A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In 1994, the United States and other countries intervened militarily in Haiti to restore the democratically elected government that had been overthrown by the Haitian military several years earlier. During the last 6 years, the United States provided assistance to help Haiti establish its first civilian-controlled police and improve its judicial system. About $70 million in U.S. assistance helped Haiti recruit, train, organize, and equip a basic police force, including specialized units. However, despite these achievements, the police and judicial sector have displayed several weaknesses. The Haitian government's lack of a clear commitment to addressing the major problems of its police and judicial institutions has been the key factor affecting the success of the U.S. assistance provided to these institutions. The United States is reassessing several aspects of its relationship with Haiti because of concerns about how votes were counted in Haiti's May 2000 elections. The United States and Haiti have been unable to negotiate an agreement for continuing this assistance. At this time, any further aid to the Haitian Justice System should be linked to performance-related conditions."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2004, an estimated 23 billion pounds of air cargo was transported within the United States, about a quarter of which was transported on passenger aircraft. Within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is responsible for ensuring the security of commercial aviation, including the transportation of cargo by air. To evaluate the status of TSA's efforts to secure domestic air cargo, GAO examined (1) the extent to which TSA used a risk management approach to guide decisions on securing air cargo, (2) the actions TSA has taken to ensure the security of air cargo and the factors that may limit their effectiveness, and (3) TSA's plans for enhancing air cargo security and the challenges TSA and industry stakeholders face in implementing these plans."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "On January 13, 2004, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued two sets of rules (the preemption rules) on the extent to which the National Bank Act preempts the application of state and local laws to national banks and their operating subsidiaries. The rules and the manner in which OCC promulgated them generated considerable controversy. Some state officials, consumer groups, and congressional members questioned whether OCC adhered to the statutes and executive orders pertaining to rulemaking and whether the process was as inclusive as it could have been. GAO (1) assessed OCC's rulemaking process within the framework of applicable laws and executive orders, (2) described the issues raised in comment letters and OCC's responses, and (3) identified and discussed stakeholder concerns about how OCC promulgated its preemption rules."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Community economic development (CED) lenders serve the credit needs of nonconventional borrowers and economically distressed areas across the nation. However, little is known about this industry, its ability to tap private sources of capital, and loan performance and volume in the industry. To provide information that would be helpful in considering the role that the federal government might play in facilitating the creation of a secondary market for CED loans, GAO was asked among other items to (1) determine the barriers to more widely securitizing CED loans and (2) identify options for overcoming these barriers and the likely implications of these options."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report focuses on the default rate for student loans. Two major federal student loan programs, the Federal Direct Loan Program (FDLP) and the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), together provided student borrowers with about 9 million loans totaling about $42.9 billion in fiscal year 1999. The most recent student loan default rate statistics for schools showed that, overall, the direct and guaranteed student loan programs had similar default rates: at 6.6 percent for FDLP and 6.7 percent for FFELP. The two programs had similar default rates when the comparisons focused on the type of school. FDLP has two types of loans, consolidated and nonconsolidated. Generally, borrowers with consolidated loans who used the standard payment plan had a lower default rate than did borrowers with nonconsolidated loans. However, when income contingent repayment plans were used, borrowers with consolidated loans had a higher default rate than did those with nonconsolidated loans. The Department of Education uses various procedures to ensure that loans are properly serviced and collected, including independent monitoring and external assessments of monitoring results."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement system is an information system to track marine safety and law-enforcement activities involving commercial and recreational vessels. In 1999, after spending about four years and $26 million, the United States Coast Guard (USCG) terminated a contract to acquire the system and will instead develop the system at its operation systems center. USCG has made progress in developing the system and was ready to deploy a minimum level of functionality in November 2001. However, USCG faces significant challenges and risks in several areas, including managing system requirements and user expectations, testing the system, moving to an operational system, and managing program risks."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The United States has been providing assistance to Colombia since the early 1970s to help the Colombian National Police and other law enforcement agencies, the military, and civilian agencies reduce illegal drug production and trafficking. Recognizing that illegal drug activities are a serious problem, the Colombian government announced a counternarcotics plan known as Plan Colombia. This report reviews the U.S. counternarcotics efforts in Colombia. Although U.S.-provided assistance has enhanced Colombian counternarcotics capabilities, its usefulness has sometimes been limited because of long-standing problems in planning and implementation. For example, little progress has been made in launching a plan to have Colombia's National Police assume a larger role in managing the aerial eradication program, which requires costly U.S. contractor assistance. The governments of the United States and Colombia face continuing and new financial and management challenges in implementing Plan Colombia. The costs and activities needed to implement the plan are unknown at this time, and it will take years before any significant reduction in the drug trade is seen. Colombia must resolve problems with its political and economic stability and improve its management of counternarcotics funding in order …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The accuracy of the 2000 decennial census depends in part on the proper functioning of 10 interrelated information systems, one of which is the Census Bureau's headquarters (HQ) processing system. The HQ processing system consists of 48 applications, all developed internally by the Bureau, that support various census operations, such as updating address files, creating a file of census responses, and preparing data for tabulation and dissemination. GAO found that the Bureau lacks effective, mature software and system development processes to control development of its HQ processing system applications."

