The appropriate size and role of the government is one of the most fundamental and enduring debates in American politics. What role does the state play in economic activity? How is the economy affected by government intervention? Many of the arguments surrounding the proper size of government are economic in nature, and they will be discussed in this report.

The issue of North Korea's inclusion on the U.S. list of terrorism-supporting countries has been a major issue in U.S.-North Korean diplomacy since 2000, particularly in connection with negotiations over North Korea's nuclear program. North Korea demanded that the Clinton and Bush Administration remove North Korea from the terrorism support list. Secretary of State Clinton said on June 7, 2009, that the Obama Administration would consider reinstating North Korea on the list of state supporters of terrorism. However, she said that there would have to be "recent evidence of their support for international terrorism."

Guidance issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This publication supersedes GAO-03-273G, Assessing the Reliability of Computer-Processed Data, October 2002. GAO published a guide to assist its auditing staff in ensuring the reliability of computer-based data. The guidance provides a flexible, risk-based framework for data reliability assessments that can be geared to the specific circumstances of each engagement. The framework is built on (1) making use of all existing information about the data; (2) performing at least a minimal level of data testing; (3) doing only the amount of work necessary to determine whether the data are reliable enough for GAO's purposes; (4) maximizing professional judgment; and (5) bringing the appropriate people, including management, to the table at key decision points."

This report discusses the drastic increase in demand for homeowners' insurance in Atlantic and Gulf Coast states following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This report also discusses various measures and efforts underway to enhance insurer capacity, pursue alternative forms of risk transfer, and create a national catastrophe financing facility, the last of which is an issue under considerable debate.

There are 645 informal (Congressional) Member organizations listed in the Congressional Yellow Book or registered with the Committee on House Administration. Of these 645 informal organizations, 256 are registered with the Committee on House Administration as a congressional Member organization (CMO). This report examines the purpose and activities of CMOs and the reasons Members form them. It also identifies and describes seven CMO types, and it provides an overview of the historical development of informal Member organizations since the first Congress. It concludes with a step-by-step guide for House Members and staff who might be interested in forming a CMO.

The United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Res. 1874 on June 12, 2009, in response to North Korea's second nuclear test. The resolution puts in place a series of sanctions on North Korea's arms sales, luxury goods, and financial transactions related to its weapons programs, and calls upon states to inspect North Korean vessels suspected of carrying such shipments. This report summarizes and analyzes Res. 1874.

After several decades of widespread stagnation, nuclear power is attracting renewed interest. Expanding global access to nuclear power has the potential to lead to the spread of nuclear technology that could be used for nuclear weapons. This report discusses the issue of nuclear power with regard to nuclear weapons nonproliferation policies, the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) begun under the Bush Administration, the future of the GNEP under the Obama Administration, and four areas of oversight in which Congress will have a considerable role.

This report summarizes what is known from open sources about the North Korean nuclear weapons program - including weapons-usable fissile material and warhead estimates - and assesses current developments in achieving denuclearization.

In February 2009, Kyrgyzstan announced that it was terminating an agreement permitting U.S. forces to upgrade and use portions of the Manas international airport near the capital of Bishkek to support coalition military operations in Afghanistan. U.S. forces faced leaving the airbase by late August 2009. Major U.S. concerns included working out alternative logistics routes and support functions for a surge in U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan and possibly cooler security ties with Kyrgyzstan that could set back U.S. counter-terrorism efforts and other U.S. interests in Central Asia. After reportedly intense negotiations, the United States and Kyrgyzstan reached agreement in June 2009 on modalities for maintaining U.S. and NATO transit operations at Manas.

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

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This report considers FY2009 appropriations in regards to agricultural agencies. Moreover, the report examines the budget for these agencies and different versions of appropriations bills on the matter.

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Reference Binder: International Energy Agency Implementing Agreements and Annexes

This Final Report is covers the completion of the Electric Power Delivery Testing Feasibility Study. The objective of this project was to research, engineer, and demonstrate high-power laboratory testing protocols to accurately reproduce the conditions on the electric power grid representing both normal load switching and abnormalities such as short-circuit fault protection. Test circuits, equipment, and techniques were developed and proven at reduced power levels to determine the feasibility of building a large-scale high-power testing laboratory capable of testing equipment and systems at simulated high-power conditions of the U.S. power grid at distribution levels up through 38 kiloVolts (kV) and transmission levels up through 230 kV. The project delivered demonstrated testing techniques, high-voltage test equipment for load testing and synthetic short-circuit testing, and recommended designs for future implementation of a high-power testing laboratory to test equipment and systems, enabling increased reliability of the electric transmission and distribution grid.

