A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) of 1994 protects millions of people, largely National Guard and Reserve members, as they transition between their federal duties and their civilian employment. The act is intended to eliminate or minimize employment disadvantages to civilian careers that can result from service in the uniformed services. This report examines the extent to which the Departments of Defense (DOD), Labor (DOL), Justice (DOJ), and the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) have achieved this purpose, specifically, the extent to which the agencies (1) have data that indicate the level of compliance with USERRA, (2) have efficiently and effectively conducted educational outreach, and (3) have efficiently and effectively addressed servicemember complaints."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Joint Strike Fighter Program (JSFP), the military's most expensive aircraft program, is intended to produce affordable, next-generation aircraft to replace aging aircraft in military inventories. Although JSFP has made good progress in some technology areas, the program may not meet its affordability objective because critical technologies are not projected to be matured to levels GAO believes would indicate a low risk program at the planned start of engineering and manufacturing development in October 2001."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In January 2007 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported the results of its study that assigned the fiscal year 2005 costs of its Air Traffic Organization (ATO) to users. FAA used this study to support the President's proposal to replace many current excise taxes with cost-based fees for commercial aviation users and higher fuel taxes for general aviation users. GAO assessed (1) the consistency of FAA's cost assignment methodology with established standards and guidance, (2) the support for selected cost assignment assumptions and methods, and (3) the impact of including budgeted capital costs in the cost baseline. GAO compared FAA's methodology to federal accounting standards and international guidance, reviewed available documents and analyses supporting FAA's assumptions and methods, and interviewed FAA officials and consultants."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is among the largest federal acquisition agencies, spending $7.3 billion on product and service acquisitions in 2004 alone. Recent reports by VA and other organizations identified weaknesses in the agency's acquisition function that could result in excess costs to the taxpayer. One report by the Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP) made 24 recommendations to improve VA's acquisition function. VA has accepted these recommendations. GAO was asked to review the progress VA has made in implementing the key NAVSUP recommendations. GAO identified 7 of the 24 recommendations as key, based primarily on its professional judgment and prior experience."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since 1988, the Department of State (State) has ordered over 270 evacuations from overseas posts due to civil strife, terrorist incidents, natural disasters, conventional war threats, and disease outbreaks. To prepare for evacuation, overseas posts rely on a variety of guidance, plans, and training, such as Emergency Action Plans (EAP). GAO was asked to assess State's (1) guidance and plans to prepare for evacuation, (2) training and exercises to prepare post staff for crisis, and (3) efforts to collect, analyze, and incorporate evacuation lessons learned into guidance and training. GAO examined State and Department of Defense (DOD) documents, spoke with State and DOD officials, conducted a survey of 243 overseas posts, and completed 22 structured interviews with State personnel."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Prices for four energy commodities--crude oil, heating oil, unleaded gasoline, and natural gas--have risen substantially since 2002. Some observers believe that higher energy prices are the result of changes in supply and demand. Others believe that increased futures trading activity has also contributed to higher prices. This report, conducted under the Comptroller General of the United States' authority, examines (1) trends and patterns in the physical and energy derivatives markets, (2) the scope of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) regulatory authority over these markets, and (3) the effectiveness of CFTC's monitoring and detection of market abuses and enforcement. For this work, GAO analyzed futures and large trader data and interviewed market participants, experts, and officials at six federal agencies."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Public assessments by Department of Defense (DOD) officials have emphasized the seriousness of the military threat from chemical and biological (CB) weapons. However, neither DOD nor the services have systematically examined the adequacy of the current specialty mix of medical personnel for CB defense. Although some of the services have begun to review the adequacy of staffing of deployable medical units that would manage the consequences of chemical warfare scenarios, they have not done so for biological warfare scenarios. Joint protocols for treating CB casualties have recently been completed, but the services have not yet agreed on which health care providers should provide treatment. Relatively few military health care providers are trained to a standard of proficiency in providing care to CB casualties. The service surgeons general have begun integrating chemical and a few biological scenarios into their medical exercises, but no realistic field exercise of medical support for CB warfare had been concluded. DOD and the services have not fully addressed weaknesses and gaps in modeling, planning, training, tracking, or proficiency testing for the treatment of CB casualties. The resulting medical structure has not been …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The first Internet pharmacies began online service in early 1999. Public health officials are concerned about Internet pharmacies that do not adhere to state licensing requirements and standards. Public officials are also concerned about the validity of prescriptions and international drugs that are not approved in the United States being sent by mail. The unique qualities of the Internet pose new challenges for enforcing state pharmacy and medical practice laws because they allow pharmacies and physicians to reach consumers across state and international borders and remain anonymous. Congress is considering legislation to strengthen oversight of Internet pharmacies."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program was created to increase the use of small businesses to meet federal research needs and commercialize the results of this research. To monitor the program, the Small Business Administration (SBA) requires participating agencies to provide, in a standard format, specific data on all SBIR awards they make. SBA then compiles these data into a database known as Tech-Net. Congress also required SBA to create, by 2001, a restricted and more comprehensive database that would provide information for government agencies to use in evaluating the program. GAO was asked to identify the (1) types of data that agencies report to SBA for inclusion in the Tech-Net database, (2) extent to which these data are provided in a standard format, (3) extent to which SBA has established the government-use database, and (4) extent to which SBIR agencies have developed and implemented techniques to track commercialization of SBIR projects. GAO reviewed 8 of the 11 agencies participating in SBIR."

