This report presents an overview of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. This is a clash between the principles of territorial integrity and self-determination that is occurring in the Caucasus, creating the longest inter-ethnic dispute in the former Soviet Union. The report includes the background and analysis of history, warfare and peace process in the region. The report discusses the Armenian and Azerbaijani perspective, the role and views of others (Iran, Turkey, Russia), as well as the U.S. policy regarding the conflict.

Innovative program to explore the viability of using Cavity Ringdown Spectroscopy (CRDS) for trace analysis and monitoring of remediation processes for hazardous and radioactive wastes. Cavity ringdown spectroscopy is a measurement of the rate of absorption of a sample within a closed optical cavity rather than the standard measurement of the avsorved signal strength over a given sample path. It is a technique capable of providing ultra-sensitive absorption measurements in hostile environments using commercially available easy-to-use pulsed lasers. The inherent high sensitivity stems from both the long effective sample pathlengths possible and the relaxed constraints on the accuracy of the measurement of the cavity decay time.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) serves almost half of all infants and about one-quarter of all children between one and four years of age in the United States. The WIC program faces the following challenges: (1) coordinating its nutrition services with health and welfare programs undergoing considerable change, (2) responding to health and demographic changes in the low-income population, (3) recruiting and keeping a skilled staff, (4) improving the use of information technology to enhance service delivery and program management, (5) assessing the effect of nutrition services, and (6) meeting increased program requirements without a corresponding increase in funding. This report identifies 16 approaches to address these challenges. Each of the approaches has advantages and disadvantages that policymakers should consider."

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NREL conducted economic analysis examining two process designs for producing hydrogen from thermocatalytic decomposition based on research by Dr. Nazim Muradov of FSEC.

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Trade ministers from 142 member countries of the World Trade Organizations met in Doha, Qatar, issuing a ministerial declaration, along with two statements on developing country concerns.

The objective of this Class III project was demonstrate that reservoir characterization and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) by CO2 flood can increase production from slope and basin clastic reservoirs in sandstones of the Delaware Mountain Group in the Delaware Basin of West Texas and New Mexico. Phase 1 of the project, reservoir characterization, focused on Geraldine Ford and East Ford fields, which are Delaware Mountain Group fields that produce from the upper Bell Canyon Formation (Ramsey sandstone). The demonstration phase of the project was a CO2 flood conducted in East Ford field, which is operated by Orla Petco, Inc., as the East Ford unit.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Nonresponse follow-up was the most expensive and labor-intensive of all Census 2000 operations. The Census Bureau spent $1.2 billion and used more than 500,000 enumerators to obtain census information from 42 million nonresponding households in less than 10 weeks. Because of this colossal workload, even small variations in productivity had significant cost implications. Workload and enumerator productivity have historically been two of the largest drivers of census costs, and the Bureau developed its budget model for the 2000 Census using key assumptions about these two variables. Nationally, enumerators completed their nonresponse follow-up workload at a rate of 1.04 housing units per hour--slightly exceeding the Bureau's expected rate of 1.03 housing units per hour. Productivity varied for the four primary types of local census offices, ranging from 0.90 housing units per hour in inner-city and urban areas to 1.10 cases per hour in rural areas. In refining the data, the Bureau corrected what it considered to be the most significant discrepancy--a misclassification of some employees' time charges that overstated the number of hours worked by nonresponse follow-up enumerators and understated enumerator production rates."

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon led to the closing the following day of 50 of the nearly 260 U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide. A week later, however, all U.S. facilities were open for business. Additionally, three embassies – in Pakistan, Yemen, and Turkmenistan – allowed for voluntary evacuations immediately after the attack. In the months prior to the attack, travel warnings were issued and embassies were put on high alert as Osama bin Laden had issued vague, but credible, threats against Americans and American interests around the world.

This report documents the results of an evaluation of stream stability for Montezuma Creek downstream of the former uranium and vanadium millsite at Monticello, Utah. The work was performed by personnel from Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL's) Environmental Technology Section (ETS). ORNL/ETS was the Independent Verification Contractor (IVC) for the Monticello projects, and it established independent verification strategies that provided the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) with a third-party assessment of whether remedial action had effectively reduced levels of contamination and whether supporting documentation that described the remediation was adequate. The DOE regulation 10 CFR 1022, which implements Executive Orders 11988 and 11990 for the protection of wetlands and floodplains, provided the regulatory rationale for the activity. This report documents both the impact of millsite remedial activities and postremediation conditions of Montezuma Creek. The scientific rationale for the stream survey was that conventional engineering practices do not adequately account for varying hydrologic regimes nor do they address the entire riparian zone as an interrelated unit. As a result, modifications to streams consistently cause damage to the environment by increasing erosion and sedimentation. Field activities included the establishment of permanent cross sections and periodic measurements and surveys of physical characteristics. The …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Presidio Trust--a wholly owned government corporation--was created in 1996 to manage a large part of the Presidio grounds using sound principles of land use planning and management while maintaining the area's scenic beauty and historic and natural character. The Trust is responsible for leasing, maintaining, rehabilitating, repairing, and improving the property it controls. The Trust must become financially self-sufficient by 2013. GAO found that the Trust has made significant progress in preserving, protecting, and improving the Presidio. It has launched major efforts to repair and upgrade the Presidio's infrastructure and to repair and rehabilitate residential housing and commercial space. So far, the Trust has converted about half of the former military buildings into useable residential and commercial space. The rehabilitation, repair, and leasing of the remaining 300 residential units and about 2.2 million square feet of undeveloped commercial space is critical to the Trust's efforts to achieve financial self-sufficiency. The Trust has also begun several environmental initiatives, including the cleanup of military contamination and the restoration of Mountain Lake--one of the few remaining natural lakes within the San Francisco city limits. The Trust is also …

