China’s economy continues to be a concern to U.S. policymakers. On the one hand, China’s economic growth presents huge opportunities for U.S. exporters. On the other hand, the surge in Chinese exports to the United States has put competitive pressures on many U.S. industries. Many U.S. policymakers have argued that greater efforts should be made to pressure China to fully implement its WTO commitments and to change various economic policies deemed harmful to U.S. economic interests, such as its currency peg and its use of subsidies to support its SOEs. In addition, recent bids by Chinese state-owned firms to purchase various U.S. firms have raised concerns among Members over the impact such acquisitions could have on U.S. national and economic security.

None

Damage to or destruction of the nation’s water supply and water quality infrastructure by a terrorist attack could disrupt the delivery of vital human services in this country, threatening public health and the environment or possibly causing loss of life. Interest in such problems has increased greatly since September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon.

None

None

This report discusses the ongoing debate about whether or not to approve energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Current law forbids energy leasing in the Refuge. This report addresses several legislative options on the issue, as well as policymakers' arguments for and against development, especially in the wake of increasing terrorism since 2000-2001.

The construction of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), with an estimated construction cost of $128 million, will be the The first Department of Homeland Security laboratory specifically focused on biodefense. Its programmatic contents and component organization are unclear, as conflicting the information has been provided during each of the past three budget cycles. Congressional oversight of programs, especially those performed in federal facilities for homeland security purposes, is considered key to maintaining transparency in biodefense. Policy issues that may interest Congress include funding for the construction of the NBACC facility, transparency of research activities performed through the center, and the potential for duplication of effort between the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies. This report will be updated as circumstances warrant.

The Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program, commonly referred to as Social Security, is facing a long-term fiscal deficit. In response to this challenge, President Bush has made Social Security reform the key focus of his domestic social policy agenda during his second term. On February 2, the President issued a document, “Strengthening Social Security for the 21st Century,” which lays out the specifications for a system of voluntary individual accounts to be phased-in as part of a reformed Social Security system. Administration officials concede that the individual accounts themselves do not alleviate the solvency problem. The individual account proposal would likely make the solvency problem worse over the next 75 years. The President has not yet specified how the additional shortfall due to the individual accounts will be financed. The President has stated that these accounts are just one piece of a comprehensive Social Security reform package and that additional measures will be needed to achieve long-term solvency. At the time of this report’s publication, the President has not specified what these additional measures might be.

This report evaluates that assertion, and considers other effects China’s peg has on the U.S. economy. These include the beneficial effects on consumption, interest rates, and investment spending. Nationwide, these effects should offset job loss in the trade sector, at least in the medium term. Several bills have been introduced in the 109th Congress to address China’s currency policy, including H.R. 1216, H.R. 1498, H.R. 1575, S. 14, S. 295, S. 377, and S. 593; some would impose trade sanctions against China unless it accepted a market-based system of currency valuation.

Letter from Mark E. Souder to Anthony Principi requesting that Fort Wayne be permitted to retain the 122nd Air National Guard Fighter Wing.

The growing and diverse nature of recreation on federal lands has increased the challenge of balancing recreation with other land uses, and balancing different types of recreation. Motorized recreation has been particularly controversial, with issues centering on access and environmental impacts. The 109th Congress may consider legislation and conduct oversight on issues involving recreation on federal lands, including traditional recreational pursuits and newer forms of motorized recreation. Other federal land recreation issues of possible interest include recreational uses within the National Wildlife Refuge System, recreation at federal water, recreation fees, and Grand Canyon Colorado River management.

The growing and diverse nature of recreation on federal lands has increased the challenge of balancing recreation with other land uses, and balancing different types of recreation. Motorized recreation has been particularly controversial, with issues centering on access and environmental impacts. The 109th Congress may consider legislation and conduct oversight on issues involving recreation on federal lands, including traditional recreational pursuits and newer forms of motorized recreation. Other federal land recreation issues of possible interest include recreational uses within the National Wildlife Refuge System, recreation at federal water, recreation fees, and Grand Canyon Colorado River management.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Smithsonian is the world's largest museum complex and research organization, with 18 museums and galleries, 10 science centers, and a zoological park. The age of the structures, past inattention to maintenance needs, and high visitation have left its facilities in need of revitalization and repair. Currently, the Smithsonian estimates $2.3 billion in costs for revitalization, construction, and maintenance projects between 2005 and 2013. This report addresses (1) how the current condition of the Smithsonian's facilities has affected access to the collections, and the collections themselves; (2) what changes the Smithsonian has made to its organization, practices, and prioritization processes to improve its facilities management; and (3) the estimated costs and status of the Smithsonian's facilities projects and their funding sources."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In accordance with the President's Management Agenda, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has sponsored initiatives to promote electronic government--the use of information technology, such as Web-based Internet applications, to enhance government services. Generally, these "e-gov" initiatives do not have direct appropriations but depend on a variety of funding sources, including monetary contributions from participating agencies. GAO was asked to review the funding of e-gov initiatives that relied on such contributions: specifically, to determine, for fiscal years 2003 and 2004, whether agencies made contributions in the amounts planned and to determine the timing of these contributions."

