Much of the debate over U.S. policy toward Iran has centered on the nature of the current regime; some believe that Iran, a country of about 70 million people, is a threat to U.S. interests because hardliners in Iran's regime dominate and set a policy direction intended to challenge U.S. influence and allies in the region. President George W. Bush, in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union message, labeled Iran part of an "axis of evil" along with Iraq and North Korea. This report discusses the political history of Iran, U.S. strategy in Iran, and the Obama Administration's policies for dealing with Iran, especially with regard to the previous administration's policies.

This report discusses the current political state of Iran and its relationship with the United States. This report emphasizes in particular the Iranian presidential elections that took place on June 12, 2009; current U.S. efforts under President Obama to forge diplomatic talks with Iran while at the same time urging aggressive action in the way of certain economic and trade sanctions; and how current U.S. efforts under the Obama Administration differ and/or are similar to efforts under the Bush Administration.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS Convention) was agreed to in 1982, but the United States never became a signatory nation. In the 111th Congress, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs on January 13, 2009, acknowledged that U.S. accession to the LOS Convention would be an Obama Administration priority. This report describes provisions of the LOS Convention relating to living marine resources and discusses how these provisions comport with current U.S. marine policy.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Over the past decade, per capita consumption of bottled water in the United States has more than doubled. With this increase have come several concerns in recent years about the safety, quality, and environmental impacts of bottled water. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates bottled water under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act as a food and is responsible for ensuring that domestic and imported bottled water is safe and truthfully labeled. Among other things, GAO (1) evaluated the extent to which FDA regulates and ensures the quality and safety of bottled water; (2) evaluated the extent to which federal and state authorities regulate the accuracy of labels and claims regarding the purity and source of bottled water; and (3) identified the environmental and other impacts of bottled water. GAO reviewed FDA data, reports, and requirements for bottled water; conducted a state survey of all 50 states and the District of Columbia; reviewed bottled water labels; and interviewed FDA officials and key experts."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) has had the authority to award multiyear contracts--continuing contracts--without having received appropriations to cover the full contract amount. In 2006, Congress limited the Corps' use of such contracts by prohibiting obligations made in advance of appropriations. In response, the Corps developed a new clause that stopped work once funding for a fiscal year was expended. GAO was mandated to examine (1) the accuracy of the Corps' fiscal years 2007 and 2008 quarterly reports to Congress about continuing contracts that included the new clause, (2) the extent to which the Corps' use of continuing contacts with the new clause may have affected its execution of the Civil Works program during this time, and (3) the extent to which the Corps followed legal procedures in implementing the new clause. To conduct this work, GAO reviewed Corps documents, such as its quarterly reports and bid protests, federal procurement laws, and interviewed officials."

This report provides an analysis of the NFIP and its financial status, summarizes the major challenges facing the program, including issues affecting its long-term financial solvency, presents some alternative approaches for managing and financing the flood losses and describes pending legislation on this issue.

Successive U.S. governments have urged the creation of an anti-missile system to protect against long-range ballistic missile threats from adversary states. The Bush Administration proposed deploying a ground-based mid-course defense (GMD) element of the larger Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) in Europe to defend against an Iranian missile threat. The proposed U.S. system has encountered resistance in some European countries and beyond. The GMD plan has also affected U.S.-Russia relations. Former President Putin and his successor, Vladimir Medvedev, have argued that the proposal would reignite the arms race and upset U.S.-Russian-European security relations. This report discusses these issues, as well as the pending related budget requests.

The Directorate of Science and Technology is the primary organization for research and development (R&D) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The directorate is headed by the Under Secretary for Science and Technology. In the past, some Members of Congress and other observers have been highly critical of the directorate's performance. Although management changes have somewhat muted this criticism in recent years, fundamental issues remain, which this report discusses in detail. Congressional policymakers are widely expected to consider reauthorization legislation for DHS during the 111th Congress. Such legislation would likely include provisions that would affect the Science and Technology Directorate.

Special Operations Forces (SOF) play a significant role in U.S. military operations and the Administration has given U.S. SOF greater responsibility for planning and conducting worldwide counterterrorism operations. U.S. SOF's growing need for enabling forces that are largely drawn from conventional forces is a potential policy issue for congressional consideration.