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The current crisis has caused concern that measures implemented to fight terrorism will have a disproportionately negative effect on innocent Arab-Americans, Muslims, and aliens with ties to the Middle East. The purpose of this report is to address the issues surrounding race-based civil detention for security purposes.

Backward Raman amplification and compression at high power might occur if a long pumping laser pulse is passed through a plasma to interact resonantly with a counter-propagating short seed pulse [V.M. Malkin, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 82 (1999) 4448-4451]. One critical issue, however, is that the pump may be unacceptably depleted due to spontaneous Raman backscatter from intrinsic fluctuations in the amplifying plasma medium prior to its useful interaction with the seed. Premature backscatter may be avoided, however, by employing a gaseous medium with pump intensities too low to ionize the medium, and using the intense seed to produce the plasma by rapid photoionization as it is being amplified [V.M. Malkin, et al., Phys. Plasmas (2001)]. In addition to allowing that only rather low power pumps be used, photoionization introduces a damping of the short pulse which must be overcome by the Raman growth rate for net amplification to occur. The parameter space of gas densities, laser wavelengths, and laser intensities is surveyed to identify favorable regimes for this effect. Output laser intensities of 10(superscript ''17'') W/cm(superscript ''2'') for 0.5 mm radiation are found to be feasible for such a scheme using a pump of 10(superscript ''13'') W/cm(superscript ''2'') …

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A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "A competitive national economy depends on providing individuals with marketable skills and employers with access to qualified workers. In the past, the nation's job training system was fragmented and did not serve job seekers or employers well. The Workforce Investment Act in 1998 created a system that links employment, education, and training services to better match workers and labor market trends. The act represented a significant change from earlier workforce development efforts. Many of the act's provisions took effect in July 2000, and state and local organizations are at different stages of implementing them. Although the act's mandatory partners are making efforts to participate in the one-stops, programmatic or financial concerns are affecting the partners' level of participation as well as their ability to fully integrate their services at the one-stop. As implementation of the act progresses, training options for job seekers may be diminishing rather than improving, as trained providers reduce the number of courses offered to job seekers. Private-sector representatives may be discouraged from participating on workforce investment boards as a result of how states and localities are operating their boards and associated entities."

Poor control of steam generator water level of a nuclear power plant may lead to frequent nuclear reactor shutdowns. These shutdowns are more common at low power where the plant exhibits strong non-minimum phase characteristics and flow measurements at low power are unreliable in many instances. There is need to investigate this problem and systematically design a controller for water level regulation. This work is concerned with the study and the design of a suitable controller for a U-Tube Steam Generator (UTSG) of a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) which has time varying dynamics. The controller should be suitable for the water level control of UTSG without manual operation from start-up to full load transient condition. Some preliminary simulation results are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller. The development of the complete control algorithm includes components such as robust output tracking, and adaptively estimating both the system parameters and state variables simultaneously. At the present time all these components are not completed due to time constraints. A robust tracking component of the controller for water level control is developed and its effectiveness on the parameter variations is demonstrated in this study. The results appear encouraging and they are …

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The narrow margin of victory in the 2000 presidential election aroused concern about the reliability of voting machines; the training of polling place workers; and the extent to which local jurisdictions accepted ballots from members of the military, their dependents, or citizens living abroad. The Federal Voting Assistance program developed several useful tools for voters and Voting Assistance Officers, but many potential voters GAO spoke to were unaware of them. Some installations did not meet the Department of Defense (DOD) and service requirements because they provided insufficient numbers of trained Voting Assistance Officers, voter training, and voting materials. Overseas citizens and federal employees said that the State Department provided useful information. However, many military and overseas voters believe that challenges remain, such as understanding and complying with state requirements and local procedures for absentee voting. Security and privacy issues also present challenges to widespread use of the Internet for voting. Information on the precise number of military and overseas absentee votes that local jurisdictions disqualified nationwide in the 2000 general election and the reasons for disqualification are not readily available. However, GAO's national telephone survey found …

Monte Carlo (MCNP4B) and Discrete Ordinates (DORT) calculations were carried out to estimate {sup 60}Co and {sup 152}Eu activation as a function of ground range due to neutrons emitted from the Hiroshima A-bomb. Results of ORNL DORT and MCNP calculations using RZ cylindrical air-over-ground models are compared with LANL MCNP results obtained with an XYZ air-over-ground model. All of the calculations were carried out using ENDF/B-VI cross-section data and detailed angle and energy resolved neutron emission spectra from the weapon. Favorable agreement was achieved for the {sup 60}Co and {sup 152}Eu activation for ground ranges out to 1000m from the three calculations.