Sub-Saharan Africa has been far more severely affected by AIDS than any other part of the world. The United Nations reports that 26.6 million adults and children are infected with the HIV virus in the region, which has about 10% of the world's population but more than two-thirds of the worldwide total of infected people. This report discusses this issue in detail, including the cause of the African AIDS epidemic, the social and economic consequences, response and treatment, and U.S. policy.

The Language Acquisition State Grant Program under Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) as amended by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) contains provisions intended to address the specific educational needs of limited English proficient (LEP) students and students who have recently immigrated to the United States.1 Title III represents a major overhaul of federal programs for LEP students formerly provided under ESEA, Title VII, Parts A and C.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)(1) preempts chapter 145 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code (RQ-0123-GA)

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In October 2000, Congress passed the International Anticorruption and Good Governance Act (P.L. 106-309). The purpose of this legislation is to promote good governance by helping other countries combat corruption and improve government transparency and accountability. U.S. agencies spent about $33 million per year in fiscal years 2001-2002 providing anticorruption assistance to 22 sub-Saharan African countries. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided the majority of this assistance, along with the Departments of the Treasury, Justice, Commerce, and State. To help Congress oversee management of anticorruption programs in sub-Saharan Africa, GAO was asked to examine (1) what is known about the extent of corruption in the region, (2) the factors that give rise to corruption in this region, (3) the anticorruption assistance U.S. agencies have provided, and (4) the lessons about anticorruption assistance that U.S. agencies and other international organizations have learned."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In November 2003, we issued our report on the results of our audit of the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) financial statements as of and for the fiscal years ending September 30, 2003 and 2002, and on the effectiveness of its internal controls as of September 30, 2003. We also reported our conclusions on IRS's compliance with significant provisions of selected laws and regulations and on whether IRS's financial management systems substantially comply with requirements of the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996. A separate report on the implementation status of recommendations from our prior IRS financial audits and related financial management reports including this one will be issued shortly. The purpose of this report is to discuss issues identified during our fiscal year 2003 audit regarding internal controls and accounting procedures that could be improved for which we do not presently have any recommendations outstanding. Although not all of these issues were discussed in our fiscal year 2003 audit report, they all warrant management's consideration."

Successful operation in NSTX of two prototype fast-response micro ionization gauges during plasma operations has motivated us to install five gauges at different toroidal and poloidal locations to measure the edge neutral pressure and its dependence on the type of discharge (L-mode, H-mode, CHI) and the fueling method and location. The edge neutral pressure is also used as an input to the transport analysis codes TRANSP and DEGAS-2. The modified PDX-type Penning gauges are well suited for pressure measurements in the NSTX divertor where the toroidal field is relatively high. Behind the NSTX outer divertor plates where the field is lower, an unshielded fast ion gauge of a new design has been installed. This gauge was developed after laboratory testing of several different designs in a vacuum chamber with applied magnetic fields.

The Chemical Engineering Division is one of six divisions within the Engineering Research Directorate at Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. government's oldest and largest research laboratories. The University of Chicago oversees the laboratory on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Argonne's mission is to conduct basic scientific research, to operate national scientific facilities, to enhance the nation's energy resources, to promote national security, and to develop better ways to manage environmental problems. Argonne has the further responsibility of strengthening the nation's technology base by developing innovative technology and transferring it to industry. The Division is a diverse early-stage engineering organization, specializing in the treatment of spent nuclear fuel, development of advanced electrochemical power sources, and management of both high- and low-level nuclear wastes. Additionally, the Division operates the Analytical Chemistry Laboratory, which provides a broad range of analytical services to Argonne and other organizations. The Division is multidisciplinary. Its people have formal training in chemistry; physics; materials science; and electrical, mechanical, chemical, and nuclear engineering. They are specialists in electrochemistry, ceramics, metallurgy, catalysis, materials characterization, nuclear magnetic resonance, repository science, and the nuclear fuel cycle. Our staff have experience working in and collaborating with university, industry …

The incompressibility of the phase flow of Hamiltonian wave-plasma interactions restrains the class of realizable wave-driven transformations of the particle distribution. After the interaction, the distribution remains composed of the original phase-space elements, or local densities, which are only rearranged (''restacked'') by the wave. A variational formalism is developed to study the corresponding limitations on the energy and momentum transfer. A case of particular interest is a toroidal plasma immersed in a dc magnetic field. The restacking algorithm by Gardner [Phys. Fluids 6, 839 (1963)] is formulated precisely. The minimum energy state for a plasma with a given current is determined

