The primary purpose of this issue brief is to focus on the current legislative action in the 107th Congress with respect to abortion; however, understanding that legislation requires a review of the U. S. Supreme Court’s leading decisions concerning a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate her pregnancy. For a detailed discussion of the case law, see CRS Report 95-724, Abortion Law Development: A Brief Overview.

One of the objectives of the U.S. Department of Defense is to standardize all classes used in object-oriented deployment simulations by developing a standard class attribute representation and behavior for all deployment simulations that rely on an underlying class representation. The EXtensive Hierarchy and Object Representation for Transportation Simulations (EXHORT) is a class framework composed of two hierarchies that together constitute a standard and consistent class attribute representation and behavior that could be used directly by a large set of deployment simulations. The first hierarchy, the Transportation Class Hierarchy (TCH), was submitted to the Army Modeling and Simulation Office's (AMSO) Army Standards Repository in 1999 and presented at the Fall Simulation Interoperability Workshop in the same year. The second hierarchy, the Infrastructure Class Hierarchy (ICH), describes the encapsulation of the rest of the defense transportation system and is the primary focus of this paper. The entire EXHORT framework lets deployment simulations use the same set of underlying class data, ensures transparent exchanges, reduces the effort needed to integrate simulations, and permits a detailed analysis of the defense transportation system.

As a first step towards developing liquid lithium target technology for a future high-power nuclear physics fragmentation facility, an adjustable thickness Li/Be hybrid target is being constructed for use at the NSCL. This target will use beryllium windows with flowing lithium. The lithium serves as a part of the target as well as the coolant. Up to 1 kW of beam power is dissipated in the target and is carried away by the recirculating liquid lithium loop. It is designed for high power beams in the mass range from oxygen to calcium. Tapered beryllium windows combined with a uniform thickness lithium channel gives an overall target thickness ranging from 0.7 g/cm{sup 2} to 3 g/cm{sup 2}, which is adjusted by moving the target vertically. The target system design is complete and is described in this paper.

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Our understanding of the generation of coherent synchrotron radiation in magnetic bending systems and its impact on beam dynamics has grown considerably over the past few years. The search for understanding has brought a number of surprises, all related to the complexity of the fully self-consistent problem. Herein I survey the associated phenomenology, theory, and experiments while emphasizing important subtleties that have recently been uncovered. I conclude by speculating on courses of future investigations that may prove fruitful.

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Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Section 127a, title 10 of the United States Code provides the Department of Defense (DOD) with two options for funding nontraining deployments and operations when Congress has not provided funds in advance. These options involve waiving reimbursements for support services and transferring amounts from other DOD accounts. Section 127a prescribes specific procedures to be followed by DOD when these funding options are used; requires DOD to notify Congress of and report on certain new contingency operations; and states that the Comptroller General of the United States shall from time to time, and when requested by a Committee of Congress, conduct a review to determine whether DOD is complying with the statutory requirements and limitations. GAO found that DOD has complied with the requirements contained in section 127a. Since the current notification and reporting requirements of section 127a were enacted in 1996, DOD has provided congressional notification for four operations, involving Bosnia, Kosovo, hurricane relief in Central America, and East Timor. DOD has rarely used the funding options provided in section 127a. It used the section 127a funding option allowing waiver of reimbursement for units providing support once, for …

Natural gas transmission companies mark the right-of-way areas where pipelines are buried with warning signs to prevent accidental third-party damage. Nevertheless, pipelines are sometimes damaged by third-party construction equipment. A single incident can be devastating, causing death and millions of dollars of property loss. This damage would be prevented if potentially hazardous construction equipment could be detected, identified, and an alert given before the pipeline was damaged. The Gas Technology Institute (GTI) is developing a system to solve this problem by using an optical fiber as a distributed sensor and interrogating the fiber with an custom optical time domain reflectometer. Key issues are the ability to detect encroachment and the ability to discriminate among potentially hazardous and benign encroachments. The work performed in the third quarter of the project (2nd quarter of 2002) includes design of the diode laser driver and high-speed detector electronics and programming of the custom optical time domain reflectometer.

This paper introduces two efficient algorithms that compute the Contour Tree of a 3D scalar field F and its augmented version with the Betti numbers of each isosurface. The Contour Tree is a fundamental data structure in scientific visualization that is used to pre-process the domain mesh to allow optimal computation of isosurfaces with minimal storage overhead. The Contour Tree can be also used to build user interfaces reporting the complete topological characterization of a scalar field, as shown in Figure 1. In the first part of the paper we present a new scheme that augments the Contour Tree with the Betti numbers of each isocontour in linear time. We show how to extend the scheme introduced in 3 with the Betti number computation without increasing its complexity. Thus we improve on the time complexity from our previous approach 8 from 0(m log m) to 0(n log n+m), where m is the number of tetrahedra and n is the number of vertices in the domain of F. In the second part of the paper we introduce a new divide and conquer algorithm that computes the Augmented Contour Tree for scalar fields defined on rectilinear grids. The central part of the …

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This report summarizes current housing issues, cites legislative proposals, and in some cases, presents brief pro/con discussions.