After instability during the late 1990s, Bahrain undertook substantial political reforms, but the Shiite majority continues to simmer over the Sunni-led government's perceived manipulation of laws and regulations to maintain its grip on power. Bahrain's stability has long been a key U.S. interest; it has hosted U.S. naval headquarters for the Gulf for nearly 60 years. In September 2004, the United States and Bahrain signed a free trade agreement (FTA).

The Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP), which is an advanced high temperature gas reactor (HTGR) concept with emphasis on production of both electricity and hydrogen, involves helium as the coolant and a closed-cycle gas turbine for power generation with a core outlet/gas turbine inlet temperature of 900-1000 C. In the indirect cycle system, an intermediate heat exchanger is used to transfer the heat from primary helium from the core to the secondary fluid, which can be helium, nitrogen/helium mixture, or a molten salt. The system concept for the vary high temperature reactor (VHTR) can be a reactor based on the prismatic block of the GT-MHR developed by a consortium led by General Atomics in the U.S. or based on the PBMR design developed by ESKOM of South Africa and British Nuclear Fuels of U.K. This report has made an assessment on the issues pertaining to the intermediate heat exchanger (IHX) for the NGNP. A detailed thermal hydraulic analysis, using models developed at ANL, was performed to calculate heat transfer, temperature distribution, and pressure drop. Two IHX designs namely, shell and straight tube and compact heat exchangers were considered in an earlier assessment. Helical coil heat exchangers were analyzed in the …

Clean surfaces and those with adsorbates have been investigated to obtain electronic and atomic structure data. The various modes of synchrotron radiation (SR) photoemission spectroscopy (PES) have been performed mostly beam line 7.0.1 at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in Berkeley, CA and some at the Synchrotron Radiation Center (SRC) in Madison, WI. These were done on silicon, carbon, and group III nitrides.

The Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) will facilitate technical expertise and training of Native Americans in renewable energy resource development for electrical generation facilities, and distributed generation options contributing to feasibility studies, strategic planning and visioning. CERT will also provide information to Tribes on energy efficiency and energy management techniques.This project will provide facilitation and coordination of expertise from government agencies and private industries to interact with Native Americans in ways that will result in renewable energy resource development, energy efficiency program development, and electrical generation facilities management by Tribal entities. The intent of this cooperative agreement is to help build capacity within the Tribes to manage these important resources.

Accelerator facility upgrades, new accelerator applications, and future design efforts are leading to novel klystron and IOT device concepts, including multiple beam, high-order mode operation, and new geometry configurations of old concepts. At the same time, a new simulation capability, based upon finite-difference “cut-cell” boundaries, has emerged and is transforming the existing modeling and design capability with unparalleled realism, greater flexibility, and improved accuracy. This same new technology can also be brought to bear on a difficult-to-study aspect of the energy recovery linac (ERL), namely the accurate modeling of the exit beam, and design of the beam dump for optimum energy efficiency. We have developed new capability for design calculations and modeling of a broad class of devices which convert bunched beam kinetic energy to RF energy, including RF sources, as for example, klystrons, gyro-klystrons, IOT's, TWT’s, and other devices in which space-charge effects are important. Recent advances in geometry representation now permits very accurate representation of the curved metallic surfaces common to RF sources, resulting in unprecedented simulation accuracy. In the Phase I work, we evaluated and demonstrated the capabilities of the new geometry representation technology as applied to modeling and design of output cavity components of klystron, IOT's, …

