This report covers the recent 2011 Nigerian elections, development challenges, reform initiatives, social issues, security concerns, and international relations in Nigeria. It ends with some concerns for Congress, including U.S.-Nigerian trade issues, Nigerian counter-terrorism efforts, and U.S. assistance to Nigeria.

This report discusses the Department of Defense (DOD) policy via the Defense Utilization and Marketing Service (DRMS) for disposing of government equipment and supplies considered surplus or deemed unnecessary to the agency's currently designated mission. The report focuses on DRMS background, as well as the most recent DRMS policy modifications.

This report uses the context of the current and long-term economic environment to examine the tax cuts implemented by the George W. Bush Administration, including the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003.

This report provides an overview of midnight rulemaking (regulations issued at the end of a presidential administration) and discusses actions that recent outgoing and incoming administrations have taken pertaining to midnight rules. It explains how an incoming President could change or eliminate midnight rules, and provides options for congressional oversight of midnight rules.

This report looks at actions taken by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) during its first year. The CFPB exists to implement and enforce federal consumer financial laws, ensure consumer access to financial products and services, and ensure that the markets for consumer financial services and products are fair, transparent, and competitive.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and other federal agencies have taken steps to improve federal spending data available on USAspending.gov. This effort to publicly display comprehensive data arose from the federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which required OMB to establish a free, publicly accessible website containing data on federal awards and subawards. OMB launched USAspending.gov in December 2007 to meet these requirements. As GAO reported in 2010, while OMB had satisfied most of the requirements associated with the act, such as establishing the site with required data elements and search capability, it had only partially satisfied the requirement to establish a pilot program to test the collection and display of subaward data and had not met the requirements to include subaward data by January 2009, or to report to Congress on the site’s usage. Also, GAO found that from a sample of 100 awards on USAspending.gov, each award had at least one data error and that USAspending.gov did not include information on grants from programs at 9 agencies for fiscal year 2008. Subsequently, OMB and agencies have taken steps to improve the site …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and aircraft operators have taken several important actions to enhance general aviation security, and TSA is gathering input from operators to develop additional requirements. For example, TSA requires that certain general aviation aircraft operators implement security programs. Aircraft operators under these programs must, among other things, develop and maintain TSA-approved security programs. TSA has also conducted outreach to the general aviation community to establish a cooperative relationship with general aviation stakeholders. In 2008, TSA developed a proposed rule that would have imposed security requirements on all aircraft over 12,500 pounds, including large aircraft that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analysis has shown could cause significant damage in an attack. In response to industry concerns about the proposed rule’s costs and security benefits, TSA is developing a new proposed rule. Officials from all six industry associations GAO spoke with stated that TSA has reached out to gather industry’s input, and three of the six associations stated that TSA has improved its efforts to gather input since the 2008 notice of proposed rulemaking."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "TSA and aircraft operators have taken several important actions to enhance general aviation security, and TSA is working with aviation industry stakeholders to develop new security guidelines and regulations. Among other measures, TSA worked with members of the General Aviation Working Group of its Aviation Security Advisory Committee in 2003 and 2004 to develop recommended guidelines for general aviation airport security, and TSA expects the group to issue updated guidelines later this year. In addition, pursuant to the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, TSA established and oversees implementation of a security program in which aircraft weighing more than 12,500 pounds in scheduled or charter service that carry passengers or cargo or both, and that do not fall under another security program, must implement a “Twelve-Five” standard security program. Aircraft operators implementing a Twelve-Five security program must include, among other elements, procedures regarding bomb or air piracy threats. TSA obtains information directly from aircraft operators that fall under Twelve-Five through its review and approval of the security programs developed by these operators and through periodic inspections to determine the extent to which operators comply with their security programs. TSA …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Overall, the U.S. Census Bureau’s (Bureau) planning efforts for 2020 are off to a good start, as the Bureau made noteworthy progress within each of the four lessons learned from the 2010 Census. Still, additional steps will be needed within each of the lessons learned in order to sustain those reforms."

