A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, established in 1996, is a bilateral and multilateral effort to provide debt relief to poor countries to help them achieve economic growth and debt sustainability. Multilateral creditors are having difficulty financing their share of the initiative, even with assistance from donors. Under the existing initiative, many countries are unlikely to achieve their debt relief targets, primarily because their export earnings are likely to be significantly less than projected by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). GAO assessed (1) the projected multilateral development banks' funding shortfall for the existing initiative and (2) the amount of funding, including development assistance, needed to help countries achieve economic growth and debt relief targets. The Treasury, World Bank, and African Development Bank commented that historical export growth rates are not good predictors of the future because significant structural changes are under way in many countries that could lead to greater growth. We consider these historical rates to be a more realistic gauge of future growth because of these countries' reliance on highly volatile primary commodities and other vulnerabilities such as HIV/AIDS."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Mail is a morale booster for troops fighting overseas and for their families at home. More than 65 million pounds of letters and parcels were delivered to troops serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and problems with prompt and reliable mail delivery surfaced early in the conflict. Congress and the White House forwarded more than 300 inquiries about mail delivery problems to military postal officials. GAO was directed to review mail delivery to troops stationed in the Middle East. In this report, GAO assesses (1) the timeliness of mail delivery to and from troops in Operation Iraqi Freedom, (2) how mail delivery issues and problems during this operation compared with those experienced during Operations Desert Shield/Storm in 1991, and (3) efforts to identify actions to resolve problems in establishing mail operations for future contingencies."

Reflection of a seismic wave from a plane interface betweentwo elastic media does not depend on the frequency. If one of the mediais poroelastic and fluid-saturated, then the reflection becomesfrequency-dependent. This paper presents a low-frequency asymptoticformula for the reflection of seismic plane p-wave from a fluid-saturatedporous medium. The obtained asymptotic scaling of the frequency-dependentcomponent of the reflection coefficient shows that it is asymptoticallyproportional to the square root of the product of the reservoir fluidmobility and the frequency of the signal. The dependence of this scalingon the dynamic Darcy's law relaxation time is investigated as well.Derivation of the main equations of the theory of poroelasticity from thedynamic filtration theory reveals that this relaxation time isproportional to Biot's tortuosity parameter.

The targets used in the Hot Halfraum Campaign at OMEGA create many hot electrons, which result in a large flux of hard x-rays. The hard x-rays produce a high background in the streak camera. The background was significantly reduced by wrapping the streak camera with a high-Z material; in this case, 1/8' of Pb. The large hard x-ray flux also adds noise to images from framing cameras which use CCDs.

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This report provides information about the Background and Funding on Child Nutrition and WIC Programs. child nutrition programs provide free meals to lower-income children.The CACFP subsidies meals and snacks served by children.

This engineering note documents the integration of Dzero Heat Pump 1 through Heat Pump 15 into the cryo/gas process control system commonly referred to as the cryo control system. Heat pumps 1 through 15 control the ambient air temperature on the 3rd, 5th, and 6th floor office areas at Dzero. The entire Johnson HVAC control system was replaced with a Siemens control system in 1999 leaving behind the 15 heat pumps with stand-alone Johnson controllers. Now, these 15 heat pump Johnson controllers are being replaced with small stand alone Beckhoff BC9000 controllers. The Beckhoff BC9000 controllers are network able into the existing Intellution control system. The Beckhoff BC9000 controllers use the cryo private Ethernet network and an OPC driver to get data into the Intellution SCADA node databases. The BC9000 is also programmed over this same Ethernet network.

Bikini Island was contaminated March 1, 1954 by the Bravo detonation (U.S nuclear test series, Castle) at Bikini Atoll. About 90% of the estimated dose from nuclear fallout to potential island residents is from cesium-137 ({sup 137}Cs) transferred from soil to plants that are consumed by residents. Thus, radioecology research efforts have been focused on removing {sup 137}Cs from soil and/or reducing its uptake into vegetation. Most effective was addition of potassium (K) to soil that reduces {sup 137}Cs concentration in fruits to 3-5% of pretreatment concentrations. Initial observations indicated this low concentration continued for some time after K was last applied. Long-term studies were designed to evaluate this persistence in more detail because it is very important to provide assurance to returning populations that {sup 137}Cs concentrations in food (and, therefore, radiation dose) will remain low for extended periods, even if K is not applied annually or biennially. Potassium applied at 300, 660, 1260, and 2070 kg ha{sup -1} lead to a {sup 137}Cs concentration in drinking coconut meat that is 34, 22, 10, and about 4% of original concentration, respectively. Concentration of {sup 137}Cs remains low 8 to 10 y after K is last applied. An explanation for …

Official statement issued by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States describing preliminary findings regarding the performance of the Intelligence Community against the danger of Islamic extremist terrorism before the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Official statement issued by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States describing preliminary findings regarding on the FBI's current capacity to detect and prevent terrorist attacks upon the United States.

Transcript of the tenth public hearing held by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States held April 13-14, 2004 in Washington, D.C. The two-day hearing examined the performance of law enforcement and the Intelligence Community prior to September 11 and evaluated post-9/11 reforms in these areas. The Commission heard from current and former top-level officials from our nation's law enforcement and intelligence communities. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III testified before the Commission, as well as former Attorney General Janet Reno, former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, and former Acting FBI Director Thomas J. Pickard. In addition to witness testimony, four staff statements were delivered during the course of the proceedings.

