A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Because of the significance of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collections to overall federal receipts and, in turn, to the consolidated financial statements of the U.S. government, which GAO is required to audit, and Congress's interest in financial management at IRS, GAO audits IRS's financial statements annually to determine whether (1) the financial statements are reliable and (2) IRS management maintained effective internal controls. GAO also tests IRS's compliance with selected provisions of significant laws and regulations and its financial systems' compliance with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996 (FFMIA)."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Department of Defense (DOD) obligations for service contracts rose from $82.3 billion in fiscal year 1996 to $141.2 billion in fiscal year 2005. DOD is becoming increasingly more reliant on the private sector to provide a wide range of services, including those for critical information technology and mission support. DOD must maximize its return on investment and provide the warfighter with needed capabilities and support at the best value for the taxpayer. GAO examined DOD's approach to managing services in order to (1) identify the key factors DOD should emphasize to improve its management of services and (2) assess the extent to which DOD's current approach exhibited these factors."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2003, violent conflict in Darfur, Sudan broke out between rebel groups, government troops, and government-supported Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed. The conflict has displaced about 2 million Darfurians and has so affected over 1.9 million others that they require assistance. Since October 2003, the U.S. government has provided humanitarian assistance in Darfur and supported African Union Mission in Sudan's (AMIS) efforts to fulfill a peace support mandate. This report reviews (1) U.S. humanitarian assistance provided to Darfur and the challenges that have been encountered and (2) African Union efforts to fulfill its mandate and challenges that have affected these efforts."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Air Traffic Organization (ATO) is responsible for maintaining approximately 40,000 pieces of air traffic control equipment, such as radars, navigation beacons, communication systems, and instrument landing systems that are essential to the safe operation of the national airspace system (NAS). Currently, ATO engineers and technicians conduct routine maintenance, periodic inspections, and performance checks on air traffic control equipment to ensure that it functions properly. Recently, ATO identified another process called reliability centered maintenance (RCM) that it plans to add to the other methods it uses to maintain the equipment. RCM is a data-driven, analytical process used to determine the most value-added maintenance requirements that are needed to keep equipment functioning properly. RCM processes are used by federal and private organizations because they reduce unnecessary maintenance. ATO believes that RCM's data-driven analyses for identifying maintenance needs, combined with the equipment manufacturers' maintenance recommendations and engineers' knowledge of the air traffic control equipment, will enhance the ways that ATO maintains the equipment. Senate Report 109-109, which accompanied the Fiscal Year 2006 Appropriations Act for the Department of Transportation, asked us to analyze FAA's plans to …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This report responds to certain requirements of the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act (HRIFA) of 1998 that authorized certain Haitian nationals and their dependents to apply to adjust their status to lawful permanent residence. Section 902 (k) of the act requires the Comptroller General to report every 6 months on the number of Haitian nationals who have applied and been approved to adjust their status to lawful permanent residence. The reports are to contain a breakdown of the number of Haitians who applied and the number who were approved as asylum applicants, parolees, children without parents, orphaned children, or abandoned children; or as the eligible dependents of these applicants, including spouses, children, and unmarried sons or daughters. Reports are to be provided until all applications have been finally adjudicated. This is our fifteenth report. Our objectives for this report were to determine (1) the number and categories of applicants who filed applications with USCIS or EOIR and (2) the number and categories of applicants whose applications were approved by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) or the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2003, violent conflict in Darfur, Sudan, broke out between rebel groups and government troops and government-supported Arab militias. While few would dispute that many thousands of Darfur civilians have died, less consensus exists about the total number of deaths attributable to the crisis. Estimates by the Department of State (State) and other parties report death tolls up to about 400,000 for varying populations and periods of time between February 2003 and August 2005. Based on the views of experts convened by GAO and the National Academy of Sciences, interviews with estimate authors, and a review of relevant literature, this report (1) evaluates six Darfur death estimates, (2) identifies general challenges to estimating deaths in such crises, and (3) discusses measures to improve death estimates."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the nation's leading research and development organization in the fields of space and aeronautics. Each year, NASA spends almost 90 percent of its annual budget on the acquisition of supplies and services in order to fulfill the agency's mission to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. NASA purchases these supplies and services from both U.S. and foreign contractors. Although most contracts were awarded to U.S. contractors, NASA, in fiscal year 2004, also awarded contracts to vendors in 23 countries. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2005 requires the NASA Administrator to annually report to Congress on NASA's contracts and subcontracts performed overseas and purchases from foreign entities. The report should also indicate contracts and subcontracts and their dollar values for goods and services that are only available from foreign sources as well as items and their dollar values for which the Buy American Act was waived pursuant to obligations of the United States under international agreements. According to the reporting requirement, the first annual report is due no later than January 2007. …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Weekly Jewish newspaper from Fort Worth, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

This report addresses defense transformation from a Department of Defense (DOD) perspective.

