This report provides background on contemporary efforts to declare English the official language, a review of selected issues raised by official English proposals in Congress, and a summary of arguments that have been advanced in favor of and in opposition to such proposals.

U.S. defense obligations to South Korea are contained in the U.S.-South Korean Mutual Defense Treaty, signed in 1953 and ratified in 1954. Under Article m of the treaty, the United States would "act to meet" an attack on South Korea "in accordance with its [U.S.] constitutional processes." At the time of ratification, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not define specifically the respective roles of the President and Congress in any decision to act militarily in accord with constitutional processes. The Committee stressed that Article did not set a requirement for an automatic American military response but that it did give the United States a wide range of possible actions

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This report examines in some detail the hypothesis that trade is undermining the economic status of the American worker. Two questions are addressed: one, Has trade tended to reduce the average level of wages? and, two, Has trade increased the inequality of wages? The general conclusion reached is that poor wage performance is largely a problem of the domestic economy, that would have occurred with or without trade.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Department of Energy's (DOE) contractor travel costs, and DOE's efforts to reduce these costs, focusing on the: (1) travel costs incurred by DOE contractors and their primary destinations during fiscal years (FY) 1996 through 1998; (2) purpose of this travel; and (3) success that DOE has had in reducing contractor travel costs and additional actions available to reduce these costs further."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the effectiveness of efforts to assist homeless veterans, focusing on: (1) describing the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) homeless programs; (2) determining what VA knows about the effectiveness of its homeless programs; and (3) examining promising approaches aimed at different groups of homeless veterans."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This French-language edition of the journal of the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) includes articles regarding: (1) changes in international auditing personnel; (2) audit planning; (3) implementing guidelines for INTOSAI auditing standards; (4) recognizing fraud indicators; (5) the Royal Audit Authority of Bhutan; (6) reports in print on auditing; and (7) activities inside INTOSAI."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This German-language edition of the journal of the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) includes articles regarding: (1) changes in international auditing personnel; (2) audit planning; (3) implementing guidelines for INTOSAI auditing standards; (4) recognizing fraud indicators; (5) the Royal Authority of Bhutan; (6) reports in print on auditing; and (7) activities inside INTOSAI."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) new rule on over-the-counter human drugs and labeling requirements. GAO noted that: (1) the rule would establish a standardized format and standardized content requirements for the labeling of over-the-counter drug products; (2) the final rule has an announced effective date of April 16, 1999, which is less than the 60-day delay in a major rule's effective date required by the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act; and (3) FDA, with the exception of the failure to allow the 60-day delay, complied with the applicable requirements in promulgating the rule."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO published a functional requirements document for human resource and payroll systems for U.S. civilian personnel. This document concerns human resources and payroll financial systems analysts, system accountants, and others who design, develop, implement, operate, and maintain financial management systems."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed compliance by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) with the requirements of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, focusing on OMB and CBO reports issued for legislation enacted during the 2nd session of the 105th Congress, which ended on October 21, 1998."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO published a glossary describing the most commonly used terms, practices, and techniques currently employed by the government and private sector asset management community."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This Spanish-language edition of the journal of the International Organization of the Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) includes articles regarding: (1) changes in international auditing personnel; (2) audit planning; (3) implementing guidelines for INTOSAI auditing standards; (4) recognizing fraud indicators; (5) the Royal Audit Authority of Bhutan; (6) reports in print on auditing; and (7) activities inside INTOSAI."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the data available on burn injuries to children and the implications of these data for the effect of the recent amendments to the children's sleepwear standard, focusing on: (1) how many burn injuries involving children's sleepwear occurred annually before and after the amendments; and (2) what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from these data about the effect of the changes to the sleepwear standard on the risk of injury."

A staff study issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO presented a compendium of fiscal year (FY) 2000 budget accounts to give users a convenient way to: (1) sort through the fiscal structure of the federal government; and (2) determine the level of budgetary resources--used, estimated, or requested by fiscal year--for individual accounts."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the free admission policy of the National Gallery of Art and its contract for the distribution of tickets for major exhibitions held at the Gallery."

