum distribution of charged particles inside jets in dijet events are compared to the predictions of the Modified Leading Log Approximation complemented with the hypothesis of Local Parton-Hadron Duality. Values for the two parameters of the model are extracted, the cut-off scale Q{sub eff} = 230 {+-} 40 MeV and the rate of parton-to-hadron conversions K{sub LPHD}{sup charged} = 0.56 {+-} 0.10. A fit of the data for the ratio of multiplicities in gluon and quark jets r, where r is treated as a free parameter, results in r = 1.9 {+-} 0.5. Also, we compare the charged particle multiplicities in dijet and {gamma}-jet events. The comparison allows for an extraction of a model-independent ratio of multiplicities in gluon and quark jets. We report r = N{sub g}/N{sub q} = 1.61 {+-} 0.11(stat) {+-} 0.28(syst) for E{sub jet} = 40 GeV.

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Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.