A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "D.C. has a larger percentage of students in charter schools than any state. To help oversee D.C. charter schools, Congress established two authorizers--the Board of Education (BOE), which has an Office of Charter Schools responsible for oversight, and the independent Public Charter School Board (PCSB). Congress required the GAO to conduct a study of the authorizers. This report--which completes GAO's May 2005 study--examines the (1) authorizers' resources, (2) oversight practices, and (3) actions taken once charter schools close. GAO examined BOE and PCSB monitoring reports, revenue and expenditure documents, and closure procedures."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) must recruit and retain hundreds of thousands of servicemembers each year to carry out its missions, including providing support in connection with events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In addition to meeting legislatively mandated aggregate personnel levels, each military component must also meet its authorized personnel requirements for each occupational specialty. DOD reports that over half of today's youth cannot meet the military's entry standards for education, aptitude, health, moral character, or other requirements, making recruiting a significant challenge. GAO, under the Comptroller General's authority (1) assessed the extent to which DOD's active, reserve, and National Guard components met their enlisted aggregate recruiting and retention goals; (2) assessed the extent to which the components met their authorized personnel levels for enlisted occupational specialties; and (3) analyzed the steps DOD has taken to address recruiting and retention challenges."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Determining whether to obtain required services using government employees or through contracts with the private sector is an important economic and strategic decision for agency managers. In this regard, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-76 prescribes policies and procedures for use by agencies as they select service providers through competitions among public and private-sector sources. The Circular is intended to ensure that the competitive sourcing process is conducted as fairly as possible, and that the estimated cost of government performance reflects all of the costs of performing the work in house. The purpose of this letter is to convey an issue we identified during the course of an ongoing review of how the costs of health benefits for federal and private-sector employees are reflected in public-private competitions conducted by the Department of Defense."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Remittances are personal funds immigrants send to their home countries. The United States is the largest remittance-sending country in the world, with more than $36 billion remitted in 2003, according to the International Monetary Fund. The majority of these remittances are sent to Latin America and the Caribbean and they are a very important source of financial flows to many countries. In 2004, the United States, with other countries, pledged to reduce fees for remittances. Remittance senders in the United States can send funds through entities in the formal financial sector such as money transfer operators, banks, and credit unions or other informal means such as couriers. This report provides information on (1) the methods of transmission available to remittance senders in the formal financial sector and the advantages and disadvantages of each, (2) the costs to send remittances through the formal financial sector, and (3) disclosures remittance providers typically provide to senders."

A statement of record issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. commercial aviation industry has an extraordinary safety record. However, when passenger airlines have accidents or serious incidents, regardless of their rarity, the consequences can be tragic. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) works to maintain a high level of safety through an effective safety oversight system. Keys to this system are to: (1) establish programs that focus resources on areas of highest safety risk and on mitigating risks; (2) provide training and communication to ensure that inspectors can consistently carry out the agency's oversight programs; and (3) have processes and data to continuously monitor, evaluate, and improve the numerous oversight programs that make up the safety oversight system. This statement focuses on these three key areas and is based on recent GAO reports on FAA's inspection oversight programs, industry partnership programs, enforcement program, and training program."

The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme ('EU ETS') began on 1 January 2005. The implementation of the EU ETS has raised interest in market-based approaches to achieving environmental and related public policy goals in the EU, particularly those related to promotion of renewable energy and energy efficiency. Indeed, national and regional markets in tradable green certificates ('TGCs') and (to a lesser extent) tradable white certificates ('TWCs') already exist. Green certificate schemes are established or proposed in a number of Member States (e.g., Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK) and form part of a growing portfolio of measures to achieve the renewable targets outlined in Directive 2001/77/EC. White certificate schemes are considerably less widespread, although schemes have been established in Italy and the UK and further activity may be stimulated by the Commission proposal on energy services (COM(2003)739). Both the renewables Directive and the energy services proposal envisage the possible evolution and harmonisation of these instruments into EU-wide certificate schemes. This study has two major objectives: -1. Analyse interactions among EU ETS and green/white certificate markets. The first major objective is to describe the interactions between green and white certificate programmes and the EU …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2004, a series of media articles alleged that financial firms were marketing expensive and potentially unnecessary insurance or other financial products to members of the military. GAO's report for this committee examined (1) features and marketing of certain insurance and securities products being sold to military members and (2) how financial regulators and the Department of Defense (DOD) were overseeing the sales of insurance and securities products to military members. GAO also examined issues relating to DOD's oversight of insurance sales for a report issued in June 2005."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 1990, the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act, heralded as the most comprehensive financial management reform legislation in 40 years, was enacted. The Act's goal is to improve management through reliable, useful, and timely financial and performance information for day-to-day decisionmaking and accountability. This testimony outlines the legislative history of the CFO Act, and its key elements, progress to date in implementing the Act, and the challenges for the future. Prior to passage of the CFO Act, the seemingly never ending disclosures of fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in federal programs painted a picture of a government unable to manage its programs, protect its assets, or provide taxpayers with the effective and economical services they expect. The enactment of the CFO Act represented a broad-based recognition that federal financial management was in great need of fundamental reform. The Act mandated a financial management leadership structure; required the preparation and audit of annual financial statements; called for modernized financial management systems and strengthened internal control; and required the systematic measurement of performance, the development of cost information, and the integration of program, budget, and financial systems."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In January 2005, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) implemented a plan, in part, to address a backlog of pending cases. This report discusses actions related to the development of this plan, including whether required practices and procedures were followed in contracting for the services of a management consulting company and in hiring an intermittent employee as a consultant. Also, the report identifies avenues of redress available to OSC employees for filing prohibited personnel practice allegations against OSC, and other redress options that could be made available."

