A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Since 1992, Congress has authorized more than $3 billion for the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program to help Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, and Georgia secure and eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Concerned about proper oversight of equipment and services provided by the program, Congress required the Department of Defense (DOD) to report annually on whether the assistance was being used as intended. This report reviews (1) whether DOD's oversight procedures produce the necessary information to determine if the threat reduction assistance, including equipment provided and services furnished, is being used as intended and (2) whether DOD can improve its oversight. GAO found that DOD has procedures in place that reasonably ensure that at least 95 percent of the assistance is being used as intended and is adequately accounted for. Because of access restrictions imposed by the Russian government, a limited amount of equipment--less than five percent of the total value of assistance provided--is in locations where access by U.S. personnel is not permitted. DOD can enhance the quality of its program oversight by better targeting and expanding the scope of its formal audit and …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Medicare is a popular program that millions of Americans depend on for covering their essential health needs. However, the management of the program has fallen short of expectations because it has not always appropriately balanced or satisfied the needs of beneficiaries, providers, and taxpayers. For example, stakeholders expect that Medicare will price services prudently; that providers will be treated fairly and paid accurately; and that beneficiaries will clearly understand their program options and will receive services that meet quality standards. In addition, there are expectations that the agency will be prepared to implement restructuring or added benefits in the context of Medicare reform. Today's Medicare, although successful in some areas, may not be able to meet these expectations effectively without further congressional attention to its multiple missions, capacity, and flexibility. The program will also need to do its part by implementing a performance-based approach that articulates priorities, documents resource needs, and holds managers accountable for accomplishing program goals."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the Mark-to-Market Program, which provides for low-income rental housing while reducing the federal government's costs for rental subsidies. The program, which is administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Office of Multifamily Housing Restructuring (OMHAR), provides the framework to restructure insured Section 8 properties in HUD's multifamily housing portfolio by lowering their rents to market levels when their current Section 8 contracts expire and reducing their mortgage debt if such action is necessary for the properties to continue to have a positive cash flow. Without restructuring, rents for many of the 8,500 properties in HUD's portfolio would substantially exceed market levels, resulting in higher federal subsidies under the Section 8 program. Legislative authorization for the Mark-to-Market program and OMHAR is scheduled to end on September 30, 2001. If authorization is not extended, HUD will still be required to renew Section 8 contract rents at market levels, but the tools established by the Multifamily Assisted Housing Reform and Affordability Act for restructuring mortgages will no longer be available. This testimony focuses on (1) the status of the Mark-to-Market program, (2) factors that have …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993. During the last decade, Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, and executive agencies have worked to implement a statutory framework to improve the performance and accountability of the executive branch and to enhance executive branch and congressional decisionmaking. The core of this framework includes financial management legislation, especially GPRA. As a result of this framework, there has been substantial progress in the last few years in establishing the basic infrastructure needed to create high-performing federal organizations. The issuance of agencies' fiscal year 2000 performance reports, in addition to updated strategic plans, annual performance plans, and the governmentwide performance plans, completes two full cycles of annual performance planning and reporting under GPRA. However, much work remains before this framework is effectively implemented across the government, including transforming agencies' organizational cultures to improve decisionmaking and strengthen performance and accountability."

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 a commissioners court is required to pay the same salary to each of the county’s constables (RQ-0337-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 the licensing and registration requirements of the Texas Engineering Practice Act apply to the activities of a federal contractor on a federal enclave and related questions (RQ-0344-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 776.019 of the Health and Safety Code, a commissioners court that orders an election to create an emergency services district that will overlap with a rural fire prevention district is limited to ordering an election tax to authorize the levy of a two percent ad valorem tax (RQ-0352-JC)

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The nature of electronic excitations in crystalline solid nitromethane under conditions of shock loading and static compression are examined. Density functional theory calculations are used to determine the crystal bandgap under hydrostatic stress, uniaxial strain, and shear strain. Bandgap lowering under uniaxial strain due to molecular defects and vacancies is considered. In all cases, the bandgap is not lowered enough to produce a significant population of excited states in the crystal. Preliminary simulations on the formation of detonation product molecules from HMX are discussed.

The report presents calculation results of isotopic composition of irradiated fuel performed for the Quad Cities-1 reactor bundle with UO{sub 2} and MOX fuel. The MCU-REA code was used for calculations. The code is developed in Kurchatov Institute, Russia. The MCU-REA results are compared with the experimental data and HELIOS code results.

This report describes the ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement) operational variational objective analysis system. It is currently used to process the data collected from the ARM Intensive Operational Periods (IOPs) for driving and evaluating physical parameterizations in climate models. The analysis system was originally developed by Zhang and Lin (1997) at State University of New York at Stony Brook and was migrated to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as the ARM operational objective analysis system in May 1999. In contrast with previous objective analysis (e.g., Barnes, 1964; O'Brien, 1970; Lin and Johnson, 1996), the ARM objective analysis used the constrained variational analysis method developed by Zhang and Lin (1997), in which the atmospheric state variables are forced to satisfy the conservation of mass, heat, moisture, and momentum through a variational technique. The purpose of this technical report is to provide an overview of the constrained variational analysis method, the architecture of the objective analysis system, along with in-depth information on running the variational analysis codes.