Dose and risk assessments are an integral part of decommissioning activities. Most human health risk assessments are performed for a reasonable maximum exposure to an individual with assumed intake and exposure parameters that depend on the end state of the decommissioning activities and the likely future use of the site. Regardless of how the potentially exposed individual is defined, the subsequent calculated human health risk is not a measurable quantity. To demonstrate compliance with risk-based acceptance or cleanliness criteria, facility-specific risk assessments usually are performed after final-verification sampling and analysis. Alternatively, conservative, a priori, guideline concentrations for residual contaminants can be calculated and rapidly compared to the subsequently measured contaminant concentrations to demonstrate compliance. In response to the request for accelerated cleanup at U.S. Department of Energy facilities, the Savannah River Site (SRS) is decommissioning its excess facilities through removal of the facility structures leaving only the concrete-slab foundations in place. Site-specific, risk-based derived concentration guideline levels (DCGLs) for radionuclides have been determined for a future industrial worker potentially exposed to residual contamination on these concrete slabs. When appropriate, these conservative DCGLs will be used at SRS in lieu of facility-specific risk assessments to further accelerate the decommissioning process. This …

We describe the performance of the block-structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) code Raptor on the 32k node IBM BlueGene/L computer. This machine represents a significant step forward towards petascale computing. As such, it presents Raptor with many challenges for utilizing the hardware efficiently. In terms of performance, Raptor shows excellent weak and strong scaling when running in single level mode (no adaptivity). Hardware performance monitors show Raptor achieves an aggregate performance of 3:0 Tflops in the main integration kernel on the 32k system. Results from preliminary AMR runs on a prototype astrophysical problem demonstrate the efficiency of the current software when running at large scale. The BG/L system is enabling a physics problem to be considered that represents a factor of 64 increase in overall size compared to the largest ones of this type computed to date. Finally, we provide a description of the development work currently underway to address our inefficiencies.

In the last few years, it was clearly shown that cross-field transport in the far SOL could be significantly faster than previously thought and that this transport exhibited convective rather then diffusive features. As a result, in high density cases the plasma coming into the SOL from the core recycled at the wall of the tokamak main chamber, rather than flowing into the divertor and recycling there, as the conventional picture of edge plasma flows would suggest. It was also shown that coherent structures, often called ''blobs'', played very important roles in the particle and energy transport inside the SOL region for both L and H confinement modes. The blobs seen in the SOL are extended along the magnetic field lines and have a plasma density two to three times higher than the ambient SOL plasma density and poloidal and radial scales of about 1 cm. In experimental measurements, the blobs propagated in radial direction towards the chamber wall with a velocity {approx} 10{sup 5} cm/s, and the contribution of non-diffusive flux associated with transport of blobs to the total particle flux in the far SOL attained 70-90%. In addition, recent assessment of experimental data and theoretical models shows that …

The HPC Challenge benchmark suite has been released by the DARPA HPCS program to help define the performance boundaries of future Petascale computing systems. HPC Challenge is a suite of tests that examine the performance of HPC architectures using kernels with memory access patterns more challenging than those of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used in the Top500 list. Thus, the suite is designed to augment the Top500 list, providing benchmarks that bound the performance of many real applications as a function of memory access characteristics e.g., spatial and temporal locality, and providing a framework for including additional tests. In particular, the suite is composed of several well known computational kernels (STREAM, HPL, matrix multiply--DGEMM, parallel matrix transpose--PTRANS, FFT, RandomAccess, and bandwidth/latency tests--b{sub eff}) that attempt to span high and low spatial and temporal locality space. By design, the HPC Challenge tests are scalable with the size of data sets being a function of the largest HPL matrix for the tested system.

None

None

This report is on Balkan Cooperation on War Crimes Issues: 2005 Update.

None

None

The exit from mitosis is the last critical decision a cell has to make during a division cycle. A complex regulatory system has evolved to evaluate the success of mitotic events and control this decision. Whereas outstanding genetic work in yeast has led to rapid discovery of a large number of interacting genes involved in the control of mitotic exit, it has also become increasingly difficult to comprehend the logic and mechanistic features embedded in the complex molecular network. Our view is that this difficulty stems in part from the attempt to explain mitotic exit control using concepts from traditional top-down engineering design, and that exciting new results from evolutionary engineering design applied to networks and electronic circuits may lend better insights. We focus on four particularly intriguing features of the mitotic exit control system: the two-stepped release of Cdc14; the self-activating nature of Tem1 GTPase; the spatial sensor associated with the spindle pole body; and the extensive redundancy in the mitotic exit network. We attempt to examine these design features from the perspective of evolutionary design and complex system engineering.