Agency strategic plan for the Texas Commission on Fire Protection describing the organization's planned services, activities, and other goals during fiscal years 2013 through 2017.

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This paper places a lowest upper bound on the field energy in electrostatic perturbations in single-species charged particle beams with initial temperature anisotropy (TllT⊥ < 1). The result applies to all electrostatic perturbations driven by the natural anisotropies that develop in accelerated particle beams, including Harris-type electrostatic instabilities, known to limit the luminosity and minimum spot size attainable in experiments. The thermodynamic bound on the field perturbation energy of the instabilities is obtained from the nonlinear Vlasov-Poisson equations for an arbitrary initial distribution function, including the effects of intense self-fields, finite geometry and nonlinear processes. This paper also includes analytical estimates of the nonlinear bounds for space-charge-dominated and emittance-dominated anisotropic bi-Maxwellian distributions.

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The research focussed on fundamental problems in the conversion of light to stored chemical energy. Specifically, work was completed on the design, synthesis and study of multi-component super- and supramolecular systems for photoinduced charge separation, one of the key steps in artificial photosynthesis, and on the use of these and related systems for the photochemical generation of H2 from water. At the center of these systems are chromophores comprised of square planar coordinated Pt(II) ions with arylacetylide and either diimine or terpyridyl ligands. Previous work had shown that the chromophores are photoluminescent in fluid solution with long-lived metal-to-ligand charge transfer (3MLCT) excited states that are necessarily directional. An advance which set the stage for a number of proposed studies was the light-driven production of hydrogen from water using a Pt(terpyridyl)(arylacetylide)+ chromophore and a sacrificial electron donor. The reaction is catalytic and appears to rival previously reported ruthenium bipyridyl systems in terms of H2 production. Variation of system components and mechanistic studies were conducted to understand better the individual steps in the overall process and how to improve its efficiency. Success with light driven H2 generation was employed as a key probe as new systems were constructed consisting of triads for …

Backward Raman compression in plasma is based on a 3-wave resonant interaction, which includes two- counter propagating laser pulses (pump and seed pulses) and an electron plasma wave (Langmuir wave). A high-density, roughly homogeneous, plasma mediates the energy transfer between the lasers by ensuring resonance with the plasma wave. However, in practice, a laser pulse entering or leaving plasma source encounters plasma at the edges of the homogeneous section that is far too tenuous to maintain resonance. When these tenuous plasma regions are extensive, such as for the wider plasma necessary for compression at higher powers, significant inverse bremsstrahlung and seed dispersion may occur. These deleterious effects may, however, be mitigated by chirping the seed and pump pulses.

Individual raw datastreams from instrumentation at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility fixed and mobile sites are collected and sent to the Data Management Facility (DMF) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for processing in near real-time. Raw and processed data are then sent approximately daily to the ARM Data Archive, where they are made available to the research community. For each instrument, we calculate the ratio of the actual number of processed data records received daily at the Archive to the expected number of data records. The results are tabulated by (1) individual datastream, site, and month for the current year and (2) site and fiscal year (FY) dating back to 1998.

Samples of the NSTX Liquid Lithium Divertor (LLD) with and without an evaporative Li coating were directly exposed to a neutral beam ex-situ at a power of ~1.5 MW/m2 for 1-3 seconds. Measurements of front face and bulk sample temperature were obtained. Predictions of temperature evolution were derived from a 1D heat flux model. No macroscopic damage occurred when the "bare" sample was exposed to the beam but microscopic changes to the surface were observed. The Li-coated sample developed a lithium hydroxide (LiOH) coating, which did not change even when the front face temperature exceeded the pure Li melting point. These results are consistent with the lack of damage to the LLD surface and imply that heating alone may not expose pure liquid Li if the melting point of surface impurities is not exceeded. This suggests that flow and heat are needed for future PFCs requiring a liquid Li surface. __________________________________________________

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