Report concerning Congressional attention on the domestic sex trafficking of children.

In 1874, the Texas legislature created the Frontier Battalion, the first formal, budgeted organization as an arm of state government of what historically had been periodic groups loosely referred to as Texas Rangers. Initially created to combat the menace of repeated raids of Indians from the north and from Mexico into frontier counties, the Battalion was led by an unusual choice: a frail, humorless Confederate veteran from Navarro County, John B. Jones. Under Jones’s leadership, the Battalion grew in sophistication, moving from Indian fighting to capturing Texas’s bad men, such as John Wesley Hardin and Sam Bass. Established during the unsettled time of Reconstruction, the Rangers effectively filled a local law enforcement void until competency was returned to local sheriffs’ and marshals’ offices. Numerous books cover individual Texas Rangers of note, but only a few have dealt with the overall history of the Rangers, and, strangely, none about Jones specifically. For the first time, author Rick Miller presents the story of the Frontier Battalion as seen through the eyes of its commander, John B. Jones, during his administration from 1874 to 1881, relating its history—both good and bad—chronologically, in depth, and in context. Highlighted are repeated budget and funding problems, …

Pinned down by a posse, the wounded outlaw’s companions urged him to escape through the gulch. “Don’t wait for me,” he replied, “I’m all in and might as well end it right here.” Placing his revolver to his right temple, he pulled the trigger for the last time, thus ending the life of the notorious “Kid Curry” of the Wild Bunch. It is long past time for the publication of a well-researched, definitive biography of the infamous western outlaw Harvey Alexander Logan, better known by his alias Kid Curry. In Wyoming he became involved in rustling and eventually graduated to bank and train robbing as a member—and soon leader—of the Wild Bunch. The core members of the gang came to be Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, George “Flatnose” Currie, Elzy Lay, Ben “the Tall Texan” Kilpatrick, Will Carver, and Kid Curry. Kid Curry has been portrayed as a cold-blooded killer, without any compassion or conscience and possessed of limited intelligence. Curry indeed was a dangerous man with a violent temperament, which was aggravated by alcoholic drink. However, Smokov shows that Curry’s record of kills is highly exaggerated, and that he was not the blood-thirsty killer as many have claimed. Mark …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The amount of spent fuel stored on-site at commercial nuclear reactors will continue to accumulate—increasing by about 2,000 metric tons per year and likely more than doubling to about 140,000 metric tons—before it can be moved off-site, because storage or disposal facilities may take decades to develop. In examining centralized storage or permanent disposal options, GAO found that new facilities may take from 15 to 40 years before they are ready to begin accepting spent fuel. Once an off-site facility is available, it will take several more decades to ship spent fuel to that facility. This situation will be challenging because by about 2040 most currently operating reactors will have ceased operations, and options for managing spent fuel, if needed to meet transportation, storage, or disposal requirements, may be limited."

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Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Wear and corrosion testing were conducted to evaluate alternate materials of construction for the Saltstone mixer auger and paddles. These components have been degraded by wear from the slurry processed in the mixer. Material test options included PVD coatings (TiN, TiCN, and ZrN), weld overlays (Stellite 12 and Ultimet) and higher hardness steels and carbides (D2 and tungsten carbide). The corrosion testing demonstrated that the slurry is not detrimental to the current materials of construction or the new candidates. The ASTM G75 Miller wear test showed that the high hardness materials and the Stellite 12 weld overlay provide superior wear relative to the Astralloy and CF8M stainless steel, which are the current materials of construction, as well as the PVD coatings and Ultimet. The following recommendations are made for selecting new material options and improving the overall wear resistance of the Saltstone mixer components: A Stellite 12 weld overlay or higher hardness steel (with toughness equivalent to Astralloy) be used to improve the wear resistance of the Saltstone mixer paddles; other manufacturing specifications for the mixer need to be considered in this selection. The current use of the Stellite 12 weld overlay be evaluated so that coverage of the 316 …

The goal of the research is to improve the competitive edge of steel mills by using the advanced CFD technology to optimize the gas and burden distributions inside a blast furnace for achieving the best gas utilization. A state-of-the-art 3-D CFD model has been developed for simulating the gas distribution inside a blast furnace at given burden conditions, burden distribution and blast parameters. The comprehensive 3-D CFD model has been validated by plant measurement data from an actual blast furnace. Validation of the sub-models is also achieved. The user friendly software package named Blast Furnace Shaft Simulator (BFSS) has been developed to simulate the blast furnace shaft process. The research has significant benefits to the steel industry with high productivity, low energy consumption, and improved environment.