Soft X-ray imager mirrors have been designed, calibrated and fabricated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and characterized at the Advanced Light Source for their performance between 200 and 1300 eV. The mirrors are coated with a multilayer coating consisting of 70 bilayers of W/ SiC. The mirrors are to reflect at 22.5 deg from grazing angle at 1.50 nm wavelength and the width of the reflectivity peak should be at least 1.3%. Also, the mirrors should be non-reflective elsewhere. Our multilayer design was optimized to satisfy these requirements. The coating is very challenging since the individual layer thicknesses need to be less than 1 nm thick and reproducibility from layer to layer is crucial. To minimize the second harmonic peak we designed a multilayer with {Gamma} = 0.5 (W and SiC layer thicknesses are the same). This way we end up with a mirror that has only the 1st and 3rd harmonic peak as shown in Figure 1. To suppress reflectivity outside the first peak we used our novel approach, an antireflective coating. Modeling predicted substantial reduction in reflectivity, especially for lower energies as shown in Figure 1. The experimental results of the soft x-ray imager mirror as measured at …

The 1607-F7, 141-M Building Septic Tank waste site was a septic tank and drain field that received sanitary sewage from the former 141-M Building. Remedial action was performed in August and November 2005. The results of verification sampling demonstrate that residual contaminant concentrations support future unrestricted land uses that can be represented by a rural-residential scenario. These results also show that residual concentrations support unrestricted future use of shallow zone soil and that contaminant levels remaining in the soil are protective of groundwater and the Columbia River.

In a study designed to provide an improved scientific basis for assessing possible health effects from inhaling depleted uranium (DU) aerosols, a series of DU penetrators was fired at an Abrams tank and a Bradley fighting vehicle. A robust sampling system was designed to collect aerosols in this difficult environment and continuously monitor the sampler flow rates. Aerosols collected were analyzed for uranium concentration and particle size distribution as a function of time. They were also analyzed for uranium oxide phases, particle morphology, and dissolution in vitro. The resulting data provide input useful in human health risk assessments.

