A statement of record issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The federal government will spend approximately $11 billion to combat terrorism In fiscal year 2001. In the event of a domestic terrorist incident, state and local governments have the primary responsibility for managing the consequences of a terrorist attack. However, the federal government can assist state and local authorities if they lack the capability to respond adequately. On the basis of past and ongoing GAO work, two key issues emerge that the new President and Congress will face concerning programs to combat terrorism. First, the overall leadership and management of such programs are fragmented within the federal government. No single entity acts as the federal government's top official accountable to both the President and Congress. Fragmentation exists in both coordination of domestic preparedness programs and in efforts to develop a national strategy. The Department of Justice worked with other agencies to develop the Attorney General's Five-Year Interagency Counterterrorism and Technology Crime Plan. Although this plan is the current document that most resembles a national strategy, GAO believes that it still lacks some critical elements including measurable desired outcomes, linkage to resources, and a discussion of …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The confluence of the aging baby boom generation, longer life expectancies, and evolving options for providing and financing long-term care services will require substantial public and private investment in long-term care and the development of sufficient capacity to serve this growing population. Spending for long-term care was about $134 billion in 1999. Medicaid and Medicare paid for nearly 58 percent of these services, contributing about $59 billion and $18 billion, respectively. Private long-term care insurance was viewed as a possible way to reduce catastrophic financial risk for the elderly needing long-term care and to relieve some of the financing burden now shouldered by public long-term care programs. Yet private insurance represents only about 10 percent of long-term care spending. Questions remain about the affordability of policies and the value of the coverage relative to the premiums charged. Although many states have adopted standards for long-term care policies, it is uncertain whether these standards have bolstered consumer confidence in the reliability of long-term care insurance. If long-term care insurance is to have a more significant role in addressing the baby boom generation's upcoming chronic health care needs, consumers must …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Initiative is a complex, long-term effort to restore the South Florida ecosystem--including the Everglades--that involves federal, state, local, and tribal entities, as well as public and private interests. In response to growing signs of the ecosystem's deterioration, federal agencies established the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force in 1993 to coordinate ongoing federal activities. The Task Force is charged with coordinating and facilitating the overall restoration effort. The Task Force's strategic plan is a good start. However, because the plan does not contain all the elements that GAO recommended in a previous report, it does not fulfill the requirement placed on the Secretary of the Interior, as the Task Force Chair, by the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations. GAO recognizes that the plan is a "work in progress" and that the Task Force will continue to refine and improve its strategic plan as it learns more about the ecosystem and how the ecosystem is responding to the Task Force's efforts. Revising the plan when it is updated in 2002 to include all the elements would fulfill the Committees' requirement and …

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether section 62.003 of the Property Code, which converts a personal property lien on a manufactured home to a purchase money lien on real property, creates a valid purchase money lien against homestead property under article XVI, section 50 of the Texas Constitution (RQ-0293-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Definition of "presiding magistrate" for probable cause hearing pursuant to section 574.025, Texas Health and Safety Code (RQ-0296-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether under section 2256.016 of the Government Code ,The Texas Local Government Investment Pool may calculate the "maximum average dollar-weighted maturity" of the pool using the reset date of floating date securities as opposed to their stated maturity rate(RQ-0305-JC).

This report discusses law and proposed changes related to Country-of-Origin labeling for Foods.

B. Kirby and E. Hirst, Customer-Specific Metrics for the Regulation and Load-Following 1 Ancillary Services, ORNL/CON-474, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn., January 2000. In an earlier project, we analyzed data on total system load and the loads of eight large industrial customers in terms of system- and customer-specific requirements for the regulation and load-following ancillary services. We conducted these analyses using 12 days of data from February 1 1999 plus 12 days of data from August and September 1999. These analyses were conducted using data provided by the control area at the 30-s level, which we then aggregated to the 2-min level for subsequent analysis. The current project analyzes the feasibility of using 5-min revenue-meter (RM) data to allocate load-following and regulation requirements among retail customers. This project does not use the 5-min data to determine the actual ancillary services requirements for individual loads because these requirements depend strongly on the time-averaging period chosen for the load data. In particular, the amount of regulation required declines as the time-averaging period increases. Our earlier project showed that 2 min was a reasonable time-averaging period for this control area. The reason for examining 5-min data is that supervisory control and …

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a new technique to monitor the growth of cracks in structural members, and to predict when failure due to this damage is imminent. This technique requires the measurement of global loadings and local deflections/strains at critical locations to indicate the increasing growth of hidden cracks with sufficient warning time prior to failure to take preventative action to correct the problem or retire the structure before failure. The techniques, as described in the referenced report have been proven on a laboratory scale to successfully detect the onset of failure due to fatigue cracking (including cracking of corroded samples), stress corrosion cracking, and low temperature creep crack growth, with a reasonable degree of warning before failure.

