This report discusses the Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) Program, also known as fire grants of the FIRE Act grant program, which provides federal grants directly to local fire departments and unaffiliated Emergency Medical Services (EMS) organizations to help address a variety of equipment, training, and other firefighter-related and EMS needs. This report also discusses the possible reauthorization of AFG and the related Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response Firefighters (SAFER) program.

This report mainly discuss the Background and Greening Options of the Capitol Power Plant. Its impact on congressional operations are misunderstood.

This report deals with Cars and Climate that discusses what can Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Do to Control Greenhouse Gases from Mobile Sources.

Casher and Susskind have noted that in the light-front description, spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is a property of hadronic wavefunctions and not of the vacuum. Here we show from several physical perspectives that, because of color confinement, quark and gluon QCD condensates are associated with the internal dynamics of hadrons. We discuss condensates using condensed matter analogues, the AdS/CFT correspondence, and the Bethe-Salpeter/Dyson-Schwinger approach for bound states. Our analysis is in agreement with the Casher and Susskind model and the explicit demonstration of 'in-hadron' condensates by Roberts et al., using the Bethe-Salpeter/Dyson-Schwinger formalism for QCD bound states. These results imply that QCD condensates give zero contribution to the cosmological constant, since all of the gravitational effects of the in-hadron condensates are already included in the normal contribution from hadron masses.

On February 26, 2009, the Administration released the broad outlines of its federal budget request for FY2010, listing for each Cabinet department and for several independent agencies the total discretionary budget authority President Obama would request, but providing no additional details. Full details of the request were made public May 7, 2009. This report summarizes the budget request in an abbreviated yet detailed format.

The ILC damping ring injection and extraction kickers will require high availability modulators that can deliver {+-}5 kV pulses into 50 {Omega} with a 2 ns flattop ({approx}1 ns rise and fall time) at up to 6 MHz. An effort is underway at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to meet these requirements using a transmission line adder topology to combine the output of an array of {approx}1 kV modules. The modules employ an ultra-fast hybrid MOSFET/driver that can switch 33 A in 1.2 ns. Experimental results for a scale adder structure are presented.

The ILC baseline extraction line is designed for 14 mrad horizontal crossing angle between e{sup +} and e{sup -} colliding beams at Interaction Point (IP). The extraction optics in the Interaction Region (IR) includes a detector integrated dipole field (anti-DID) to reduce orbit perturbation caused by the detector solenoid and minimize detector background. This paper presents a study of random field and alignment errors in the extraction magnets, compensation of the induced orbit perturbation, and effects of errors on extraction beam power loss. The results are obtained for the baseline ILC energy of 500 GeV center-of-mass and three options of beam parameters.

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii.

A panel of cell lines of diverse molecular background offers an improved model system for high-content screening, comparative analysis, and cell systems biology. A computational pipeline has been developed to collect images from cell-based assays, segment individual cells and colonies, represent segmented objects in a multidimensional space, and cluster them for identifying distinct subpopulations. While each segmentation strategy can vary for different imaging assays, representation and subpopulation analysis share a common thread. Application of this pipeline to a library of 41 breast cancer cell lines is demonstrated. These cell lines are grown in 2D and imaged through immunofluorescence microscopy. Subpopulations in this panel are identified and shown to correlate with previous subtyping literature that was derived from transcript data.

The ability to ensure adequate numbers of medical staff represents a crucial part of the medical response to any disaster. However, healthcare worker absenteeism during disasters, especially in the event of an attack of biological terrorism or an epidemic such as pandemic influenza, is a serious concern. Though a significant rate of absenteeism is often included as a baseline assumption in emergency planning, published reports on strategies to minimize absenteeism are comparatively few. This report documents interviews with managers and emergency response planners at hospitals and public health agencies and reviews existing survey data on healthcare worker absenteeism and studies of disasters to glean lessons about the needs of healthcare workers during those disasters. Based on this research, expected rates of absenteeism and individual determinants of absenteeism are presented along with recommendations of steps that hospitals, emergency medical services departments, public health organizations, and government agencies can take to meet the needs of healthcare workers and minimize absenteeism during a biological event.

We describe searches for B{sup 0} meson decays to the charmless final states {pi}{sup 0}K{sub S}{sup 0}K{sub S}{sup 0}, {eta}K{sub S}{sup 0}K{sub S}{sup 0}, and {eta}{prime}K{sub S}{sup 0}K{sub S}{sup 0}. The data sample corresponds to 467 x 10{sup 6} B{bar B} pairs produced in e{sup +}e{sup -} annihilation and collected with the BABAR detector at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. We find no significant signals and determine the 90% confidence level upper limits on the branching fractions, in units of 10{sup -7}, {Beta}(B{sup 0} {yields} {pi}{sup 0}K{sub S}{sup 0}K{sub S}{sup 0}) < 12, {Beta}(B{sup 0} {yields} {eta}K{sub S}{sup 0}K{sub S}{sup 0}) < 10, and {Beta}(B{sup 0} {yields} {eta}{prime}K{sub S}{sup 0}K{sub S}{sup 0}) < 20.

This report describes the process by which the Senate provides advice and consent on presidential nominations, including receipt and referral of nominations, committee practices, and floor procedure.

Using the principle of energy balance we develop a 2D theory for calculating growth rates of instability in a two-cavity model of a sheet beam klystron. An important ingredient is a TE-like mode in the gap that also gives a longitudinal kick to the beam. When compared with a self-consistent particle-in-cell calculation, with sheet beam klystron-type parameters, agreement is quite good up to half the design current, 65 A; at full current, however, other, current-dependent effects come in and the results deviate significantly.

This report discusses Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) Act, which was enacted by the 108th Congress as Section 1057 of the FY2004 National Defense Authorization Act (P.L. 108-136). It includes background of the SAFER Act, appropriations from FY2005-FY2010, reauthorization of the program in the House and Senate, and information about program implementation.

This report discusses the constitutional issues raised in relation to state and local laws intended to deter the presence of unauthorized aliens, along with the implications that federal civil rights statutes might have on the implementation and enforcement of measures restricting such persons' ability to obtain employment, housing, or other state and local benefits or services.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This letter provides information Congress requested at the March 25, 2009, hearing entitled The Roles and Responsibilities of Inspectors General within Financial Regulatory Agencies. During the hearing, the former Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) testified that provisions of the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended (IG Act), allow the Secretary of the Department of the Treasury to prevent the IG from pursuing an investigation or audit, including the issuance of subpoenas, under certain conditions. Due to concerns about the possible inappropriate use of such authorities, Congress asked GAO to identify federal agencies that possess the authority under the IG Act to prohibit audits and investigations by their offices of inspectors general (IG offices) and to determine the extent to which such provisions have been used to limit the IGs' activities."

Biological images have the potential to reveal complex signatures that may not be amenable to morphological modeling in terms of shape, location, texture, and color. An effective analytical method is to characterize the composition of a specimen based on user-defined patterns of texture and contrast formation. However, such a simple requirement demands an improved model for stability and robustness. Here, an interactive computational model is introduced for learning patterns of interest by example. The learned patterns bound an active contour model in which the traditional gradient descent optimization is replaced by the more efficient optimization of the graph cut methods. First, the energy function is defined according to the curve evolution. Next, a graph is constructed with weighted edges on the energy function and is optimized with the graph cut algorithm. As a result, the method combines the advantages of the level set method and graph cut algorithm, i.e.,"topological" invariance and computational efficiency. The technique is extended to the multi-phase segmentation problem; the method is validated on synthetic images and then applied to specimens imaged by transmission electron microscopy(TEM).

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.