On June 19, 2009, the House voted to impeach U.S. District Judge Samuel B. Kent of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. The impeachment process provides a mechanism for removal of the President, Vice President, and other federal civil officers found to have engaged in "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." This report explains the impeachment process, including its history and the process itself.

Nowadays, virtual models are commonly used to evaluate the performance of conventional window systems. Complex fenestration systems can be difficult to simulate accurately not only because of their geometry but also because of their optical properties that scatter light in an unpredictable manner. Bi-directional Scattering Distribution Functions (BSDF) have recently been developed based on a mixture of measurements and modelling to characterize the optics of such systems. This paper describes the workflow needed to create then use these BSDF datasets in the Radiance lighting simulation software. Limited comparisons are made between visualizations produced using the standard ray-tracing method, the BSDF method, and that taken in a full-scale outdoor mockup.

The work under this grant consisted of encouraging community activities for the development of parallel programming patterns. This work was in conjunction with the research performed under the Pmodels award - where research was pursued on the development for new parallel programming models. Work on programming patterns does not have, as a goal, the invention of new technology. Rather, it is about codifying existing practice, so as to provide practitioners with a common language. This facilitates education and communication between practitioners. In addition, it helps in the design of new parallel frameworks and languages. One major issue in their design is expressiveness: To what extent does the language or framework facilitates the expression of common programming patterns. In order to assess expressiveness in any useful way, it is necessary to identify those common patterns.

We describe a technique to optimally tune and calibrate bendable x-ray optics for sub-micron focusing. The focusing is divided between two elliptically cylindrical reflecting elements, a Kirkpatrick-Baez (KB) pair. Each optic is shaped by applying unequal bending couples to each end of a flat mirror. The developed technique allowsoptimal tuning of these systems using surface slope data obtained with a slope measuring instrument, the long trace profiler (LTP). Due to the near linearity of the problem, the minimal set of data necessary for the tuning of each bender, consists of only three slope traces measured before and after a single adjustment of each bending couple. The data are analyzed with software realizing a method of regression analysis with experimentally found characteristic functions of the benders. The resulting approximation to the functional dependence of the desired shape provides nearly final settings. Moreover, the characteristic functions of the benders found in the course of tuning, can be used for retuning to a new desired shape without removal from the beamline and re-measuring. We perform a ray trace, using profiler data for the finally tuned optics, predicting the performance to be expected during use of the optics on the beamline.

HyS is conceptually the simplest of the thermochemical cycles and involves only sulfur chemistry. In the HyS Cycle hydrogen gas (H{sub 2}) is produced at the cathode of the electrochemical cell (or electrolyzer). Sulfur dioxide (SO{sub 2}) is oxidized at the anode to form sulfuric acid (H{sub 2}SO{sub 4}) and protons (H{sup +}) as illustrated below. A separate high temperature reaction decomposes the sulfuric acid to water and sulfur dioxide which are recycled to the electrolyzers, and oxygen which is separated out as a secondary product. The electrolyzer includes a membrane that will allow hydrogen ions to pass through but block the flow of hydrogen gas. The membrane is also intended to prevent other chemical species from migrating between electrodes and undergoing undesired reactions that could poison the cathode or reduce overall process efficiency. In conventional water electrolysis, water is oxidized at the anode to produce protons and oxygen. The standard cell potential for conventional water electrolysis is 1.23 volts at 25 C. However, commercial electrolyzers typically require higher voltages ranging from 1.8 V to 2.6 V [Kirk-Othmer, 1991]. The oxidation of sulfur dioxide instead of water in the HyS electrolyzer occurs at a much lower potential. For example, the …