This report discusses intelligence issues for Congress including narcotics trafficking, conflicts between Israel and Palestine, in Iraq, and among the former Yugoslav states, and North Korean missile capabilities. updated July 19, 2002.

The Interstate Clean Transportation (ICTC) purpose is to develop a public-private partnership dedicated to accelerating the market penetration of clean, alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) in interstate goods movement. In order to foster project development, the ICTC activity sought to increase awareness of heavy-duty AFVs among truck fleet operators.

Polycrystals of the intermetallic compound of the Dy{sub 5}(Si{sub x}Ge{sub 1-x}){sub 4} system, where x = 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.625, 0.675, 0.725, 0.75, 0.775, 0.825, 0.875, and 1, have been prepared by electric-arc-melting on water-cooled copper hearth in an argon atmosphere. A study of phase relationships and crystallography in the pseudobinary system Dy{sub 5}(Si{sub x}Ge{sub 1-x}){sub 4} using X-ray powder diffraction data and optical metallography was completed. It revealed that silicides in the composition range from 0.825 to 1 crystallize in the Gd{sub 5}Si{sub 4}-type crystal structure: germanides in the composition range from 0 to 0.625 crystallize in the Sm{sub 5}Ge{sub 4}-type structure, and alloys with intermediate composition range from 0.675 to 0.775 crystallize in the monoclinic Gd{sub 5}Si{sub 2}Ge{sub 2}-type structure. The -{Delta}S{sub m} values were determined from magnetization measurements for 7 alloys. The alloys with a monoclinic crystal structure which belong to an intermediate phase region have large MCE value, which exceeds those observed in the other two phase regions by 300 to 500%. The nature of the observed magnetic and structural transformations in the Dy{sub 5}(Si{sub x}Ge{sub 1-x}){sub 4} system seems to be similar with those reported for the Gd{sub 5}(Si{sub x}Ge{sub 1-x}){sub 4} system. However, the …

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A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The 6,900 Home Health Agencies (HHAs) that serve Medicare beneficiaries must meet federal requirements, known as conditions of participation (COP), to ensure that they have the appropriate staff, are following the plan of care specified by a physician, maintain medical records to document the care provided, and periodically reassess each patient's condition. Although nationwide surveys done at HHAs since 1998 have identified a small proportion of agencies with serious deficiencies, the extent of the problem may be understated, and dangerous situations affecting home health patients may occur more often than documented. Shortcomings in the survey process and inconsistencies in state surveys make it difficult to assess the quality of care delivered and may mask potential problems. The ability to lodge complaints about an HHA and have them resolved promptly is important to protecting patient health and safety. HHA oversight by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has been too limited to identify the problems GAO found in the survey process. CMS does not review state compliance with requirements for conducting HHA surveys, such as whether HHAs with COP-level deficiencies are surveyed annually rather than …

A Monte Carlo procedure is used to generate N-particle configurations compatible with two-temperature canonical equilibria in two dimensions, with particular attention to nonlinear plasma gyrokinetics. An unusual feature of the problem is the importance of a nontrivial probability density function R0(PHI), the probability of realizing a set {Phi} of Fourier amplitudes associated with an ensemble of uniformly distributed, independent particles. This quantity arises because the equilibrium distribution is specified in terms of {Phi}, whereas the sampling procedure naturally produces particles states gamma; {Phi} and gamma are related via a gyrokinetic Poisson equation, highly nonlinear in its dependence on gamma. Expansion and asymptotic methods are used to calculate R0(PHI) analytically; excellent agreement is found between the large-N asymptotic result and a direct numerical calculation. The algorithm is tested by successfully generating a variety of states of both positive and negative temperature, including ones in which either the longest- or shortest-wavelength modes are excited to relatively very large amplitudes.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Each year, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insures billions of dollars in multifamily housing mortgage loans to help construct, rehabilitate, purchase, and refinance apartments and health care facilities. However, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) lacks assurances that the lenders approved for the Multifamily Accelerated Processing (MAP) program always meet all of HUD's qualifications. HUD's guidance requires prospective lenders to submit documents showing that they are financially sound, have a satisfactory lending record, and have qualified underwriters. GAO found that HUD did not always comply with, or effectively implement, controls and procedures for reviewing and monitoring MAP lenders' underwriting of loans. Before issuing a loan, field staff are required to conduct and document reviews of lenders' mortgage insurance applications and associated loan exhibits to ensure compliance with HUD underwriting requirements. However, staff did not always properly document their reviews. HUD has held some lenders accountable for specific violations of program requirements but is unable to systematically identify lenders that exhibit patterns of noncompliance. To hold lenders accountable for specific violations or for patterns of noncompliance, HUD's Office of Multifamily Housing can suspend or terminate …