This report discusses the West African country of Mali that faces multiple overlapping crises. The country’s political leadership has been uncertain and disputed since a military coup on March 22, 2012, overthrew a democratically elected government in the capital, Bamako.

Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) conducted in-process inspections and independent verification (IV) surveys in support of DOE's remedial efforts in Zone 1 of East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Inspections concluded that the remediation contractor's soil removal and survey objectives were satisfied and the dynamic verification strategy (DVS) was implemented as designed. Independent verification (IV) activities included gamma walkover surveys and soil sample collection/analysis over multiple exposure units (EUs).

Russia will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation's (APEC) week-long series of senior-level meetings in Vladivostok on September 2-9, 2012. The main event for the week will be the 20th APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting to be held September 8-9, 2012. This report looks at the main points of this meeting as they relate to the U.S.

Report that addresses provisions of federal law and regulation restricting the acceptance of personal gifts by the President of the United States.

The research undertaken under this grant is described in this document. The document describes progress in the construction of an instrument for recording photodissociation action spectra of mass-selected cryo-cooled cations. The instrument is not yet functional, but we anticipate trapping ions and conducting photodissociation experiments before the end of the year. It also describes resonant two-photon ionization spectra that have been recorded for uranium mononitride (UN) in the visible portion of the spectrum. These experiments are still underway at the present time. Although the spectra are a bit difficult to properly fit, due to upper state perturbations, it appears that the molecule has a ground state with {Omega} = 3.5 and a bond length of approximately 1.76 {angstrom}. Finally, results on the thermochemistry and reactivity of Th{sup +} are presented. In these studies the bond energies of the following bonds have been determined: D{sub 0}(Th{sup +}-2O) = 10.2 {+-} 0.2 eV; D0(Th{sup +}-N) = 6.69 {+-} 0.35 eV; D0(Th{sup +}-O) = 8.40 {+-} 0.28 eV; D{sub 0}(OTh{sup +}-O) = 1.8 {+-} 0.4 eV.

The ALCF's Early Science Program aims to prepare key applications for the architecture and scale of Mira and to solidify libraries and infrastructure that will pave the way for other future production applications. Two billion core-hours have been allocated to 16 Early Science projects on Mira. The projects, in addition to promising delivery of exciting new science, are all based on state-of-the-art, petascale, parallel applications. The project teams, in collaboration with ALCF staff and IBM, have undertaken intensive efforts to adapt their software to take advantage of Mira's Blue Gene/Q architecture, which, in a number of ways, is a precursor to future high-performance-computing architecture. The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) enables transformative science that solves some of the most difficult challenges in biology, chemistry, energy, climate, materials, physics, and other scientific realms. Users partnering with ALCF staff have reached research milestones previously unattainable, due to the ALCF's world-class supercomputing resources and expertise in computation science. In 2011, the ALCF's commitment to providing outstanding science and leadership-class resources was honored with several prestigious awards. Research on multiscale brain blood flow simulations was named a Gordon Bell Prize finalist. Intrepid, the ALCF's BG/P system, ranked No. 1 on the Graph 500 list …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Housing assistance is fragmented across 160 programs and activities. Overlap exists for some products offered, service delivery, and geographic areas served by selected programs—particularly in the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Rural Housing Service (RHS) and Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Federal Housing Administration (FHA). For instance, RHS, FHA, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) all guarantee mortgage loans for homeowners. According to fiscal year 2009 data (the most recent available), FHA served a larger number of households than RHS in all areas, including a larger number of low- and moderate-income households in rural areas. Although selected HUD, USDA, and Department of the Treasury (Treasury) multifamily programs had overlapping purposes, the products, areas served, and delivery methods differed. For example, HUD, RHS, and Treasury provide financing for development and rehabilitation of multifamily housing for low- and moderate-income households, but RHS-financed properties were more concentrated in rural areas and HUD’s and Treasury’s tax credit properties were more concentrated in urban and suburban areas."

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