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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a school district may offer an early payment discount to its taxpayers if the school district has contracted with a county for tax collection services and the county had discontinued early payment discounts (RQ-0179-GA)

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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether, consistently with section 573.041 of the Government Code, a home-rule municipality may appoint a department head who is related to the mayor within the third degree by consanguinity or the second degree by affinity if the city charter authorizes the city manager to “appoint, subject to consultation with the Board of Commissioners, all department heads” (RQ-0180-GA)

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The temporal dependence of the 14.7 nm Ni-like Pd ion x-ray laser is measured as a function of the laser drive conditions with a fast sub-picosecond x-ray streak camera. The chirped pulse amplification laser beam that pumps the inversion process is varied from 0.5 - 27 ps (FWHM) to determine the effect on the x-ray laser pulse duration. The average x-ray laser pulse duration varies by a relatively small factor of 2.5 times from 3.6 ps to 8.1 ps with traveling wave (TW) irradiation conditions. Slightly shorter pulse durations approaching 2 ps are observed with the x-ray laser operating below saturation. The x-ray laser is found to be 4 - 5 times transform-limited for 6 - 13 ps laser pumping conditions.

In recent years exciting experimental discoveries have shown that neutrino flavors oscillate, and hence that neutrinos have nonzero masses and mixings. The Standard Model needs to be modified to accommodate neutrino mass terms, which require either the existence of right-handed neutrinos to create Dirac mass terms, and/or a violation of lepton number conservation to create Majorana mass terms. The observation that neutrino masses and mass-splittings are tiny compared to the masses of any of the other fundamental fermions suggests radically new physics, which perhaps originates at the GUT or Planck Scale, or perhaps indicates the existence of new spatial dimensions. Whatever the origin of the observed neutrino masses and mixings is, it will certainly require a profound extension to our picture of the physical world. The first step towards understanding this new physics is to pin down the measurable parameters, and address the first round of basic questions: (1) Are there only three neutrino flavors, or do light sterile neutrinos exist? Are there any other deviations to three-flavor mixing? (2) There is one angle {theta}{sub 13} in the mixing matrix which is unmeasured. Is it non-zero? (3) We don't know the mass-ordering of the neutrino mass eigenstates. There are two …

The Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC) engaged in numerous projects outlined under the scope of work discussed in the United States Department of Energy (DOE) grant number DE-FG26-01BC15336 awarded to the IOGCC. Numerous projects were completed that were extremely valuable to state oil and gas agencies as a result of work performed utilizing resources provided by the grant. There are numerous areas in which state agencies still need assistance. This additional assistance will need to be addressed under another grant because funding resources have been exhausted under The scope of work objectives for the eight projects covered under this grant is as follows: (1) Improve uniformity within state oil and gas data management efforts. (2) Conduct environmental compliance workshops and related educational projects on natural gas and oil exploration and production. (3) Improve regulatory efficiency through partnering opportunities provided by the Appalachian Illinois Basin Directors. (4) Promote the development and implementation of risk-based environmental regulation at the state level through an expertise-sharing program that brings stakeholders together to develop guidelines and models to meet regulatory challenges. (5) Support the IOGCC's regulatory streamlining efforts, including the identification and elimination of unnecessary duplications of effort between state and federal programs …

The overall purpose of this research was to evaluate the independent and interactive effects of elevated levels of CO{sub 2} and O{sub 3} on tree leaf litter quality and decomposition. This research was conducted at the Aspen FACE (Free Air CO{sub 2} Enrichment) facility near Rhinelander, Wisconsin. This research comprised one facet of a larger project assessing how CO{sub 2} and O{sub 3} pollutants will alter carbon sequestration and nutrient cycling in north temperate forest ecosystems.

Time-resolved measurements of deposition in current tokamaks are crucial to gain a predictive understanding of deposition with a view to mitigating tritium retention and deposition on diagnostic mirrors expected in next-step devices. Two quartz crystal microbalances have been installed on NSTX at a location 0.77m outside the last closed flux surface. This configuration mimics a typical diagnostic window or mirror. The deposits were analyzed ex-situ and found to be dominantly carbon, oxygen, and deuterium. A rear facing quartz crystal recorded deposition of lower sticking probability molecules at 10% of the rate of the front facing one. Time resolved measurements over a 4-week period with 497 discharges, recorded 29.2 {micro}g/cm{sup 2} of deposition, however surprisingly, 15.9 {micro}g/cm{sup 2} of material loss occurred at 7 discharges. The net deposited mass of 13.3 {micro}g/cm{sup 2} matched the mass of 13.5 {micro}g/cm{sup 2} measured independently by ion beam analysis. Monte Carlo modeling suggests that transient processes are likely to dominate the deposition.

