A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Agencies are increasingly asked to demonstrate results, but many programs lack credible performance information and the capacity to rigorously evaluate program results. To assist agency efforts to provide credible information, GAO examined the experiences of five agencies that demonstrated evaluation capacity in their performance reports: the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the Coast Guard, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF)."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Recent operations in Afghanistan demonstrated the dangers of providing air support close to troops on the ground. Such close air support requires timely, well-practiced procedures and communication between ground and air elements. While most close air support operations in Afghanistan were successful, "friendly fire" incidents have resulted from mistakes made while conducting the mission. At the request of the Ranking Minority Members of the Subcommittees on Total Force and Readiness, House Committee on Armed Services, GAO reviewed Department of Defense (DOD) efforts to provide adequate close air support training, as well as efforts to enhance the equipment used to support this mission."

Monthly report written by the Texas Daily Newspaper Association's (TDNA's) office manager, Darla Thompson, to Phil Berkebile providing a summary of revenues and account balances, programs, meetings, and other activities in the office during the previous month.

This report provides a brief overview of the organization and operations of House and Senate committees.

This report examines federal law regarding obscenity and indecency. The First Amendment provides: “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” In general, the First Amendment protects pornography, with this term being used to mean any erotic material. The Supreme Court, however, has held that the First Amendment does not protect two types of pornography: obscenity and child pornography. Consequently, they may be banned on the basis of their content, and federal law prohibits the mailing of obscenity, as well as its transport or receipt in interstate or foreign commerce.

The authors compare CALE simulations with recent experimental results of a laser-induced shock traversing a spherical under-dense region (''void''). In this report the experimental results are described, as well as several numerical attempts at explaining the observed radiographs. The conclusion is that the numerical simulations at this time cannot satisfactorily explain the experiment. The simulations also indicate that the introduction of air gaps between the under-dense sphere and the surrounding foam can greatly change the behavior of the shocked sphere. Thus fabrication details may play an important role in the detailed evolution of this experiment. Regardless of the simulations, analysis of the observed time sequence indicates that reproducibility of this experiment may be a factor. To settle this issue, further experiments of this kind will be required.

This report documents results from tests conducted to evaluate the impacts of elevated levels of oxalate on operations within the SRS High-Level Waste System. These operations include sludge washing, evaporation, mixing of supernates and wash waters and pretreatment of supernates to remove strontium and actinides by monosodium titanate.

Under the Low Curie Salt Program, interstitial liquid is being drained from saltcake in Tank 41 to remove most of the Cs-137 activity. The program is contingent upon reducing residual liquid content, and thru residual Cs-137 content, to a sufficiently low level.

The Soils and Groundwater Closure Projects Reactor Team requested support from the Environmental Sciences and Technology Department of the Savannah River Technology Center to conduct a source term determination for the P Area Reactor Groundwater Operable Unit. The identified documents reviewed and pertinent findings are recorded in this report.

This review was compiled to summarize the technologies currently being investigated to remove arsenic from drinking waters, with a special focus on developing and third-world countries where the problem is exacerbated by flooding and depressed economic conditions. The reason for compiling this report is to provide background material and a description of competing technologies currently described in the literature for arsenic removal. Based on the sophistication and applicability of current technologies, Argonne National Laboratory may develop an improved method based on magnetic particle technology. Magnetic particle sorbents may afford improved reaction rates, facilitate particle-water separation, and offer reusability. Developing countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh cannot afford expensive, large-scale treatments to remove arsenic from drinking waters to acceptable limits (from 50 ppb to 10 ppb, depending on the country). Low-cost, effective technologies that can be readily available at the household or community level are needed to solve the present crisis. Appropriate technologies should meet certain criteria, including the following: The treatment must be applicable over a wide range of arsenic concentrations; It should be easy to use without running water or electricity; and The materials for the treatment should be cheap and readily available, and/or suitable for reuse. Our review of …

Based on experimental studies with simulated and actual wastes, we recommend adopting the use of 0.1-micron pore-size, sintered stainless-steel filter elements within the design of the Salt Waste Processing Facility. Furthermore, adopting the smaller pore size elements for the Actinide Removal Process would result in a significant risk to the start-up schedule due to delays for buying, installing, and testing new equipment. The existing 0.5-micron pore-size filters will provide nearly equivalent service with no additional capital investment. Unless the planned filter test at Building 512-S fails to meet specifications, the project should proceed with the existing equipment, including spares. When the existing equipment reaches the end of the service life, management can consider replacement with the smaller pore-size elements. The laboratory studies indicate that use of the smaller pore size equipment will result in greater protection against particulate fines passing to downstream facilities while giving equivalent or superior processing rates than provided by the 0.5-micron elements.

Various options for sequential, shared memory and distributed memory implementations for the CLJP algorithm, a parallel coarsening scheme within algebraic multigrid, are discussed. The use of different data structures as well as different approaches of implementing the actual algorithm are investigated, and experimental results illustrating the results are presented.

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This report provides information about the Constitutionality and Summaries of Selected Statutes on Federal Tort Reform Legislation. This report also considers the functionality of federal reform legislation such as product liability.

This report provides information about Constitutional Principles and Federal Statutes on Child Pornography.

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This report considers the constitutionality of federal tort reform legislation, such as the products liability and medical malpractice reform proposals that have been introduced for the last several Congresses.

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The Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, P.L. 104-208, 110 Stat. 3009- 26, added a definition of “child pornography” that include visual depictions of what appears to be a minor engaging in explicit sexual conduct, even if no actual minor was used in producing the depiction. On April 16, 2002, in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court held this provision unconstitutional to the extent that it prohibited pictures that were not produced with actual minors. (This case is discussed under “Section 2256,” below.) In response to Ashcroft, bills were introduced in the House and Senate that would continue to ban some child pornography that was produced without an actual minor; on June 25, 2002, the House passed one such bill: H.R. 4623, 107th Congress.

The United States and its allies are helping Afghanistan emerging from more than 22 years of warfare, although substantial risk to Afghan stability remains. Before the U.S. military campaign against the orthodox Islamist Taliban movement began on October 7, 2001, Afghanistan had been mired in conflict since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The defeat of the Taliban has enabled the United States and its coalition partners to send forces throughout Afghanistan to search for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and leaders that remain at large, including Osama bin Laden. As the war against remaining Al Qaeda and Taliban elements winds down, the United States is shifting its military focus toward stabilizing the interim government, including training a new Afghan national army, and supporting the international security force (ISAF) that is helping the new government provide security.

Sub-Saharan Africa has been far more severely affected by AIDS than any other part of the world. The United Nations reports that 29.4 million adults and children are infected with the HIV virus in the region, which has about 10% of the world's population but more than 70% of the worldwide total of infected people. This report discusses this issue in detail, including the cause of the African AIDS epidemic, the social and economic consequences, response and treatment, and U.S. policy.

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