BRAC Analysis - Contains notes and research from the analyst Mike Delaney of the Joint Issues team relating to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Letter from David A. Stallman to Helen W. Snapp, sent on November 17, 2005, discussing Stallman's recent contact with one Priscilla, the creator of the painting "Lady Dauntless," which Stallman will use for the cover of his and Snapp's book "Target-Towing WASP at Camp Davis." It includes page 211 of an article from the March issue of Our State which discusses Liberty Field in Camp Stewart. The final page includes four black and white photographs: the top left of four men in military dress standing in front of a plane, the top right of a long line of Women Airforce Service Pilots standing in front of two planes, the bottom left of a plane in flight, and the bottom left of a military dinner or banquet.

Weekly Jewish newspaper from Fort Worth, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

This report is a guide to one of the regular appropriations bills that Congress considers each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Agriculture. It summarizes the status of the bill, its scope, major issues, funding levels, and related congressional activity, and is updated as events warrant. The report lists the key CRS staff relevant to the issues covered and related CRS products.

An introduction to the 2006 Budget Draft for the Texas Daily Newspaper Association board of directors meeting on December 1, 2005 at the Headliners Club in Austin, Texas. The budget goes into detailed length on the expected income for the association as well as their expected expenses for the 2006 year.

Weekly newspaper from Albany, Texas that includes local, county, and state news along with extensive advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Liquid silica at high pressure and temperature is shown to undergo significant structural modifications and profound changes in its electronic properties. Temperature measurements on shock waves in silica at 70-1000 GPa indicate that the specific heat of liquid SiO{sub 2} rises well above the Dulong-Petit limit, exhibiting a broad peak with temperature that is attributable to the growing structural disorder caused by bond-breaking in the melt. The simultaneous sharp rise in optical reflectivity of liquid SiO{sub 2} indicates that dissociation causes the electrical and therefore thermal conductivities of silica to attain metallic-like values of 1-5 x 10{sup 5} S/m and 24-600 W/m.K respectively.

The kinetics of the beta-delta solid-solid phase transformation of HMX (nitramine octahydro-1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7-tetrazocine) were modeled in ALE2D using four similar equilibrium-inhibited nucleation-growth models: a reversible set of Arrhenius kinetics following a LANL model, and three sets of kinetics derived based on an autocatalytic model using the bidirectional reaction formalism. The parameters for the bidirectional kinetics models were calibrated using simulations of two experimental setup scenarios where experimental data is available: 165 C XRD and SITI. In this calibration, the transition enthalpy and activation energy values were kept constant, while the frequency factors were iterated to achieve results similar to those provided by the experiments. This process yielded six unique sets of kinetic parameters that describe the phase transformation: a pair of sets for each of the three bidirectional kinetics models. The models calibrated using 165 C XRD data showed good agreement with LX-04 STEX experimental results, while the SITI-based models were in good agreement with the LANL model and PBX-9501 STEX experimental data. These bidirectional models were also shown to require less computational effort than the LANL model.

The structural phase stability of heavy f-electron metals is studied by means of density-functional theory (DFT). These include temperature-induced transitions in plutonium metal as well as pressure-induced transitions in the trans-plutonium metals Am, Cm, Bk, and Cf. The early actinides (Th-Np) display phases that could be rather well understood from the competition of a crystal-symmetry breaking mechanism (Peierls distortion) of the 5f states and electrostatic forces, while for the trans-plutonium metals (Am-Cf) the ground-state structures are governed by 6d bonding. We show in this paper that new physics is needed to understand the phases of the actinides in the volume range of about 15-30 {angstrom}{sup 3}. At these volumes one would expect, from theoretical arguments made in the past, to encounter highly complex crystal phases due to a Peierls distortion. Here we argue that the symmetry reduction associated with spin polarization can make higher symmetry phases competitive. Taking this into account, DFT is shown to describe the well-known phase diagram of plutonium and also the recently discovered complex and intriguing high-pressure phase diagrams of Am and Cm. The theory is further applied to investigate the behaviors of Bk and Cf under compression.

Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) is currently one of the most sensitive methods available for the trace detection of DNA adducts and is particularly valuable for measuring adducts in humans or animal models. However, the standard approach requires administration of a radiolabeled compound. As an alternative, we have developed a preliminary {sup 14}C-postlabeling assay for detection of the highly mutagenic O{sup 6}-MedG, by AMS. Procedures were developed for derivatizing O{sup 6}-MedG using unlabeled acetic anhydride. Using conventional LC-MS analysis, the limit of detection for the major product, triacetylated O{sup 6}-MedG, was 10 fmoles. On reaction with {sup 14}C-acetic anhydride, using a specially designed enclosed system, the predominant product was {sup 14}C-di-acetyl O{sup 6}-MedG. This change in reaction profile was due to a modification of the reaction procedure, introduced as a necessary safety precaution. The limit of detection for {sup 14}C-diacetyl O{sup 6}-MedG by AMS was determined as 79 attomoles, {approx}18,000 fold lower than that achievable by LSC. Although the assay has so far only been carried out with labeled standards, the degree of sensitivity obtained illustrates the potential of this assay for measuring O{sup 6}-MedG levels in humans.

There is a need to understand the level of high-Z impurities in Beryllium shells prepared by sputter coating. The Ignition Point Design Requirements state the following: ''Except for allowed ingredients, as listed in the ablator composition entries, the ablator material in all layers shall contain sufficiently low impurity levels that the sum over all impurities of atom fraction*Z{sup 2} shall be less than or equal to 0.2''. This is a tight specification that requires careful materials analysis. Early in the first quarter of FY06, we undertook a study of Be shell impurities via ICP-MS{sup 2} and determined that the impurity levels in the sputtered shells are very close to the specification.

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