Concerns over financing federal elections have become a seemingly perennial aspect of our political system. This report discusses the debate regarding campaign finance regulation.

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Since 1994, 41 states and Puerto Rico have sued the tobacco industry to recover the medical costs of treating smokers. On June 20, 1997, a group of state attorneys general and industry lawyers announced that they had reached a settlement that would protect the tobacco companies from civil liability in return for annual industry payments of $365.5 billion over 25 years to reimburse states for their tobacco-related medical costs, and pay for tobacco control programs to reduce tobacco use among teenagers.

This report provides a brief overview of U.S. and China relations beginning October 1997.

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This report is intended to help the reader follow changes over time in regulations domestic and international - governing methyl bromide for its potential ozone-depleting effects. Methyl bromide, like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), has been implicated by scientists in contributing to stratospheric ozone depletion, which may pose health threats to living organisms due to increased exposure to harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Methyl bromide is currently used widely as a pesticide in international agricultural commerce.

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA, or 99Superftind"), when it was enacted in 1980, gave the federal government the lead role in cleaning up the nation's worst hazardous waste sites. It did not envision that states would assume responsibility to run the program, unlike most other environmental laws. Since 1980, states have come to play an increasingly important role in waste site cleanup and now, through cooperative arrangements, have assumed lead responsibility for about 10% of federal Superfund sites (those on the National Priorities List, or NPL).

Japan-U.S. relations are more uncertain and subject to greater strain today than at any time since World War II. Longstanding military allies and increasingly interdependent economic partners, Japan and the United States have worked closely together to build a strong, multifaceted relationship based on democratic values and interests in world stability and development. But Japan today is our foremost economic and technological competitor. The Cold War thaw, discord in U.S.-Japanese relations over the Iraq-Kuwait crisis of 1990-1991, a protracted U.S. recession, and exigencies of U.S. election-year politics raised new questions about the appropriate U.S. policy toward this Asian ally.