In the Sustained Spheromak Physics Experiment, (SSPX) ['Improved operation of the SSPX spheromak', R.D. Wood, D.N. Hill, E.B. Hooper, S. Woodruff1, H.S. McLean and B.W. Stallard, Nucl. Fusion 45 1582-1588 (2005)], plasmas with core electron temperatures reaching up to 500 eV at densities of 10{sup 20}/m{sup 3} have been sustained for several milliseconds, making them suitable as targets for neutral beam injection. High performance and further progress in understanding Spheromak plasma physics are expected if neutral beams are injected into the plasma. This paper presents the results of numerical 1.5 D modeling of the plasma to calculate neutral beam current drive and ion and electron heating. The results are presented for varying initial conditions of density, temperatures and profiles and beam energy, injection angle and power. Current drive efficiency (Ampere/Watt of absorbed power) of up to 0.08 can be achieved with best performance SSPX shots as target. Analyses of neutral beam heating indicate that ion temperatures of up to 1.5 keV and electron temperatures of up to 750 eV can be obtained with injection of about 1 MW of neutral beam for 5-10 ms and with diffusivities typically observed in SSPX. Injection targeting near the magnetic axis appears to be …

High energy density science (HEDS), as a discipline that has developed in the United States from National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA)-sponsored laboratory research programs, is, and will remain, a major component of the NNSA science and technology strategy. Its scientific borders are not restricted to NNSA. 'Frontiers in High Energy Density Physics: The X-Games of Contemporary Science' identified numerous exciting scientific opportunities in this field, while pointing to the need for a overarching interagency plan for its evolution. Meanwhile, construction of the first x-ray free-electron laser, the Office-of-Science-funded Linear Coherent Light Source-LCLS: the world's first free electron x-ray laser, with 100-fsec time resolution, tunable x-ray energies, a high rep rate, and a 10 order-of-magnitude increase in brightness over any other x-ray source--led to the realization that the scientific needs of NNSA and the broader scientific community could be well served by an LCLS HEDS endstation employing both short-pulse and high-energy optical lasers. Development of this concept has been well received in the community. NNSA requested a workshop on the applicability of LCLS to its needs. 'High Energy Density Science at the LCLS: NNSA Defense Programs Mission Need' was held in December 2006. The workshop provided strong support for the relevance …

None

This report provides background and discussion of policy issues relating to U.S. ethanol production, especially ethanol made from corn.

This report discusses the case of San people of Botswana against the government of Botswana.

We report on the raw disk i/o performance of a set of Compaq StorageWorks RAID arrays connected to our cluster of Compaq ES40 computers via Fibre Channel. The best cumulative peak sustained data rate is l17MB/s per node for reads and 77MB/s per node for writes. This value occurs for a configuration in which a node has two Fibre Channel interfaces to a switch, which in turn has two connections to each of two Compaq StorageWorks RAID arrays. Each RAID array has two HSG80 RAID controllers controlling (together) two 5+p RAID chains. A 10% more space efficient arrangement using a single 1l+p RAID chain in place of the two 5+P chains is 25% slower for reads and 40% slower for writes.

This report discusses the military personnel financial services protection act: H.R. 5011, 108th The bill utilizes both Congress’ constitutional Commerce Power authority to enact insurance legislation, and the states’ traditional regulation of the insurance industry1 to create a scheme for regulating the sale of certain life insurance products to military personnel that supporters argue is fairer and more transparent than is currently the case.

None

Key components of federal policies to reduce fuel consumption include the promotion of alternatives to petroleum fuels and the promotion of more efficient vehicles. This report provides an overview of current issues surrounding alternative fuels and advanced technology vehicles — issues discussed in further detail in other CRS reports referred to in each section.

None

None

The $3000 of funding provided by this grant supported a well-attended (150 people) symposium at the annual Radiation Research Society meeting in Denver, Colorado, on October 19, 2005. The symposium was entitled, ''Chemistry and Biology of Radical-mediated Deoxyribose Oxidation in DNA'', and it focused on the chemistry of damage to deoxyribose caused by radiation and other oxidants, and the role of this chemistry in the biological consequences and responses of cells to chemical and physical insults. The talks highlighted the emerging evidence for a major role for deoxyribose oxidation in the toxic effects of ionizing radiation.