This report discusses the April 2009 outbreak of the influenza strain known as H1N1, or commonly, swine influenza. This report describes the distribution of the virus and the statistics of affected areas, as well as international and U.S. efforts to treat infected persons, respond to outbreaks in various countries (such as Mexico and other Latin American nations), and prepare for a possible influenza pandemic.

An invoice from Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus to ActBlue of $25.00 on March 23, 2009.

This report discusses the current political state of Afghanistan, as well as the Afghan government. This report also discusses Afghanistan's relationship with the United States, particularly U.S. efforts to urge President Hamid Karzai to address corruption within the Afghan government.

This report discusses the current political state of Afghanistan, focusing particularly on the influence of the Taliban and other militant groups and on the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. This report also discusses the U.S.-Afghanistan relationship and U.S. efforts under the Obama Administration to provide military, reconstructive, and stabilization aid.

This report compares and contrasts the House's American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and the Senate's Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. Both bills establish further regulations on greenhouse gases. The contention is that both of these bills potentially raise costs.

This report analyzes the agriculture, nutrition, and rural provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, P.L. 111-5). The ARRA boosts government spending on various infrastructure programs and government benefits programs, and offers individual and business tax benefits.

This report discusses issues for Congress in FY2011, which are whether to approve, reject, or modify DOD's new KC-X competition strategy, and whether to approve, reject, or modify the Air Force's request for FY2011 research and development funding for the new KC-X program.

This report provides information regarding pollution from ships and port facilities; discusses some of the measures being implemented and considered by local, state, and federal regulatory agencies; discusses the efforts to ratify and to strengthen Annex VI of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL); and describes legislation in Congress to control emissions from ships by amending the Clean Air Act (CAA).

This report discusses challenges the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will likely face to address projected growth in passenger airline travel while maintaining and improving upon the efficiency and effectiveness of passenger screening operations.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) provides a statutory framework by which government agencies may, when gathering foreign intelligence investigation, obtain authorization to conduct electronic surveillance or physical searches, utilize pen registers and trap and trace devices, or access specified business records and other tangible things. This report discusses three sunsetting amendments of FISA which include the "Lone Wolf" provision, "roving" wiretaps, and access to business records.

In order to provide more accurate and precise estimates of individual dose (and thus more precise estimates of radiation risk) for the members of the ETRC, a new dosimetric calculation system, the Techa River Dosimetry System-2009 (TRDS-2009) has been prepared. The deterministic version of the improved dosimetry system TRDS-2009D was basically completed in April 2009. Recent developments in evaluation of dose-response models in light of uncertain dose have highlighted the importance of different types of uncertainties in the development of individual dose estimates. These include uncertain parameters that may be either shared or unshared within the dosimetric cohort, and also the nature of the type of uncertainty as aleatory or epistemic and either classical or Berkson. This report identifies the nature of the various input parameters and calculational methods incorporated in the Techa River Dosimetry System (based on the TRDS-2009D implementation), with the intention of preparing a stochastic version to estimate the uncertainties in the dose estimates. This report reviews the equations, databases, and input parameters, and then identifies the author’s interpretations of their general nature. It presents the approach selected so that the stochastic, Monte-Carlo, implementation of the dosimetry System - TRDS-2009MC - will provide useful information regarding the …

This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding plasma turbulence in astrophysical plasmas. It is motivated by observations of electromagnetic and density fluctuations in the solar wind, interstellar medium and galaxy clusters, as well as by models of particle heating in accretion disks. All of these plasmas and many others have turbulentmotions at weakly collisional and collisionless scales. The paper focuses on turbulence in a strong mean magnetic field. The key assumptions are that the turbulent fluctuations are small compared to the mean field, spatially anisotropic with respect to it and that their frequency is low compared to the ion cyclotron frequency. The turbulence is assumed to be forced at some system-specific outer scale. The energy injected at this scale has to be dissipated into heat, which ultimately cannot be accomplished without collisions. A kinetic cascade develops that brings the energy to collisional scales both in space and velocity. The nature of the kinetic cascade in various scale ranges depends on the physics of plasma fluctuations that exist there. There are four special scales that separate physically distinct regimes: the electron and ion gyroscales, the mean free path and the electron diffusion scale. In each of the scale ranges separated …

Individual raw data streams from instrumentation at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program Climate Research Facility (ACRF) fixed and mobile sites are collected and sent to the Data Management Facility (DMF) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for processing in near real-time. Raw and processed data are then sent daily to the ACRF Archive, where they are made available to users. For each instrument, we calculate the ratio of the actual number of data records received daily at the Archive to the expected number of data records. The results are tabulated by (1) individual data stream, site, and month for the current year and (2) site and fiscal year (FY) dating back to 1998. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) requires national user facilities to report time-based operating data. The requirements concern the actual hours of operation (ACTUAL); the estimated maximum operation or uptime goal (OPSMAX), which accounts for planned downtime; and the VARIANCE [1 - (ACTUAL/OPSMAX)], which accounts for unplanned downtime. The OPSMAX time for the second quarter of FY 2009 for the Southern Great Plains (SGP) site is 2,052.00 hours (0.95 x 2,160 hours this quarter). The OPSMAX for the North Slope Alaska (NSA) locale is 1,944.00 hours …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The turmoil in financial markets and the economic downturn has brought significant financial stress to the auto manufacturing industry. The economic reach of the auto industry in the United States is broad, affecting autoworkers, auto suppliers, stock and bondholders, dealers, and certain states. To help stabilize the U.S. auto industry and avoid disruptions that could pose systemic risk to the nation's economy, in December 2008 the Department of the Treasury established the Automotive Industry Financing Program (AIFP) under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). From December 2008 through March 2009, Treasury has allocated about $36 billion to this program, including loans to Chrysler Holding LLC (Chrysler) and General Motors (GM). GAO has previously identified three principles to guide federal assistance to large firms: define the problem, determine the national interests and set goals and objectives, and protect the government's interests. As part of GAO's statutorily mandated responsibilities to provide timely oversight of TARP activities, this report discusses the (1) nature and purpose of assistance to the auto industry, (2) how the assistance addresses the three principles, and (3) important factors for Chrysler and GM to address …