Ordering of Fe{sup 3+} and Fe{sup 2+} between octahedral (Oh) and tetrahedral (Td) sites in synthetic members of the magnetite (Fe{sub 3}O{sub 4}) - ulvoespinel (Fe{sub 2}TiO{sub 4}) solid-solution series was determined using Fe L{sub 2,3}-edge X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) coupled with electron microprobe and chemical analysis, Ti L-edge spectroscopy, Fe K-edge EXAFS and XANES, Fe{sub 57} Moessbauer spectroscopy, and unit cell parameters. Microprobe analysis, cell edges and chemical FeO determinations showed that the bulk compositions of the samples were stoichiometric magnetite-ulvoespinel solid-solutions. Surface sensitive XMCD showed that the surfaces of these oxide minerals were more sensitive to redox conditions and some samples required re-equilibration with suitable solid-solid buffers. Detailed site-occupancy analysis of these samples gave XMCD-Fe{sup 2+}/Fe{sup 3+} ratios very close to stoichiometric values. L{sub 2,3}-edge spectroscopy showed that Ti{sup 4+} was restricted to Oh sites. XMCD results showed that significant Fe{sup 2+} only entered Td when the Ti content was > 0.40 apfu while Fe{sup 2+} in Oh increased from 1 a.p.f.u in magnetite to a maximum of {approx}1.4 apfu in USP45. As the Ti content increased from this point, the steady increase in Fe{sup 2+} in Td sites was clearly observable in the XMCD spectra, concurrent …

A number of fundamental scientific questions have arisen concerning the operation of high-energy DR and CT systems. Some of these questions include: (1) How deeply can such systems penetrate thickly shielded objects? (2) How well can such systems distinguish between dense and relatively high Z materials such as lead, tungsten and depleted uranium and lower Z materials such as steel, copper and tin? (3) How well will such systems operate for a uranium material which is an intermediate case between low density yellowcake and high density depleted uranium metal? These questions have led us to develop a set of phantoms to help answer these questions, but do not have any direct bearing on any smuggling concern. These new phantoms are designed to allow a systemic exploration of these questions by gradually varying their compositions and thicknesses. These phantoms are also good probes of the blurring behavior of radiography and tomography systems. These phantoms are composed of steel ({rho} assumed to be 7.8 g/cc), lead ({rho} assumed to be 11.4 g/cc), tungsten ({rho} assumed to be 19.25 g/cc), uranium oxide (UO{sub 3}) ({rho} assumed to be 4.6 g/cc), and depleted uranium (DU) ({rho} assumed to be 18.9 g/cc). There are five …

Annual report of the Texas Racing Commission describing goals, activities, and accomplishments during fiscal year 2008.

Interspecies hydrogen transfer between organisms producing and consuming hydrogen promotes the decomposition of organic matter in most anoxic environments. Although syntrophic couplings between hydrogen producers and consumers are a major feature of the carbon cycle, mechanisms for energy recovery at the extremely low free energies of reactions typical of these anaerobic communities have not been established. In this study, comparative transcriptional analysis of a model sulfate-reducing microbe, Desulfovibrio vulgaris Hildenborough, suggested the use of alternative electron transfer systems dependent upon growth modality. During syntrophic growth on lactate with a hydrogenotrophic methanogen, D. vulgaris up-regulated numerous genes involved in electron transfer and energy generation when compared with sulfate-limited monocultures. In particular, genes coding for the putative membrane-bound Coo hydrogenase, two periplasmic hydrogenases (Hyd and Hyn) and the well-characterized high-molecular weight cytochrome (Hmc) were among the most highly expressed and up-regulated. Additionally, a predicted operon coding for genes involved in lactate transport and oxidation exhibited up-regulation, further suggesting an alternative pathway for electrons derived from lactate oxidation during syntrophic growth. Mutations in a subset of genes coding for Coo, Hmc, Hyd and Hyn impaired or severely limited syntrophic growth but had little affect on growth via sulfate-respiration. These results demonstrate that syntrophic …

This report contains the information about The Davis-Bacon Act. It further discusses the comparison of Davis-Bacon Prevailing wages with Average Hourly Wages from the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) Survey.

This report describes provisions of the LOS Convention relating to living marine resources and discusses how these provisions comport with current U.S. marine policy. As presently understood and interpreted, these provisions generally appear to reflect current U.S. policy with respect to living marine resource management, conservation, and exploitation.

An "inherently governmental function" is one that, as a matter of law and policy, must be performed by federal government employees and cannot be contracted out because it is "intimately related to the public interest." This report explores various sides of the debate as to what exactly constitutes an "inherently governmental function," as there is currently no one uniform definition. Congress is concerned that inconsistent definitions may lead to improperly contracted jobs.

This report analyzes and discusses Iran's 2009 presidential election, particularly the campaigns of reformist candidate Mir Hussein Musavi and incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Allegations of vote rigging and election fraud have led to protests by supporters of candidate Musavi and have provoked international attention.