Tetrapyrroles are strongly pigmented heterocyclic molecules that play key roles in the harvesting of light and in its efficient conversion into chemical energy by photosynthetic organisms, including agronomically important plant species. This grant provided financial support for the International Conference on Tetrapyrrole Photoreceptors of Photosynthetic Organisms (ICTPPO 2009), the ninth in the series of ad hoc biennial conferences focused on the structure, function and biotechnological applications of tetrapyrrole photoreceptors, held at Asilomar Conference Center, Monterey CA from July 26 to July 31, 2009. The goal of this meeting was to bring together leading experts in the field of tetrapyrrole photoreceptors and from associated fields with new investigators, to provide critical analyses of the current state of their fields, the challenges and opportunities therein and their most recent unpublished discoveries to stimulate new approaches to address key issues of agricultural and energy significance. Among the 80 participants included 40 PIs (including one Nobelist in chemistry, two members of the US National Academy of Science, and a recent inductee to the Royal Society), 8 senior scientists, 1 DOE program manager, 12 postdoctoral fellows and 20 graduate students representing 13 countries. One third of the formal lecture program was reserved for discussion, and …

This 2008 NCMR project has pursued measurement of the antineutrino-nucleus coherent scattering interaction using a low-energy threshold germanium gamma-ray spectrometer of roughly one-half kilogram total mass. These efforts support development of a compact system for monitoring the antineutrino emission from nuclear reactor cores. Such a monitoring system is relevant to nuclear safeguards and nuclear non-proliferation in general by adding a strong method for assuring quantitative material balance of special nuclear material in the nuclear fuel cycle used in electricity generation.

This study examines the past trends and evolution of safeguards over time and projects growth through 2030. The report documents the amount of nuclear material and facilities under safeguards from 1970 until present, along with the corresponding budget. Estimates for the future amount of facilities and material under safeguards are made according to non-nuclear-weapons states’ (NNWS) plans to build more nuclear capacity and sustain current nuclear infrastructure. Since nuclear energy is seen as a clean and economic option for base load electric power, many countries are seeking to either expand their current nuclear infrastructure, or introduce nuclear power. In order to feed new nuclear power plants and sustain existing ones, more nuclear facilities will need to be built, and thus more nuclear material will be introduced into the safeguards system. The projections in this study conclude that a zero real growth scenario for the IAEA safeguards budget will result in large resource gaps in the near future.

The original specific aims of the grant where cut back considerably as the study section reduced both the time and the budget for the project. The objective of the grant was to show that fluorine-18 fluoride could be prepared completely anhydrous and thus substantially more reactive than conventionally dried fluoride using the method of Sun and DiMagno. This method involved using conventionally dried fluoride to prepare an aromatic fluoride in which the aromatic ring is substituted with electron withdrawing groups. The aryl fluoride is then dried and purified and the fluoride is displaced with an anhydrous nucleophile. Using fluorine-19 and macroscopic scale reactions the reactions work well and give anhydrous fluoride salts that are both more reactive and more selective in their reactions than conventionally dried fluoride. The original substrate chosen for the reaction was bromopentacyanobenzene (1). This compound proved to be easy to make but very hard to purify. As an alternative hexabromobenzene, which is commercially available in high purity, was tried. This reacted cleanly with conventionally dried F-18 fluoride in acetonitrile to give [{sup 18}F]-fluoropentabromobenzene (2), which could be dried by passage of the solution over alumina, which also removed any unreacted fluoride. The fluorine-18 fluoride could be …

Letter from Erin Hill to Friends on July 1, 2009, discussing ActBlue's development of technical services.

The accuracy of numerical predictions for gas/liquid two-phase flows using Computational Multiphase Fluid Dynamics (CMFD) methods strongly depends on the formulation of models governing the interaction between the continuous liquid field and bubbles of different sizes. The purpose of this paper is to develop, test and validate a multifield model of adiabatic gas/liquid flows at intermediate gas concentrations (e.g., churn-turbulent flow regime), in which multiple-size bubbles are divided into a specified number of groups, each representing a prescribed range of sizes. The proposed modeling concept uses transport equations for the continuous liquid field and for each bubble field. The overall model has been implemented in the NPHASE-CMFD computer code. The results of NPHASE-CMFD simulations have been validated against the experimental data from the TOPFLOW test facility. Also, a parametric analysis on the effect of various modeling assumptions has been performed.

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Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.