Weekly newspaper from Port Aransas, Texas on Mustang Island that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Albany, Texas that includes local, county, and state news along with extensive advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

To address the DOE need for the storage and handling of terabyte of nuclear physics data, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) developed a new multi-terabit, 90° recording geometry 3D holographic archival optical memory storage and search system. In contrast to state-of-the-art memory approaches, 3DHAM handles the data through highly parallel optical processing in conjunction with highly redundant hologram multiplexing. The 3DHAM system advantages also stem from its unique 3D volume-recording medium, which theoretically has a significantly greater data density than diskbased systems.

Technetium-99 is an abundant, long-lived (t1/2 = 213,000 yr)fission product that creates challenges for the safe, long-term disposalof nuclear waste. While 99Tc receives attention largely due to its highenvironmental mobility, it also causes problems during its incorporationinto nuclear waste glass due to the volatility of Tc(VII) compounds. Thisvolatility decreases the amount of 99Tc stabilized in the waste glass andcauses contamination of the waste glass melter and off-gas system. Theapproach to decrease the volatility of 99Tc that has received the mostattention is reduction of the volatile Tc(VII) species to less volatileTc(IV) species in the glass melt. On engineering scale experiments,rhenium is often used as a non-radioactive surrogate for 99Tc to avoidthe radioactive contamination problems caused by volatile 99Tc compounds.However, Re(VII) is more stable towards reduction than Tc(VII), so morereducing conditions would be required in the glass melt to produceRe(IV). To better understand the redox behavior of Tc and Re in nuclearwaste glass, a series of glasses were prepared under different redoxconditions. The speciation of Tc and Re in the resulting glasses wasdetermined by X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy. Surprisingly,Re and Tc do not behave similarly in the glass melt. Although Tc(0),Tc(IV), and Tc(VII) were observed in these samples, only Re(0) andRe(VII) …

None

A trial coating run has been performed at Teer Coating LTD to assess the use of a barrel coating system as a viable option to coat multilayer spheres. Hollow glass spheres (3M K15) ranging in diameter from 70-120 microns were cleaned in a process using a 0.1 M HCl solution. Comparative photos before and after the cleaning process are shown in figure 1. Approximately, 2 liters of cleaned spheres were sent to Teer for the trial coating in their barrel coater. A picture of barrel coating system is shown in figure 2. The coating process was one layer of titanium followed by one layer of aluminum. The target thickness for each layer is 500 nm, however, no rate runs were performed to calibrate the parameters. Each layer was sputtered for 10 hours, for a total of 20 hours. After the coating process, the coated spheres were sent back to LLNL for SEM analysis. In order to quickly examine the coating in cross-section, the spheres were broken with a spatula. Photos of the broken spheres are shown in Fig 3. One sphere was chosen to look at the uniformity around the sphere. As can be seen in Figure 4, there is …

The overall objective of this program was to develop technology that can be applied to the production of various chemicals and plastics from seed oils. This research and development program included activities in all four key barrier areas identified in the US DOE Technology Roadmap for Plant/Crop-Based Renewable Resources, namely Plant Science, Production, Processing, and Utilization. Participants in the project included The Dow Chemical Company, Castor Oil, Inc., and the USDA Western Regional Research Center (WRRC). The objective of this production task was to evaluate and develop metathesis catalyst technology as a means of utilizing seed oils as feedstocks for the chemical industry. Specifically, ethenolysis of fatty acid methyl esters, FAME’s, leads to functionalized derivatives. These serve as valuable starting points for materials which cascade into a variety of applications, many of which have a current market presence. The relatively recent discovery and commercial availability of a family of metathesis catalysts which are tolerant of polar functional groups and the acquisition and implementation of high throughput synthesis and screening infrastructure led to a prime opportunity to investigate this project area.

Several impacts of climate change may depend more on changes in mean daily minimum (T{sub min}) or maximum (T{sub max}) temperatures than daily averages. To evaluate uncertainties in these variables, we compared projections of T{sub min} and T{sub max} changes by 2046-2065 for 12 climate models under an A2 emission scenario. Average modeled changes in T{sub max} were slightly lower in most locations than T{sub min}, consistent with historical trends exhibiting a reduction in diurnal temperature ranges. However, while average changes in T{sub min} and T{sub max} were similar, the inter-model variability of T{sub min} and T{sub max} projections exhibited substantial differences. For example, inter-model standard deviations of June-August T{sub max} changes were more than 50% greater than for T{sub min} throughout much of North America, Europe, and Asia. Model differences in cloud changes, which exert relatively greater influence on T{sub max} during summer and T{sub min} during winter, were identified as the main source of uncertainty disparities. These results highlight the importance of considering separately projections for T{sub max} and T{sub min} when assessing climate change impacts, even in cases where average projected changes are similar. In addition, impacts that are most sensitive to summertime T{sub min} or wintertime …

Semi-weekly newspaper from Livingston, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Comanche, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Hondo, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with extensive advertising.