The economic prosperity and the well-being of our nation's communities depend on the reliable functioning of critical infrastructures: transportation, banking and finance, information and communications, water supply systems, emergency services, and especially energy (electric power, oil, and natural gas). In the new economy, these infrastructures are increasingly reliant on information technologies and are strongly affected by restructuring and other market forces. They are much more heavily interconnected than ever before, and disruptions in one system can have significant adverse consequences, both locally and regionally. Communities often are not well prepared to deal with widespread infrastructure failures, which could become commonplace in the new millennium. This report, prepared on behalf of the partnership, is a first-of-a-kind effort to compile this type of information on the electric power system in a form that municipal governments can use and adapt to local conditions. ComEd and Harza Engineering Company have provided valuable support for this effort. Argonne National Laboratory's Infrastructure Assurance Center compiled and integrated the planning information.

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

None

This report debates agricultural subsidies given out by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Moreover, the report provides statistical information on this specifically from the European Union (EU) and the United States.

Constructing numerical schemes which are both adaptive and suitable for parallel architectures is very challenging. The challenge lies in the need to maintain a balanced load across the processing elements using a method that is both efficient and scalable. Here we propose a method which is adaptive, load balanced, absolutely efficient and scalable offering significant speedup over lower order adaptive schemes. The ability of wavelets to accurately and efficiently represent functions with localized features has spawned intensive research into applying wavelets for the solution of partial differential equations with the promise of significantly reducing the necessary computational effort and memory requirements. Traditionally, this effort has been centered around using wavelets as an orthogonal and complete basis, spanning a space in which to seek approximate solutions satisfying the equation in a Galerkin sense. Besides from the well known difficulties associated with such an approach for non-linear problems, one is also faced with the problem of dealing with non-trivial boundary conditions in an accurate and stable manner. Such restrictions on the applicability of wavelet based methods for the solution of problems of more general interest have, in recent years, induced significant interest into grid-based collocation wavelet methods, with various different approaches being …

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

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

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

The Senate authorizes funds for two years for each of its committees (except appropriations and ethics) through an omnibus resolution, recommended by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, and adopted by the full Senate at the beginning of each Congress.

The Everglades, a unique network of subtropical wetlands, is now half its original size. Many factors have contributed to its decline, including flood control projects and agricultural and urban development. As part of a larger restoration program for South Florida, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other federal, state, tribal, and local agencies collaborated to develop the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP or the Plan). CERP focuses on increasing storage of wet season waters to provide more water during the dry season for the natural system, and urban and agricultural users

The 107th Congress is expected to consider new "fast track" (or, Presidential trade promotion) authority, which could enable the Administration to submit trade agreements negotiated with foreign countries to Congress for consideration under expedited procedures. Many agricultural and food industry interests are among the export-oriented enterprises that support fast track authority, arguing that foreign trading partners will not seriously negotiate with an Administration that lacks it. However, some agricultural groups argue that fast track ultimately will lead to new agreements that deliver more benefits to foreign than to U.S. producers, at least in some commodity sectors.

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

This Corrective Action Investigation Plan contains the U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Operations Office's approach to collect the data necessary to evaluate corrective action alternatives appropriate for the closure of Corrective Action Unit (CAU) 34 under the Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order. Corrective Action Unit 34 consists of four Corrective Action Sites (CASs). The CAU is located within the Area 3 Compound at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) in the vicinity of the Mud Plant Facility in Yucca Valley. Historically, CAS 03-09-07, Mud Pit, was used for disposal of excess mud from washing drilling equipment from 1968 to 1974, at which time it began to be used for excess mud disposal (currently inactive); CAS 03-44-01, Chromium Contamination Spill, was used to store additives used in the formulation of drilling mud from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s; CAS 03-47-02, Area 3 Mud Plant Pond, was used as a freshwater storage reservoir for the mud plant as well as supplied water for a number of activities including the mixing of mud, the rinsing and cleaning of tanks, and various washdowns from the 1960s through 1990s; and CAS 03-09-06, Mud Disposal Crater, was created in 1962 by …

Boronization of the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) has enabled access to higher density, higher confinement plasmas. A glow discharge with 4 mTorr helium and 10% deuterated trimethyl boron deposited 1.7 g of boron on the plasma facing surfaces. Ion beam analysis of witness coupons showed a B+C areal density of 10 to the 18 (B+C) cm to the -2 corresponding to a film thickness of 100 nm. Subsequent ohmic discharges showed oxygen emission lines reduced by x15, carbon emission reduced by two and copper reduced to undetectable levels. After boronization, the plasma current flattop time increased by 70% enabling access to higher density, higher confinement plasmas.

Because of the recent experiences of several states undergoing restructuring (e.g., higher prices, greater volatility, lower reliability), concerns have been raised in states currently considering restructuring as to whether their systems are equally vulnerable. Factors such as local generation costs, transmission constraints, market concentration, and market design can all play a role in the success or failure of the market. These factors along with the mix of generation capacity supplying the state will influence the relative prices paid by consumers. The purpose of this project is to provide a model and process to evaluate the potential price and economic impacts of restructuring the Oklahoma electric industry. This Phase I report concentrates on providing an analysis of the Oklahoma system in the near-term, using only present generation resources and customer demands. In Phase II, a longer-term analysis will be conducted, incorporating the potential of new generation resources and customer responses. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed the Oak Ridge Competitive Electricity Dispatch (ORCED) model to evaluate marginal-cost-based and regulated prices for the state. The model dispatches the state's power plants to meet the demands from all customers based on the marginal cost of production. Consequent market-clearing prices for each hour …