Members of the military and U.S. citizens who live abroad are eligible to register and vote absentee in federal elections under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) of 1986. The law was enacted to improve absentee registration and voting for this group of voters and to consolidate existing laws. This report summarizes the UOCAVA and details modifications and improvements to the UOCAVA since its inception, as well as related pieces of legislation.

Proposals to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases often include the use of forestry and agricultural practices and lands for carbon sequestration. However, uncertainty about the accuracy of measuring carbon from these activities has led some to question this potential. Basic approaches for measuring forest and agricultural carbon include on-site measurement; indirect measurement from off-site tools; and estimation using models or inferences. Because of challenges associated with balancing the cost and accuracy of these measurement tools, any practicable system for measuring forest and agricultural carbon might require a mix of these approaches.

This report examines the current status of the credit, summarizes its legislative history, discusses some key policy issues it raises, and describes legislation in the 110th Congress to modify or extend it.

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 certain posted agenda items satisfy the notice requirements of the Open Meetings Act, chapter 551, Government Code (RQ-0696-GA)

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In September 1999, the government of Colombia announced a strategy, known as "Plan Colombia," to (1) reduce the production of illicit drugs (primarily cocaine) by 50 percent in 6 years and (2) improve security in Colombia by re-claiming control of areas held by illegal armed groups. Since fiscal year 2000, the United States has provided over $6 billion to support Plan Colombia. The Departments of State, Defense, and Justice and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) manage the assistance. GAO examined (1) the progress made toward Plan Colombia's drug reduction and enhanced security objectives, (2) the results of U.S. aid for the military and police, (3) the results of U.S. aid for non-military programs, and (4) the status of efforts to "nationalize" or transfer operations and funding responsibilities for U.S.-supported programs to Colombia."

Application materials submitted to the Texas Historical Commission requesting a historic marker for the Allen-Fowler House, in Bastrop, Texas. The materials include the inscription text of the marker, original application, narrative, floor plans, maps, and photographs.

This report analyzes Brazil's political, economic, and social conditions, and how those conditions affect its role in the region and its relationship with the United States.

This report surveys military courts' jurisdiction, the structure of appellate review for military cases, interactions between military and civilian courts, the Stevenson case, and the bills introduced in the 110th Congress.

This report discusses "green" programs and the higher profile they have gained in the 110th Congress. "Green" programs are those designed to create an environmentally friendly work environment and conserve energy. This report discusses initiatives and policy options that would improve the "greening" process on Capitol Hill.

This report discusses congressional interest in securing the nation's pipelines. Nearly half a million miles of oil and natural gas transmission pipeline crisscross the United States. While an efficient and fundamentally safe means of transport, many pipelines carry hazardous materials with the potential to cause public injury and environmental damage.

This report discusses the current status of NATO membership following the April 2-4, 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania. A principal issue was consideration of the candidacies for membership of Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia. The allies agreed to extend invitations to Albania and Croatia. Although the alliance determined that Macedonia met the qualifications for NATO membership, Greece blocked the invitation due to an enduring dispute over Macedonia's name.

This report discusses the awaited revision of the 2001 Public Health and Safety Standard for the proposed Yucca Mountain deep geologic repository, high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.

This report discusses the current political and economic conditions in Russia, focusing on the impact of Vladimir Putin's leadership and the leadership of his successor/protégé, Dmitriy Medvedev. The report also discusses the state of the economy since the Soviet collapse in 1999, how the recent global economic downturn has affected Russia, the state of Russia's military, and the current relationship between Russia and the United States.

This report is a guide to one of the regular appropriations bills that Congress considers each year. It is designed to supplement the information provided by the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Defense. This report summarizes the status of defense authorization and appropriation bills, their scope, major issues, funding levels, and related congressional activity.

This report contains the history and increases of the debt limit for the second time in 2008.