Predictions of increasing levels of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}) and the specter of global warming have intensified research efforts to identify ways to sequester carbon. A number of novel avenues of research are being considered, including bioprocessing methods to promote and accelerate biosequestration of CO{sub 2} from the environment through the growth of organisms such as coccolithophorids, which are capable of sequestering CO{sub 2} relatively permanently. Calcium and magnesium carbonates are currently the only proven, long-term storage reservoirs for carbon. Whereas organic carbon is readily oxidized and releases CO{sub 2} through microbial decomposition on land and in the sea, carbonates can sequester carbon over geologic time scales. This proposal investigates the use of coccolithophorids single-celled, marine algae that are the major global producers of calcium carbonate to sequester CO{sub 2} emissions from power plants. Cultivation of coccolithophorids for calcium carbonate (CaCO{sub 3}) precipitation is environmentally benign and results in a stable product with potential commercial value. Because this method of carbon sequestration does not impact natural ecosystem dynamics, it avoids controversial issues of public acceptability and legality associated with other options such as direct injection of CO{sub 2} into the sea and ocean fertilization. Consequently, cultivation of coccolithophorids could …

Off-axis rf-driven current can play a critical role in sustaining high Beta spherical torus (ST) plasmas without a central solenoid. Numerical modeling of electron Bernstein wave current drive (EBWCD) for a {Beta} {approx} 40% ST plasma predicts efficient, off-axis, Ohkawa EBWCD. Current can be efficiently driven at r/a greater than 0.5 where the large trapped electron fraction precludes conventional Fisch-Boozer current drive and provides near-ideal conditions for Ohkawa EBWCD. Also, Ohkawa EBWCD efficiency increases with r/a. Enhancement over Fisch-Boozer current drive is a factor of two at r/a {approx} 0.2 rising to over an order of magnitude at r/a {approx} 0.5.

A thin foil Faraday cup array is being built to measure the loss of 3.5 MeV alpha particles and MeV ion cyclotron heating (ICH) tail ions on JET. It will consist of nine detectors spread over five different poloidal locations and three radial positions. They will measure the poloidal distribution and radial scrape off of the losses. The detectors will be comprised of four layers of thin (2.5 micron) Ni foil, giving some resolution of the lost particle energy distribution as different ranges of energies will stop in different layers of the detector. One detector will utilize eight thinner (1.0 micron) foils to obtain a better resolved energy distribution. These detectors will accept particles incident up to 45{sup o} from the normal to the foils.

In December of 2003 a large amount of water from the Santa Rosa wastewater project began being pumped to The Geysers for injection. Millions of dollars are being spent on this injection project in the anticipation that the additional fluid will not only extend the life of The Geysers but also greatly increase the net amount of energy extracted. Optimal use of the injected water, however, will require that the water be injected at the right place, in the right amount and at the proper rate. It has been shown that Microearthquake (MEQ) generation is a direct indicator of the effect of fluid injection at The Geysers (Majer and McEvilly 1979; Eberhart-Phillips and Oppenheimer 1984; Enedy et al. 1992; Stark 1992; Kirkpatrick et al. 1999; Smith et al. 2000). It is one of the few, if not only methods, practical to monitor the volumetric effect of water injection at The Geysers. At the beginning of this project there was not a detailed MEQ response, Geysers-wide, to a large influx of water such as will be the case from the Santa Rosa injection project. New technology in MEQ acquisition and analysis, while used in parts of The Geysers for short periods …

Gas Technology Institute is developing a novel concept of membrane gasifier for high efficiency, clean and low cost production of hydrogen from coal. The concept incorporates a hydrogen-selective membrane within a gasification reactor for direct extraction of hydrogen from coal synthesis gases. The objective of this project is to determine the technical and economic feasibility of this concept by screening, testing and identifying potential candidate membranes under high temperature, high pressure, and harsh environments of the coal gasification conditions. The best performing membranes will be selected for preliminary reactor design and cost estimates. To evaluate the performances of the candidate membranes under the gasification conditions, a high temperature/high pressure hydrogen permeation unit will be constructed in this project. During this reporting period, the mechanical construction of the permeation unit was completed. Commissioning and shake down tests are being conducted. The unit is capable of operation at temperatures up to 1100 C and pressures to 60 atm for evaluation of ceramic membranes such as mixed ionic conducting membrane. The membranes to be tested will be in disc form with a diameter of about 3 cm. Operation at these high temperatures and high hydrogen partial pressures will demonstrate commercially relevant hydrogen flux, …

