The major challenges to coalition forces are now quelling a persistent Iraqi resistance movement and training sufficient Iraqi forces to assume responsibility for the nations domestic security. This report discusses military planning and operations in Iraq.

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This report includes four tables which provide the January 2004, January 2005, and January 2006 salaries for federal officials and members of the SES, and for employees in SL, ST, and GS-15 positions in the Washington, DC, and the “Rest of the United States” locality pay areas.

Letter from Linda Jebavy discussing an article about the death of Bill Nelson.

Letter from Linda Jebavy discussing an article about Terry Tebedo's death.

Letter from Linda Jebavy discussing the death of Bill Nelson.

This report discusses U.S. laws and executive orders that impose economic sanctions currently in place against Libya, including whether they can be changed by executive action, and exemptions to the sanctions that could make foreign assistance available.

The goal of this project was to investigate mechanisms underlying the adaptive response seen following exposure of HeLa x skin fibroblast human hybrid cells to low doses of low LET radiation. It was proposed to investigate the contributions of three possible mechanisms. These were: 1. Upregulation of cellular antioxidant status. 2. Upregulation of DNA repair. 3. Upregulation of gap junction intracellular communication. We have completed the study of the role of upregulation of reduced glutathione (GSH) as a possible mechanism underlying our observed suppression of transformation frequency at low radiation doses. We have also completed our study of the possible role of upregulation of DNA repair in the observed adaptive response against neoplastic transformation. We concluded that upregulation of DNA repair may be more important in modulating transformation at the higher dose. A manuscript describing the above studies has been submitted published in Carcinogenesis 24:1961-1965, 2003. Finally, we have completed two studies of the possible role of upregulation of gap junction intercellular communication (GJIC) in modulating transformation frequency at low doses of low LET radiation. This research was published in Radiation Research 162:646-654, 2004. In order to optimize the opportunity for GJIC, we then carried out a study where confluent …

Newsletter of Congregation Beth Yeshurun in Houston, including news and events, upcoming services, member announcements, editorials, and other information of interest to congregants.

This report provides a brief overview of the Impact Aid program, including the calculation of Impact Aid payments to local educational agencies (LEA), and an overview of the Base Realignment and Closing (BRAC) recommendations. This is followed by a discussion of the potential effects of the BRAC recommendations on LEAs that will both lose and gain students as a result of the changes. The report concludes with a brief discussion of actions that have been taken by LEAs in anticipation of large influxes of federally connected students.

A statement of record issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Chairman, Subcommittee on Labor, HHS and Education, Senate Committee on Appropriations, asked GAO to submit a statement for the record highlighting findings from our 2003 report on how well the Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) oversees its process for reviewing and approving critical types of mine plans and the extent to which MSHA's inspections and accident investigations processes help ensure the safety and health of underground coal miners."

A two-stage gas release model was examined to determine if it could provide a physically realistic and accurate model for fission gas release under Prometheus conditions. The single-stage Booth model [1], which is often used to calculate fission gas release, is considered to be oversimplified and not representative of the mechanisms that occur during fission gas release. Two-stage gas release models require saturation at the grain boundaries before gas is release, leading to a time delay in release of gases generated in the fuel. Two versions of a two-stage model developed by Forsberg and Massih [2] were implemented using Mathcad [3]. The original Forsbers and Massih model [2] and a modified version of the Forsberg and Massih model that is used in a commercially available fuel performance code (FRAPCON-3) [4] were examined. After an examination of these models, it is apparent that without further development and validation neither of these models should be used to calculate fission gas release under Prometheus-type conditions. There is too much uncertainty in the input parameters used in the models. In addition. the data used to tune the modified Forsberg and Massih model (FRAPCON-3) was collected under commercial reactor conditions, which will have higher fission …

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (http://bioontology.org) is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists funded by the NIH Roadmap to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are: (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. The Center is working toward these objectives by providing tools to develop ontologies and to annotate experimental data, and by developing resources to integrate and relate existing ontologies as well as by creating repositories of biomedical data that are annotated using those ontologies. The Center is providing training workshops in ontology design, …