The DOE is currently conducting cleanup activities at its nuclear weapons development sites, many of which have accumulated plutonium (Pu) in soils for 50 years. To properly control Pu migration in soils within Federal sites and onto public lands, better evaluate the public risk, and design effective remediation strategies, a fundamental understanding of Pu speciation and environmental transport is needed. This type of information is increasingly important as the remediation and decommissioning plans for actinide-contaminated sites includes in situ stabilization or clean-up to a particular level of residual contamination. Long-term stewardship of the sites and return of these sites to public use will require more accurate predictions of contamination stability and mobility than is possible using current information.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "To increase the accessibility of primary and preventive health services for low-income people living in medically underserved areas, Congress made federally qualified health centers and rural health clinics eligible for Medicaid payments. Since 1989, federal law has required Medicaid to reimburse both the centers and the clinics on the basis of reasonable costs they incurred in providing services to beneficiaries. Cost-based reimbursement can ensure that service providers are reimbursed for necessary costs; it is also regarded as inflationary because providers can increase their payments by raising their costs. In part because of their mandate to preserve and expand necessary primary health care services, the centers and the clinics have traditionally been reimbursed on the basis of their costs in an effort to ensure adequate payment. However, this approach does little to encourage efficiency. The new payment system mandated by the Benefits Improvement and Protection Act attempts to ensure adequacy by basing payments on historical rates while promoting efficiency by limiting increases. However, the combination of reimbursement limits imposed historically by most states and the inflation adjustments in the new prospective payment system may contain future Medicaid …

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

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) was awarded ten Environmental Management Science Program (EMSP) research grants in fiscal year 1996, six in fiscal year 1997, nine in fiscal year 1998, seven in fiscal year 1999, and five in fiscal year 2000. All of the fiscal year 1996 award projects have published final reports. The 1997 and 1998 award projects have been completed or are nearing completion. Final reports for these awards will be published, so their annual updates will not be included in this document. This section summarizes how each of the 1999 and 2000 grants address significant U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) cleanup issues, including those at the Hanford Site. The technical progress made to date in each of these research projects is addressed in more detail in the individual progress reports contained in this document. The 1999 and 2000 EMSP awards at PNNL are focused primarily in two areas: Tank Waste Remediation, and Soil and Groundwater Cleanup.

As part of a laser fusion diagnostic development program, we have performed pulsed neutron and pulsed laser tests of a CVD diamond detector manufactured from DIAFILM, a commercial grade of CVD diamond. The laser tests were performed at the short pulse UV laser at Bechtel Nevada in Livermore, CA. The pulsed neutrons were provided by DT capsule implosions at the OMEGA laser fusion facility in Rochester, NY. From these tests, we have determined the impulse response to be 250 ps fwhm for an applied E-field of 500 V/mm. Additionally, we have determined the sensitivity to be 2.8 mA/W at 500 V/mm and 4.5 mA/W at 1000 V/mm (2 to 6x times higher than reported values for natural Type IIa diamond). These detector characteristics allow us to conceive of a neutron time-of-flight current mode spectrometer based on CVD diamond. Such an instrument would sit inside the laser fusion target chamber close to TCC, and would record neutron spectra fast enough such that backscattered neutrons and y rays from the target chamber wall would not be a concern. However, the data we have taken show that the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) noise could be a limiting factor in performance. Determining the degree to …

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Concerns about the long-term viability of SFS as the metadata store for HPSS have been increasing. A concern that Transarc may discontinue support for SFS motivates us to consider alternative means to store HPSS metadata. The obvious alternative is a commercial database. Commercial databases have the necessary characteristics for storage of HPSS metadata records. They are robust and scalable and can easily accommodate the volume of data that must be stored. They provide programming interfaces, transactional semantics and a full set of maintenance and performance enhancement tools. A team was organized within the HPSS project to study and recommend an approach for the replacement of SFS. Members of the team are David Fisher, Jim Minton, Donna Mecozzi, Danny Cook, Bart Parliman and Lynn Jones. We examined several possible solutions to the problem of replacing SFS, and recommended on May 22, 2000, in a report to the HPSS Technical and Executive Committees, to change HPSS into a database application over either Oracle or DB2. We recommended either Oracle or DB2 on the basis of market share and technical suitability. Oracle and DB2 are dominant offerings in the market, and it is in the best interest of HPSS to use a major …

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

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Charles Hubenthal. Hubenthal joined the Navy in November of 1942. He provides details of his flight training and the various planes he flew. He graduated in 1944. They traveled to Hawaii and Ulithi, where he was assigned to fly fighters off the USS Essex (CV-9). Hubenthal participated in both the Okinawa and Japan campaigns. He shares vivid details of his experiences through these battles. He was discharged in September of 1945.

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.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Charles Hubenthal. Hubenthal joined the Navy in November of 1942. He provides details of his flight training and the various planes he flew. He graduated in 1944. They traveled to Hawaii and Ulithi, where he was assigned to fly fighters off the USS Essex (CV-9). Hubenthal participated in both the Okinawa and Japan campaigns. He shares vivid details of his experiences through these battles. He was discharged in September of 1945.

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