Recent progress in simulation methodologies and high-performance parallel computers have made it is possible to perform detailed simulations of multidimensional reacting flow phenomena using comprehensive kinetics mechanisms. As simulations become larger and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to extract useful information from the numerical solution, particularly regarding the interactions of the chemical reaction and diffusion processes. In this paper we present a new diagnostic tool for analysis of numerical simulations of reacting flow. Our approach is based on recasting an Eulerian flow solution in a Lagrangian frame. Unlike a conventional Lagrangian view point that follows the evolution of a volume of the fluid, we instead follow specific chemical elements, e.g., carbon, nitrogen, etc., as they move through the system . From this perspective an ''atom'' is part of some molecule of a species that is transported through the domain by advection and diffusion. Reactions cause the atom to shift from one chemical host species to another and the subsequent transport of the atom is given by the movement of the new species. We represent these processes using a stochastic particle formulation that treats advection deterministically and models diffusion and chemistry as stochastic processes. In this paper, we discuss the …

The conceptual and predictive models documented in this Engineered Barrier System: Physical and Chemical Environment Model report describe the evolution of the physical and chemical conditions within the waste emplacement drifts of the repository. The modeling approaches and model output data will be used in the total system performance assessment (TSPA-LA) to assess the performance of the engineered barrier system and the waste form. These models evaluate the range of potential water compositions within the emplacement drifts, resulting from the interaction of introduced materials and minerals in dust with water seeping into the drifts and with aqueous solutions forming by deliquescence of dust (as influenced by atmospheric conditions), and from thermal-hydrological-chemical (THC) processes in the drift. These models also consider the uncertainty and variability in water chemistry inside the drift and the compositions of introduced materials within the drift. This report develops and documents a set of process- and abstraction-level models that constitute the engineered barrier system: physical and chemical environment model. Where possible, these models use information directly from other process model reports as input, which promotes integration among process models used for total system performance assessment. Specific tasks and activities of modeling the physical and chemical environment are …

During this quarter, work was focused on testing layered composite membranes under varying feed stream flow rates at high pressure. By optimizing conditions, H{sub 2} permeation rates in excess of 400 mL {center_dot} min{sup -1} {center_dot} cm{sup -2} at 440 C were measured. Membrane stability was characterized by repeated thermal and pressure cycling. The effect of cermet grain size on permeation was determined. Finally, progress is summarized on thin film cermet fabrication, catalyst development, and H{sub 2} separation unit scale up.

The objective of this study was to examine the homogeneous and heterogeneous reduction of Cr(VI) by dissolved Fe(II) and Fe(II)-containing minerals under conditions thought to be indicative of HLW fluids (high pH, high ionic strength and high temperature). Many investigators have reported the homogeneous reduction of Cr(VI) by dissolved FE(ii), but less information is available for Ph values > 8. The first part of this effort evaluated the ability of dissolved Fe(II) to reduce dissolved Cr(VI) in hyperalkaline solutions.

This report describes the work performed during the second year of the project, ''Investigating of Efficiency Improvements during CO{sub 2} Injection in Hydraulically and Naturally Fractured Reservoirs.'' The objective of this project is to perform unique laboratory experiments with artificial fractured cores (AFCs) and X-ray CT to examine the physical mechanisms of bypassing in HFR and NFR that eventually result in less efficient CO{sub 2} flooding in heterogeneous or fracture-dominated reservoirs. To achieve this objective, in this period we concentrated our effort on investigating the effect of CO{sub 2} injection rates in homogeneous and fractured cores on oil recovery and a strategy to mitigate CO{sub 2} bypassing in a fractured core.

For a particle moving in nonuniform magnetic field under the action of an rf wave, ponderomotive effects result from rf-driven oscillations nonlinearly coupled with Larmor rotation. Using Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalism, we show how, despite this coupling, two independent integrals of the particle motion are approximately conserved. Those are the magnetic moment of free Larmor rotation and the quasi-energy of the guiding center motion parallel to the magnetic field. Under the assumption of non-resonant interaction of the particle with the rf field, these integrals represent adiabatic invariants of the particle motion.

We report the results of variational calculations of elastic electron scattering by tetrafluoroethene, C{sub 2}F{sub 4}, with incident electron energies ranging from 0.5 to 20 eV, using the complex Kohn method and effective core potentials. These are the first fully calculations to reproduce experimental angular differential cross sections at energies below 10 eV. Low-energy electron scattering by C{sub 2}F{sub 4} is sensitive to the inclusion of electronic correlation and target-distortion effects. We therefore present results that describe the dynamic polarization of the target by the incident electron. The calculated cross sections are compared with recent experimental measurements.

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This report describes the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (the GLB Act), which Congress passed in 1999 to enhance competition among financial services providers and to modernize their regulation. Since then, markets have not really integrated, and regulatory silos - with few exceptions - remain intact. Congress is now exploring federal standards for some aspects of state regulation of insurance.

Report on the diversity visa lottery, which "encourag[es] legal immigration from countries other than the major sending countries of current immigration to the United States" (p. 1).