This best practices guide is the ninth in a series of guides for builders produced by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America Program. This guide book is a resource to help builders design and construct homes that are among the most energy-efficient available, while addressing issues such as building durability, indoor air quality, and occupant health, safety, and comfort. With the measures described in this guide, builders in the hot-dry and mixed-dry climates can achieve homes that have whole house energy savings of 40% over the Building America benchmark (a home built to mid-1990s building practices roughly equivalent to the 1993 Model Energy Code) with no added overall costs for consumers. These best practices are based on the results of research and demonstration projects conducted by Building America’s research teams. The guide includes information for managers, designers, marketers, site supervisors, and subcontractors, as well as case studies of builders who are successfully building homes that cut energy use by 40% in the hot-dry and mixed-dry climates.

The goal of this program was to design, build, test, and characterize a flight qualified calibration source and monitor for a Dark Energy related experiment: ACCESS - 'Absolute Color Calibration Experiment for Standard Stars'. This calibration source, the On-board Calibration Monitor (OCM), is a key component of our ACCESS spectrophotometric calibration program. The OCM will be flown as part of the ACCESS sub-orbital rocket payload in addition to monitoring instrument sensitivity on the ground. The objective of the OCM is to minimize systematic errors associated with any potential changes in the ACCESS instrument sensitivity. Importantly, the OCM will be used to monitor instrument sensitivity immediately after astronomical observations while the instrument payload is parachuting to the ground. Through monitoring, we can detect, track, characterize, and thus correct for any changes in instrument senstivity over the proposed 5-year duration of the assembled and calibrated instrument.

This report covers carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), but not other types of carbon sequestration activities whereby CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and stored in vegetation, soils, or oceans. Forests and agricultural lands store carbon, and the world's oceans exchange huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere through natural processes.

This report provides an overview of the fundamental choices involved between a cost (tax) and a quantity (cap) control instrument, including a discussion of policy tools that could be employed to bridge the gap between a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade program. It also analyzes the potential advantages and disadvantages of a carbon tax, discusses implementation issues for a carbon tax -- including where to apply the tax, at what level to set the tax, and options for distributing the tax revenues-- and provides conclusions.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As a result of internal control deficiencies discussed in GAO's 2007 report on certain contracts at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), GAO was asked to identify the extent to which CMS (1) implemented effective control procedures over contract actions, and (2) established a strong control environment for contract management. GAO used a statistical random sample of 2008 CMS contract actions (including contract awards and modifications) to assess CMS internal control procedures. The results were projected to the population of 2008 CMS contract actions. GAO also determined the extent to which CMS implemented recommendations GAO made in 2007 to improve internal control over contracting and payments to contractors. GAO reviewed contract file documentation and interviewed senior acquisition management officials."

This report examines policy changes that have driven actual and proposed shifts in the alliance between the U.S. and Japan. Key features of the proposals include a reduction in the number of U.S. Marines in Japan, the relocation of a controversial Marine air base in Okinawa, expanded cooperation in training and intelligence sharing, and command structure changes.

This proposal to the DOE outlines a three-year plan of research in theoretical and computational condensed-matter physics, with the aim of developing a microscopic theory for charge and spin dynamics in disordered materials with magnetic impurities. Important representatives of this class of materials are the dilute magnetic semiconductors (DMS), which have attracted great attention as a promising basis for spintronics devices. There is an intense experimental effort underway to study the transport properties of ferromagnetic DMS such as (Ga,Mn)As, and a number of interesting features have emerged: negative magnetoresistance, anomalous Hall effect, non-Drude dynamical conductivity, and resistivity maxima at the Curie temperature. Available theories have been able to account for some of these features, but at present we are still far away from a systematic microscopic understanding of transport in DMS. We propose to address this challenge by developing a theory of charge and spin dynamics based on a combination of the memory-function formalism and time-dependent density functional theory. This approach will be capable of dealing with two important issues: (a) the strong degree of correlated disorder in DMS, close to the localization transition (which invalidates the usual relaxation-time approximation to the Boltzmann equation), (b) the essentially unknown role of …

Using a variety of unclassified consultations and sources, this report discusses the national security problem of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) role in weapons proliferation and issues related to the U.S. policy response, including legislation, since the mid-1990s.

This report focuses on the potential implications of China's naval modernization for future required U.S. Navy capabilities. This report is based on unclassified open-source information, such as the annual Department of Defense (DOD) report to Congress on China's military power, and published reference sources such as Jane's Fighting Ships.

This report focuses on the potential implications of China's naval modernization for future required U.S. Navy capabilities. This report is based on unclassified open-source information, such as the annual Department of Defense (DOD) report to Congress on China's military power, an August 2009 report from the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), and published reference sources such as Jane's Fighting Ships.