Due to the advent of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) as an efficient means of creating ultra-high intensity laser light (I > 5{times}10{sup 17} W/cm{sup 2}) in pulses less than a few picoseconds, new ideas for achieving ignition and gain in DT targets with less than 1 megajoule of input energy are currently being pursued. Two types of powerful lasers are employed in this scheme: (1) channeling beams and (2) ignition beams. The current state of laser-plasma interactions relating to this fusion scheme will be discussed. In particular, plasma physics issues in the ultra-intense regime are crucial to the success of this scheme. We compare simulation and experimental results in this highly nonlinear regime.

The Air Force`s Armstrong Laboratory at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, has supported the research and development of Radio Frequency Soil Decontamination. Radio frequency soil decontamination is essentially a heat-assisted soil vapor extraction process. Site S-1 at Kelly Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, was selected for the demonstration of two patented techniques. The site is a former sump that collected spills and surface run-off from a waste petroleum, oils, and lubricants and solvent storage and transfer area. In 1993, a technique developed by the IIT Research Institute using an array of electrodes placed in the soil was demonstrated. In 1994, a technique developed by KAI Technologies, Inc. using a single applicator placed in a vertical borehole was demonstrated. Approximately 120 tons of soil were heated during each demonstration to a temperature of about 150 degrees Celsius.

The objective of the Advanced Emissions Control Development Program (AECDP) is to develop practical, cost-effective strategies for reducing the emissions of air toxics from coal-fired boilers. Ideally, the project aim is to effectively control air toxic emissions through the use of conventional flue gas cleanup equipment such as electrostatic precipitators (ESPS), fabric filters (baghouse), and wet flue gas desulfurization. Development work to date has concentrated on the capture of mercury, other trace metals, fine particulate and hydrogen chloride. Following the construction and evaluation of a representative air toxics test facility in Phase I, Phase II focused on the evaluation of mercury and several other air toxics emissions. The AECDP is jointly funded by the United States Department of Energy's Federal Energy Technology Center (DOE), the Ohio Coal Development Office within the Ohio Department of Development (oCDO), and Babcock& Wilcox-a McDermott company (B&W).

This report describes the formal test plan that will be used for the data acquisition and management system developed to monitor a bioremediation study by Argonne National Laboratory in association with Sandia National Laboratories. The data acquisition and management system will record the site data during the bioremediation and assist experts in site analysis. The three major subsystems of this system are described in detail in this report. In addition, this report documents the component- and system-level test procedures that will be implemented at each phase of the project. Results of these test procedures are documented in this report.

Although this guide focuses on the retrocommissioning process and its advantages, all three types of commissioning--retrocommissioning, commissioning, and recommissioning--play an equally important role in ensuring that buildings perform efficiently and provide comfortable, safe, and productive work environments for owners and occupants. For new construction and retrofit projects, commissioning should be incorporated early, during design, and last throughout the length of the project. For buildings that were never commissioned, the retrocommissioning process can yield a wealth of cost-saving opportunities while enhancing a building's environment. Finally, once a building is commissioned or retrocommissioned, incorporating recommissioning into the organization's O and M program (by periodically reapplying the original diagnostic testing and checklist procedures) helps ensure that cost savings and other benefits gained from the original process persist over time.

The basic problem addressed in the project was that of accelerating the iterative convergence of Discrete Ordinates (S{sub N}) problems. Important previous work on this problem, much of which was done at LANL, has shown that the Diffusion Synthetic Acceleration (DSA) method can be a very effective acceleration procedure. However, in two-dimensional geometries, only the diamond differenced S{sub N} equations have been efficiently solved using DSA. This is because, for the 2-D diamond-differenced S{sub N} equations, the standard DSA procedure leads to a relatively simple discretized low-order diffusion equation that for many problems can be efficiently solved by a multigrid method. For other discretized versions of the S{sub N} equations, the standard DSA procedure leads to much more complicated discretizations of the low-order diffusion equation that have not been efficiently solved by multigrid (or other) methods. In this project, we have developed a new procedure to obtain discretized diffusion equations for DSA-accelerating the convergence of the S{sub N} equations using certain lumped discontinuous finite element spatial differencing methods. The idea is to use an asymptotic analysis for the derivation of the discretized diffusion equation. This is based on the fact that diffusion theory is an asymptotic limit of transport theory. …