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High-throughput mass separation of nuclear waste may be useful for optimal storage, disposal, or environmental remediation. The most dangerous part of nuclear waste is the fission product, which produces most of the heat and medium-term radiation. Plasmas are well-suited to separating nuclear waste because they can separate many different species in a single step. A number of plasma devices have been designed for such mass separation, but there has been no standardized comparison between these devices. We define a standard metric, the separative power per unit volume, and derive it for three different plasma mass filters: the plasma centrifuge, Ohkawa filter, and the magnetic centrifugal mass filter. __________________________________________________

This Closure Report (CR) presents information supporting closure of Corrective Action Unit (CAU) 562, Waste Systems, and provides documentation supporting the completed corrective actions and confirmation that closure objectives for CAU 562 were met. This CR complies with the requirements of the Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order (FFACO) that was agreed to by the State of Nevada; the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Environmental Management; the U.S. Department of Defense; and DOE, Legacy Management (FFACO, 1996 as amended). CAU 562 consists of the following 13 Corrective Action Sites (CASs), located in Areas 2, 23, and 25 of the Nevada National Security Site: · CAS 02-26-11, Lead Shot · CAS 02-44-02, Paint Spills and French Drain · CAS 02-59-01, Septic System · CAS 02-60-01, Concrete Drain · CAS 02-60-02, French Drain · CAS 02-60-03, Steam Cleaning Drain · CAS 02-60-04, French Drain · CAS 02-60-05, French Drain · CAS 02-60-06, French Drain · CAS 02-60-07, French Drain · CAS 23-60-01, Mud Trap Drain and Outfall · CAS 23-99-06, Grease Trap · CAS 25-60-04, Building 3123 Outfalls Closure activities began in October 2011 and were completed in April 2012. Activities were conducted according to the Corrective Action Plan for CAU 562 …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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

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An analytic model for single particle motion in the presence of a wave field and multiple cyclotron harmonics is developed and investigated. The model suggests that even in the absence of Doppler broadening, cyclotron harmonic layers have finite spatial extent. This allows for particles to interact with more than one harmonic layer simultaneously, provided the layers are tightly packed. The latter phenomenon is investigated in the context of the model using symplectic mapping techniques. Then the model behavior is compared with numerical simulations of neutral beam particle trajectories in NSTX using the full-orbit code SPIRAL

Semi-solid metal (SSM) processing has emerged as an attractive method for near-net-shape manufacturing due to the distinct advantages it holds over conventional near-net-shape forming technologies. These advantages include lower cycle time, increased die life, reduced porosity, reduced solidification shrinkage, improved mechanical properties, etc. SSM processing techniques can not only produce the complex dimensional details (e.g. thin-walled sections) associated with conventional high-pressure die castings, but also can produce high integrity castings currently attainable only with squeeze and low-pressure permanent mold casting processes. There are two primary semi-solid processing routes, (a) thixocasting and (b) rheocasting. In the thixocasting route, one starts from a non-dendritic solid precursor material that is specially prepared by a primary aluminum manufacturer, using continuous casting methods. Upon reheating this material into the mushy (a.k.a. "two-phase") zone, a thixotropic slurry is formed, which becomes the feed for the casting operation. In the rheocasting route (a.k.a. "slurry-on-demand" or "SoD"), one starts from the liquid state, and the thixotropic slurry is formed directly from the melt via careful thermal management of the system; the slurry is subsequently fed into the die cavity. Of these two routes, rheocasting is favored in that there is no premium added to the billet cost, and …

One of the most important nonperturbative methods for solving QCD is quantization at fixed light-front time {tau} = t+z=c - Dirac's 'Front Form'. The eigenvalues of the light-front QCD Hamiltonian predict the hadron spectrum and the eigensolutions provide the light-front wavefunctions which describe hadron structure. More generally, we show that the valence Fock-state wavefunctions of the light-front QCD Hamiltonian satisfy a single-variable relativistic equation of motion, analogous to the nonrelativistic radial Schrodinger equation, with an effective confining potential U which systematically incorporates the effects of higher quark and gluon Fock states. We outline a method for computing the required potential from first principles in QCD. The holographic mapping of gravity in AdS space to QCD, quantized at fixed light-front time, yields the same light front Schrodinger equation; in fact, the soft-wall AdS/QCD approach provides a model for the light-front potential which is color-confining and reproduces well the light-hadron spectrum. One also derives via light-front holography a precise relation between the bound-state amplitudes in the fifth dimension of AdS space and the boost-invariant light-front wavefunctions describing the internal structure of hadrons in physical space-time. The elastic and transition form factors of the pion and the nucleons are found to be well …

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This report outlines the required minimum functions of exchanges, and explains how exchanges are expected to be established and administered under ACA.

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