The determination of climate policy is a decision under uncertainty. The uncertainty in future climate change impacts is large, as is the uncertainty in the costs of potential policies. Rational and economically efficient policy choices will therefore seek to balance the expected marginal costs with the expected marginal benefits. This approach requires that the risks of future climate change be assessed. The decision process need not be formal or quantitative for descriptions of the risks to be useful. Whatever the decision procedure, a useful starting point is to have as accurate a description of climate risks as possible. Given the goal of describing uncertainty in future climate change, we need to characterize the uncertainty in the main causes of uncertainty in climate impacts. One of the major drivers of uncertainty in future climate change is the uncertainty in future emissions, both of greenhouse gases and other radiatively important species such as sulfur dioxide. In turn, the drivers of uncertainty in emissions are uncertainties in the determinants of the rate of economic growth and in the technologies of production and how those technologies will change over time. This project uses historical experience and observations from a large number of countries to …

The developed software consists of two parts: FSML and VizSchema. FSML is based on an XML schema that represents the visualization entities needed for displaying fields and particles data in visualization tools. Each application is then represented by an XML instance mapping its data into the XML schema. Such XML file is used by the FSML reading library to bring in fields, particles and meshes from HDF5 files into memory. Based on this library, we developed AVS/Express and VisIt plugins. The second (more flexible) part of the software is called VizSchema. It consists of the schema expressed as a set of conventions and static data in the VizSchema code. The conventions describe the markup and organization of HDF5 data that would allow easy interpretation of data in the visualization terms. Based on theses conventions, a C++ HDF5-specific API for reading the visualization data was created. Finally, based on this library, we developed a new VisIt plugin (called Vs), which allows importing data from multiple applications using the markup. These applications include VORPAL, FACETS, UEDGE, NIMROD and MODAVE. The plugin will be included into the next releases of VisIt.

This report includes information regarding the relationship between Israel and the United States. Relations with U.S. administrations (beginning with the Carter Administration through the Bush Administration) and issues within Israeli-U.S. relations are among topics discussed in this report.

None

This report describes the recent changes to file a federal income tax return as a head of household.

This report is on Anti-Doping Policies: The Olympics and Selected Professional Sports.

Battelle received five samples from Hanford waste tank 241-AP-101, taken at five different depths within the tank. No visible solids or organic layer were observed in the individual samples. Individual sample densities were measured, then the five samples were mixed together to provide a single composite. The composite was homogenized and representative sub-samples taken for inorganic, radioisotopic, and organic analysis. All analyses were performed on triplicate sub-samples of the composite material. The sample composite did not contain visible solids or an organic layer. A subsample held at 10?C for seven days formed no visible solids.

The contents of this final report require explanation, as the report cannot be written in a manner consistent with the usual guidelines for a final scientific technical report. The original PI on this grant was Professor Paul Kintner who passed away November 16, 2010. I, Charles E. Seyler, was asked by the Director of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering to take over the grant last May and try to fulfill its obligations to the PIs at the lead institution (UNH). I have worked with Professor Kintner over the years and have published joint papers with him on the subject of this grant. Consequently, I was in the best position to carry out the remainder of the grant obligations at Cornell. When the grant was transferred to me, I immediately contacted the PI, Li-Jen Chen, and asked about the obligations of the Cornell collaboration and what plans Professor Kintner had made had done previously to meet them. I also offered my assistance in the way of contributing to the project in a way that my background would allow. I have considerable experience in interpretation of space-related data and I am somewhat familiar with LAPD. I have also performed plasma …

Deposit summary of $1,000.00 made on October 17, 2002.

Perform verification surveys of 19 available grids located in the Lester Flat Area at the Davod Witherspoon Site. The survey grids included E11, E12, E13, F11, F12, F13, F14, F15, G15, G16, G17, H16, H17, H18, X16, X17, X18, K16, and J16.

This document presents the adequacy evaluation for the application of technology standards during design, fabrication, installation and testing of radioactive air exhaust systems at the Physical Sciences Facility (PSF), located on the Horn Rapids Triangle north of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) complex. The analysis specifically covers the exhaust portion of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems associated with emission units EP-3410-01-S, EP-3420-01-S and EP 3430-01-S.