The evaporation of a range of synthetic pore water solutions representative of the potential high-level-nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain, NV is being investigated. The motivation of this work is to understand and predict the range of brine compositions that may contact the waste containers from evaporation of pore waters, because these brines could form corrosive thin films on the containers and impact their long-term integrity. A relatively complex synthetic Topopah Spring Tuff pore water was progressively concentrated by evaporation in a closed vessel, heated to 95 C in a series of sequential experiments. Periodic samples of the evaporating solution were taken to determine the evolving water chemistry. According to chemical divide theory at 25 C and 95 C our starting solution should evolve towards a high pH carbonate brine. Results at 95 C show that this solution evolves towards a complex brine that contains about 99 mol% Na{sup +} for the cations, and 71 mol% Cl{sup -}, 18 mol% {Sigma}CO{sub 2}(aq), 9 mol%SO{sub 4}{sup 2-} for the anions. Initial modeling of the evaporating solution indicates precipitation of aragonite, halite, silica, sulfate and fluoride phases. The experiments have been used to benchmark the use of the EQ3/6 geochemical code in predicting …

A large, zero-tension, plate lysimeter (3.05 x 2.13 m) was installed to intercept percolating soil water at Bikini Atoll (11 35'N, 165 25'E), a former nuclear test-site. In two experiments controlled amounts of irrigation water were applied over the lysimeter and leachate water was collected. Evapotranspiration (ET) calculations were made using the Penman-Monteith equation and climate data collected at the atoll. The efficiency of the lysimeter was essentially 100% in contrast to low efficiencies reported for smaller plate lysimeters. Lysimeter design, installation, and water balance results are discussed.

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A compact high-resolution ({lambda}/{Delta}{lambda} {approx} 10000) spherically bent crystal spectrometer in the Johann geometry was recently installed and tested on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory SuperEBIT electron beam ion trap. The curvature of the mica (002) crystal grating allows for higher collection efficiency compared to the flat and cylindrically bent crystal spectrometers commonly used on the Livermore electron beam ion traps. The spectrometer's Johann configuration enables orientation of its dispersion plane to be parallel to the electron beam propagation. Used in concert with a crystal spectrometer, whose dispersion plane is perpendicular to the electron beam propagation, the polarization of x-ray emission lines can be measured.

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Ab initio electronic structure methods can supplement CALPHAD in two major ways for subsequent applications to stability in complex alloys. The first one is rather immediate and concerns the direct input of ab initio energetics in CALPHAD databases. The other way, more involved, is the assessment of ab initio thermodynamics {acute a} la CALPHAD. It will be shown how these results can be used within CALPHAD to predict the equilibrium properties of multi-component alloys.

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The longitudinally polarized gluon density is probed sensitively in hard collisions of polarized protons under the condition that the dominant dynamics are perturbative and of leading twist origin. First data have recently been presented by PHENIX on the double-spin asymmetry A{sub LL}{sup {pi}} for {pi}{sup 0} production at moderate transverse momentum p {perpendicular} {approx_equal} 1 {divided_by} 4 GeV and central rapidity. By means of a systematic investigation of the relevant degrees of freedom we show that the perturbative QCD framework at leading power in p{perpendicular} produces an asymmetry that is basically positive definite in this kinematic range, i.e. A{sub LL}{sup {pi}} {approx}> {Omicron}(-10{sup -3}).

Interest in the strange nucleon sea has been renewed when it was realized that the strangeness asymmetry s{sup -} = s - {bar s} plays a prominent role in the interpretation of the NuTeV weak mixing angle anomaly. The author reviews the NLO QCD calculation of the neutrino-production of opposite-sign dimuons as the experimental signature of the strange quark parton density. Results from a recent CTEQ fit are presented and discussed with respect to their stability under NLO corrections and their impact on the NuTeV measurement.

This report provides an overview of S. 2290, 108th Congress, the Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution Act of 2004 (or FAIR Act of 2004). The bill is a revised version of S. 1125, 108th Congress, and would create the Office of Asbestos Disease Compensation to award damages to asbestos claimants on a no-fault basis. Asbestos claims could no longer be filed or pursued under state law, except for the enforcement of judgments no longer subject to any appeal or judicial review before the date of enactment of the bill.

Recording of the tenth public hearing held by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States on April 14, 2004 in Washington, D.C. The two-day hearing examined the performance of law enforcement and the Intelligence Community prior to September 11 and evaluated post-9/11 reforms in these areas. In addition to witness testimony, four staff statements were delivered during the course of the proceedings. This section includes the panel on preventing future attacks inside the United States, with testimony from John O. Brennan, Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, John S. Pistole, and James L. Pavitt.

Recording of the tenth public hearing held by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States on April 14, 2004 in Washington, D.C. The two-day hearing examined the performance of law enforcement and the Intelligence Community prior to September 11 and evaluated post-9/11 reforms in these areas. In addition to witness testimony, four staff statements were delivered during the course of the proceedings. This section includes the staff statement on the performance of the intelligence community in addition to the panel on Summer 2001 with testimony from George J. Tenet.