This report examines the history and evolution of the House Committee on Ethics, including the committee's jurisdiction and investigative procedure. It does not deal with changes to federal or state criminal law or with criminal prosecutions of Members of Congress or with the specifics of disciplinary cases in the House.

This report addresses several options being considered by Congress to address the financing needs of local communities for wastewater and drinking water infrastructure projects and to decrease or close the gap between available funds and projected needs.

This report provides a basic description of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), including some of the widely discussed issues.

Report that looks at the background of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA), the Department of Defense's (DOD) electrical use, and DOD electricity use versus state electricity use.

This report discusses the strategic significance of Guam for defense buildup and the force relocation and deployments from the U.S. mainland. It also discusses the concerns and issues for Congress, such as allies and partner, China, and legislation.

This report discusses U.S. security assistance to Taiwan, or Republic of China (ROC), including policy issues for Congress and legislation.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Social Security Administration (SSA) receives death reports from multiple sources, including state vital records agencies (states), family members, and other federal agencies to create its set of death records. In accordance with the Social Security Act (Act), SSA shares its full set of death data with certain agencies that pay federally-funded benefits, for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy of those payments. For other users of SSA's death data, SSA extracts a subset of records into a file called the Death Master File (DMF), which, to comply with the Act, excludes state-reported death data. SSA makes the DMF available via the Department of Commerce's National Technical Information Service, from which any member of the public can purchase DMF data. Certain procedures that SSA uses for collecting, verifying, and maintaining death reports could result in erroneous or untimely death information. For example, SSA does not independently verify all reports before including them in its death records. In accordance with its policy, the agency only verifies death reports for Social Security beneficiaries in order to stop benefit payments, and then, verifies only those reports from sources it …

This report discusses the rules in the Senate regarding what can be added to conference reports by committees after their creation.

This report outlines the provisions of the 21st Century Flood Reform Act which was passed on Nov. 14, 2017. The act reauthorizes the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and revises regulations regarding insurance coverage standards.

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The primary goal of this collaborative proposal was to modify the code QuickPIC and apply it to study the long-time stability of beam propagation in low density electron clouds present in circular accelerators. The UCLA contribution to this collaborative proposal was in supporting the development of the pipelining scheme for the QuickPIC code, which extended the parallel scaling of this code by two orders of magnitude.

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The concept of small wave energy conversion modules that can be built into large, scalable arrays, in the same vein as solar panels, has been developed. This innovation lends itself to an organic business and development model, and enables the use of large-run manufacturing technology to reduce system costs. The first prototype module has been built to full-scale, and tested in a laboratory wave channel. The device has been shown to generate electricity and dissipate wave energy. Improvements need to be made to the electrical generator and a demonstration of an array of modules should be made in natural conditions.

This report discusses the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) barring the Trump Administration from implementing new asylum restrictions. The asylum restrictions were prompted by reports of a "migrant caravan" traveling through Mexico to the southern border of the United States.

This report discusses the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Venezuela, which has elevated congressional concerns about the country. Venezuela remains in a deep political and economic crisis under the authoritarian rule of President Nicolás Maduro.

Progress is reported in addressing these questions: Why do hcef mutants have increased CEF1? Is increased CEF1 caused by elevated expression or altered regulation of CEF1 components? Which metabolic pools can be regulators of CEF1? Do metabolites influence CEF1 directly or indirectly? Which CEF1 pathways are activated in high CEF1 mutants? Is PQR a proton pump? Is elevated CEF1 activated by state transitions?

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Tanks 241-AN-102 and 241-AN-107 supernatants contain soluble Sr-90 and transuranic elements that require removal prior to vitrification to comply with the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant immobilized low-activity waste specification (WTP Contract, DE-AC27-01RV 14136, Specification 2.2.2.8, "Radionuclide Concentration Limitations") and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission provisional agreement on waste incidental to reprocessing (letter, Paperiello, C. J., "Classification of Hanford Low-Activity Tank Waste Fraction"). These two tanks have high concentrations of organics and organic complexants and are referred to as complexant concentrate tanks. A precipitation process using sodium permanganate (NaMnO{sub 4}) and strontium nitrate (Sr(NO{sub 3}){sub 2}) was developed and tested with tank waste samples to precipitate Sr-90 and transuranic elements from the supernate (PNWD-3141, Optimization of Sr/TRU Removal Conditions with Samples of AN-102 Tank Waste). Testing documented in this report was conducted to further evaluate the use of the strontium nitrate/sodium permanganate process in tank farms with a retention time of up to 12 months. Previous testing was focused on developing a process for deployment in the ultrafiltration vessels in the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant. This environment is different from tank farms in two important ways: the waste is diluted in the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant to ~5.5 …

This report is the first in a two-part series discussing "Garza v. Hargan", a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit involving a detained unaccompanied alien minor and the right to terminate a pregnancy. The facts of the case and a discussion of the court's decision and whether the Health and Human Services Department policy regarding abortions unduly burdens a woman's right to an abortion is discussed.

This report discusses nuclear energy and various issues and concerns related to it use. Congressional actions and related CRS reports are described for six topics which are: radioactive waste, economic viability, safety, technological advances, security and emergency plans, and nuclear weapon nonproliferation.

This report is the secondt in a two-part series discussing "Garza v. Hargan", a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit involving a detained unaccompanied alien minor and the right to terminate a pregnancy. Debate among judges regarding the right of an unaccompanied alien minor to have an abortion when the minor was detained at the border and technically never formally entered the United States are discussed.

This report discusses differing views held by U.S. appellate courts regarding whether lying about one's assets to pre-trial service personnel in order to get a court-appointed lawyer can be used as a justification to increase the sentence of the offender.

Understanding the dependence of confi nement on collisionality in tokamaks is important for the design of next-step devices, which will operate at collisionalities at least one order of magnitude lower than in present generation. A wide range of collisionality has been obtained in the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) by employing two different wall conditioning techniques, one with boronization and between-shot helium glow discharge conditioning (HeGDC+B), and one using lithium evaporation (Li EVAP). Previous studies of HeGDC+B plasmas indicated a strong and favorable dependence of normalized con nement on collisionality. Discharges with lithium conditioning discussed in the present study gen- erally achieved lower collisionality, extending the accessible range of collisionality by almost an order of unity. While the confinement dependences on dimensional, engineering variables of the HeGDC+B and Li EVAP datasets differed, collisionality was found to unify the trends, with the lower collisionality lithium conditioned discharges extending the trend of increasing normalized confi nement time with decreasing collisionality when other dimension less variables were held as fi xed as possible. This increase of confi nement with decreasing collisionality was driven by a large reduction in electron transport in the outer region of the plasma. This result is consistent with gyrokinetic …