Novel applications of gamma ray spectroscopy for D&D process development, inventory reduction, safety analysis and facility management are discussed in this paper. These applications of gamma spectroscopy were developed and implemented during the Risk Reduction Program (RPP) to successfully downgrade the Heavy Element Facility (B251) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) from a Category II Nuclear Facility to a Radiological Facility. Non-destructive assay in general, gamma spectroscopy in particular, were found to be important tools in project management, work planning, and work control (''Expect the unexpected and confirm the expected''), minimizing worker dose, and resulted in significant safety improvements and operational efficiencies. Inventory reduction activities utilized gamma spectroscopy to identify and confirm isotopics of legacy inventory, ingrowth of daughter products and the presence of process impurities; quantify inventory; prioritize work activities for project management; and to supply information to satisfy shipper/receiver documentation requirements. D&D activities utilize in-situ gamma spectroscopy to identify and confirm isotopics of legacy contamination; quantify contamination levels and monitor the progress of decontamination efforts; and determine the point of diminishing returns in decontaminating enclosures and glove boxes containing high specific activity isotopes such as {sup 244}Cm and {sup 238}Pu. In-situ gamma spectroscopy provided quantitative comparisons of several …

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As part of the Department of Energy's (DOE) initiative on developing new technologies for storage of carbon dioxide in geologic reservoirs, Battelle has been investigating the feasibility of CO{sub 2} sequestration in the deep saline reservoirs in the Ohio River Valley region. In addition to the DOE, the project is being sponsored by American Electric Power (AEP), BP, The Ohio Coal Development Office (OCDO) of the Ohio Air Quality Development Authority, Schlumberger, and Battelle. The main objective of the project is to demonstrate that CO{sub 2} sequestration in deep formations is feasible from engineering and economic perspectives, as well as being an inherently safe practice and one that will be acceptable to the public. In addition, the project is designed to evaluate the geology of deep formations in the Ohio River Valley region in general and in the vicinity of AEP's Mountaineer Power Plant in particular, in order to determine their potential use for conducting a long-term test of CO{sub 2} disposal in deep saline formations. The current technical progress report summarizes activities completed for the October through December 2005 period of the project. As discussed in the following report, the main field activity was reservoir testing in the Copper …

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Student newspaper of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma that includes national, local, and campus news along with advertising.

A flier advertising a free training service for students interested in joining the "Our Next Educators" program. It includes information about the sessions and contact information for registering.

We investigated the valence and spin state of iron in an Al-bearing ferromagnesian silicate perovskite sample, (Mg{sub 0.88}Fe{sub 0.09})(Si{sub 0.94}Al{sub 0.10})O{sub 3}, at 300 K and up to 100 GPa, using diamond-anvil cells and synchrotron Moessbauer spectroscopy techniques. Under elevated pressures, our Moessbauer time spectra are sufficiently fitted by a ''three-doublet'' model, which assumes two ferrous (Fe{sup 2+}) iron types and one ferric (Fe{sup 3+}) iron type with distinct hyperfine parameters. At pressures above 20 GPa, the fraction of the ferric iron, Fe{sup 3+}/{Sigma}Fe, is about 75% and remains unchanged to the highest pressure, indicating a fixed valence state of iron within this pressure range. Between 20 and 100 GPa, the quadruple splittings of all three iron types do not change with pressure, while the isomer shift between the Fe{sup 3+} types and the Fe{sup 2+} type increases continuously with increasing pressure. In conjunction with previous x-ray emission data on the same sample, the unchanging quadruple splittings and increasing isomer shift suggest that Fe{sup 2+} undergoes a broad spin crossover towards the low-spin state at 100 GPa, while Fe{sup 3+} remains in the high-spin state. The essentially constant quadruple splittings of Fe{sup 2+} can also be taken as an indication …

The River Protection Project (RPP), which is managed by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of River Protection (ORP), is highly complex from technical, regulatory, legal, political, and logistical perspectives and is the largest ongoing environmental cleanup project in the world. Over the past three years, ORP has made significant advances in its planning and execution of the cleanup of the Hartford tank wastes. The 149 single-shell tanks (SSTs), 28 double-shell tanks (DSTs), and 60 miscellaneous underground storage tanks (MUSTs) at Hanford contain approximately 200,000 m{sup 3} (53 million gallons) of mixed radioactive wastes, some of which dates back to the first days of the Manhattan Project. The plan for treating and disposing of the waste stored in large underground tanks is to: (1) retrieve the waste, (2) treat the waste to separate it into high-level (sludge) and low-activity (supernatant) fractions, (3) remove key radionuclides (e.g., Cs-137, Sr-90, actinides) from the low-activity fraction to the maximum extent technically and economically practical, (4) immobilize both the high-level and low-activity waste fractions by vitrification, (5) interim store the high-level waste fraction for ultimate disposal off-site at the federal HLW repository, (6) dispose the low-activity fraction on-site in the Integrated Disposal Facility (IDF), …

This report discusses the dispose of waste from the production of nuclear weapons. The Ronald W. Reagan National Defense Authorization Act for FY2005 (P.L. 108-375) authorizing Department of Energy (DOE) to grout some of the tank wastes in place in Idaho and South Carolina.

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