The congressional franking privilege allows Members of Congress to send official mail via the U.S. Postal Service at government expense. This report provides information and analysis on the costs of franked mail in the House of Representatives and Senate.

This report discusses the current political conditions of Cuba, as well as its relationship with the United States. In particular, the report focuses on U.S. policy regarding Cuba, including various economic sanctions, human rights issues, and foreign aid appropriations.

This report is intended as a primer on the policy issues, science, and governance of geoengineering technologies. The report will first set the policy parameters under which geoengineering technologies may be considered. It will then describe selected technologies in detail and discuss their status. The third section provides a discussion of possible approaches to governmental involvement in, and oversight of, geoengineering, including a summary of domestic and international instruments and institutions that may affect geoengineering projects.

This report discusses the national security problem of the PRC's role in weapons proliferation and issues related to the U.S. policy response, including legislation, since the mid- 1990s.

This report discusses attempts to resolve the Cyprus problem and reunify the island which have undergone various levels of negotiation for almost 40 years. Beginning in 2008, Cyprus President Dimitris Christofias, a Greek Cypriot, and the former Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat engaged in what appeared to be a positive and concerted effort to reach some type of acceptable solution. However, by the end of March 2010 time and politics ran out on both.

This report discusses the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service's (USCIS) newly proposed fee schedule for immigration services. Issues for Congress to consider might include how USCIS fees have been computed and justified; whether anticipated revenue from revised fees will cover agency costs; how fiscal shortfalls might be funded; and what impact higher fees might have on the applicant pool.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill that began on April 20, 2010 lead Congress to give attention to the compensatory liability provisions of the Oil Pollution Act and, to a lesser extent, those of the Jones Act and the Death on the High Seas Act. However, federal laws possibly relevant to the oil spill also impose civil and criminal money penalties, which may reach dollar amounts in connection with the Gulf spill greater than those for compensatory liability. This report summarizes selected federal civil and criminal penalty provisions that may be found violated in connection with the Gulf spill and related worker fatalities.

This report has two sections. The first provides an overview of the current U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) disaster assistance programs: federal crop insurance, NAP payments, emergency disaster loans, the new Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments Program (SURE), and four other smaller disaster programs authorized in the 2008 farm bill. The second section reviews the recent history of emergency supplemental farm disaster assistance.

This Panel was chartered to review and assess new evaluations of work on fission product data, as well as the evaluation process used by the two U.S. nuclear weapons physics laboratories. The work focuses on fission product yields resulting from fission spectrum neutrons incident on plutonium, and includes data from measurements that had not been previously published as well as new or revised fission product cumulative yield data, and related quantities such as Q values and R values. This report documents the Panel's assessment of the work presented by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Based on the work presented we have seven key observations: (1) Experiments conducted in the 1970s at LANL, some of which were performed in association with a larger, NIST-led, program, have recently been documented. A preliminary assessment of this work, which will be referred to in this document as ILRR-LANL, shows it to be technically sound. (2) LLNL has done a thorough, unbiased review and evaluation of the available literature and is in the process of incorporating the previously unavailable LANL data into its evaluation of key fission product yields. The results of the LLNL effort, which includes a preliminary …

Presentation providing an overview of the roles, responsibilities, and funding for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice - Community Justice Assistance Division.

Items for the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation listed by priority, name and method of financing.

Financial reports compiled by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice documenting the agency's operating budget during fiscal year 2011 and funding requests for the 2012-2013 biennium, submitted to the Texas Board of Criminal Justice for consideration.