With the nation's coal-burning utilities facing the possibility of tighter controls on mercury pollutants, the U.S. Department of Energy is funding projects that could offer power plant operators better ways to reduce these emissions at much lower costs. Mercury is known to have toxic effects on the nervous systems of humans and wildlife. Although it exists only in trace amounts in coal, mercury is released when coal burns and can accumulate on land and in water. In water, bacteria transform the metal into methylmercury, the most hazardous form of the metal. Methylmercury can collect in fish and marine mammals in concentrations hundreds of thousands times higher than the levels in surrounding waters. One of the goals of DOE is to develop technologies by 2005 that will be capable of cutting mercury emissions 50 to 70 percent at well under one-half of projected DOE/EPA early cost estimates. ADA Environmental Solutions (ADA-ES) is managing a project to test mercury control technologies at full scale at four different power plants from 2000-2003. The ADA-ES project is focused on those power plants that are not equipped with wet flue gas desulfurization systems. ADA-ES has developed a portable system that was tested at four different …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The sorrow, loss, anger, and resolve so evident immediately following the September 11, 2001, attacks have been combined in an effort to help assure that our country will never again be caught unprepared. As the 9/11 Commission notes, we are safer today but we are not safe, and much work remains. Although in today's world we can never be 100 percent secure, and we can never do everything everywhere, we concur with the Commission's conclusion that the American people should expect their government to do its very best. GAO's mission is to help the Congress improve the performance and ensure the accountability of the federal government for the benefit of the American people. GAO has been actively involved in improving government's performance in the critically important homeland security area both before and after the September 11 attacks. In its request, the House Committee on Government Reform have asked GAO to address two issues: the lack of effective information sharing and analysis and the need for executive branch reorganization in response to the 9/11 Commission recommendations. Further, the Committee has asked GAO to address how to remedy problems in …

An 84.5 eV Ni-like Pd ion 4d - 4p x-ray laser source generated by the LLNL Compact Multipulse Terawatt (COMET) tabletop system has been used to probe the electronic structure of various metals and semiconductors. In addition to the {approx}4 - 5 ps time resolution, the probe provides the necessary high photon flux (>10{sup 12}/pulse), narrow line width ({Delta}E/E{approx}2 x 10{sup -5}) and coherence for studying valence band and shallow core electronic structure levels in a single shot. We show some preliminary results of room temperature and heated thin foil samples consisting of 50 nm Cu coated on a 20 nm C substrate. A 527 nm wavelength 400 fs laser pulse containing 0.1 - 2.5 mJ laser energy is focused in a large 500 x 700 {micro}m{sup 2} (FWHM) spot to create heated conditions of 0.07 - 1.8 x 1012 W cm{sup -2} intensity.

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Confidence in the precisions of AMS and decay measurements must be comparable for the application of the {sup 14}C calibration to age determinations using both technologies. We confirmed the random nature of the temporal distribution of {sup 14}C ions in an AMS spectrometer for a number of sample counting rates and properties of the sputtering process. The temporal distribution of ion counts was also measured to confirm the applicability of traditional counting statistics.

Ion beam propagation in a background plasma is an important scientific issue for many practical applications. The process of ion beam charge and current neutralization is complex because plasma electrons move in strong electric and magnetic fields of the beam. Computer simulation images of plasma interaction with an intense ion beam pulse are presented.

This is one report in the series of reports that discuss the campaign finance practices and related issues. Concerns over financing federal elections have become a seemingly perennial aspect of our political system, centered on the enduring issues of high campaign costs and reliance on interest groups for needed campaign funds. The report talks about the today’s paramount issues such as perceived loopholes in current law and the longstanding issues: overall costs, funding sources, and competition.

The 2002 farm bill (P.L. 107-171) as modified by the FY2004 USDA appropriation (P.L. 108-199) requires country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for fresh produce, red meats, and peanuts starting September 30, 2006, and for seafood starting September 30, 2004. The House Agriculture Committee approved on July 21, 2004, a bill (H.R. 4576) to make COOL voluntary. Some lawmakers still support a mandatory program, especially after recent discoveries of “mad cow” disease in a Canadian and a U.S. cow (the latter from Canada). Others counter that COOL is a marketing, not an animal or human health, issue and should be voluntary.

This report discusses the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) for inspecting most meat, poultry, and processed egg products for safety, wholesomeness, and proper labeling.

Federally supported child nutrition programs and related activities — including school meal programs and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (the WIC program) — reach over 37 million children and almost 2 million lower-income pregnant/postpartum women. In FY2004, anticipated spending on these programs is $16.6 billion, and the FY2004 appropriations law (P.L. 108-199) supports this spending level (although with new appropriations of a lesser amount, some $16 billion). The Administration’s FY2005 revised budget request envisions spending a total of $17.15 billion, supported by new appropriations of $16.47 billion. The House FY2005 appropriations bill (H.R. 4766) would support spending of $16.97 billion with new appropriations of $16.29 billion.

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