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We investigatethe reconstruction of high pT hadronically-decaying top quarksat the Large Hadron Collider. One of the main challenges in identifying energetictop quarks is that the decay products become increasingly collimated. This reducesthe efficacy of conventional reconstruction methods that exploit the topology of thetop quark decay chain. We focus on the cases where the decay products of the topquark are reconstructed as a single jet, a"top-jet." The most basic"top-tag" methodbased on jet mass measurement is considered in detail. To analyze the feasibility ofthe top-tagging method, both theoretical and experimental aspects of the large QCDjet background contribution are examined. Based on a factorization approach, wederive a simple analytic approximation for the shape of the QCD jet mass spectrum.We observe very good agreement with the Monte Carlo simulation. We consider high pT tt bar production in the Standard Model as an example, and show that our theoretical QCD jet mass distributions can efficiently characterize the background via sideband analyses. We show that with 25 fb-1 of data, our approach allows us to resolve top-jets with pT _> 1 TeV, from the QCD background, and about 1.5 TeV top-jets with 100 fb-1, without relying on b-tagging. To further improve the significancewe consider jet shapes …

Even though RHIC has two full Siberian snakes in each ring, there are various perturbations to the ideal case including orbit errors at the snakes, experiment solenoids, injection bumps, and interlaced horizontal-vertical bumps at the hydrogen jet polarimeter. These errors can cause depolarization by shifting the spin tune and tilting the stable spin direction away from vertical. Tilting of the stable spin axis can enhance horizontal depolarizing resonances. This paper presents preliminary results for some of these error scenarios, as well as their impact on the stable spin directions at STAR and PHENIX.

This research focused on efforts to prepare and characterize the first copper-indium-boron-diselenide (CIBS) photovoltaic materials. Attempts to fabricate CIBS in thin-film form followed a three-step process: 1) RF sputtering of copper, indium, and boron to form a copper-indium-boron (CIB) alloy; 2) ex-situ selenization of CIB via physical vapor deposition; 3) annealing the final product. No CIBS materials were produced with this method due to the formation of an unstable boron diselenide species that formed in step 2. Detailed investigations of the CIB alloy formation revealed that boron does not adequately mix with the copper and indium in step 1. In the last year, a nanoscience-based method has shown greater promise for successful CIBS preparation. In this two-step method, sources of copper, indium, boron, and selenium are combined and heated in a high-boiling amine solvent. The isolated product is then annealed at temperatures between 400-500 deg. C. Currently, purified CIBS has not been isolated and characterized but further study and development of this nanoscience-based method is in progress through the support of two grants from the DOE Office of Energy Renewability and Efficiency and the State of Nebraska’s Nebraska Research Initiative program. The research described in this report resulted in four …

We present the results of a search for B{sup +} meson decays into {gamma}{ell}{sup +}{nu}{sub {ell}}, where {ell} = e,{mu}. We use a sample of 232 million B{bar B} meson pairs recorded at the {Upsilon}(4S) resonance with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II B factory. We measure a partial branching fraction {Delta}{beta} in a restricted region of phase space that reduces the effect of theoretical uncertainties, requiring the lepton energy to be in the range 1.875 and 2.850 GeV, the photon energy to be in the range 0.45 and 2.35 GeV, and the cosine of the angle between the lepton and photon momenta to be less than -0.36, with all quantities computed in the {Upsilon}(4S) center-of-mass frame. We find {Delta}{Beta}(B{sup +} {yields} {gamma}{ell}{sup +}{nu}{sub {ell}}) = (-0.3{sub 1.5}{sup +1.3}(statistical){sub -0.6}{sup +0.6}(systematic) {+-} 0.1(theoretical)) x 10{sup -6}, under the assumption of lepton universality. Interpreted as a 90% confidence-level Bayesian upper limit, the result corresponds to 1.7 x 10{sup -6} for a prior at in amplitude, and 2.3 x 10{sup -6} for a prior at in branching fraction.

We discuss two recent calculations of higher-order QeD corrections to scattering of transversely polarized hadrons. A basic concept underlying much of the theoretical description of high-energy hadronic scattering is the factorization theorem, which states that large momentum-transfer reactions may be factorized into long-distance pieces that contain information on the structure of the nucleon in terms of its parton densities, and parts that are short-distance and describe the hard interactions of the partons. Two crucial points are that on the one hand the long-distance contributions are universal, i.e., they are the same in any inelastic reaction under consideration, and that on the other hand the short-distance pieces depend only on the large scales related to the large momentum transfer in the overall reaction and, therefore, may be evaluated using QCD perturbation theory. The lowest order for the latter can generally only serve to give a rough description of the reaction under study. It merely captures the main features, but does not usually provide a quantitative understanding. The first-order ('next-to-leading order' (NLO)) corrections are generally indispensable in order to arrive at a firmer theoretical prediction for hadronic cross sections, and in some cases even an all-order resummation of large perturbative corrections is …