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This report discusses the issue of U.S. economic assistance to sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting the importance of continued assistance in light of U.S. national security and also various U.S.-led efforts to promote reform amongst African citizens themselves. U.S. assistance finds its way to Africa through a variety of channels, including the USAID-administered DA program, food aid programs, and indirect aid provided through international financial institutions and the United Nations.

The United States and its allies are helping Afghanistan emerging from more than 22 years of warfare, although substantial risk to Afghan stability remains. Before the U.S. military campaign against the orthodox Islamist Taliban movement began on October 7, 2001, Afghanistan had been mired in conflict since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The defeat of the Taliban has enabled the United States and its coalition partners to send forces throughout Afghanistan to search for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and leaders that remain at large, including Osama bin Laden. As the war against remaining Al Qaeda and Taliban elements winds down, the United States is shifting its military focus toward stabilizing the interim government, including training a new Afghan national army, and supporting the international security force (ISAF) that is helping the new government provide security.

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Report discussing the potential for terrorists to develop within the Balkans region of Europe. According to the introduction, "This report will focus on two countries and a province with majority or near-majority Muslim populations: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, and Kosovo. It will deal with the role of international Islamic terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda rather than indigenous nationalist groups pursuing local or regional objectives" (p. 2).

This report provides a current summary of ballistic and cruise missile activity in selected countries and discusses implications for U.S. national security policy. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Terms of Reference Handbook defines a ballistic missile as “a missile that is guided during powered flight and unguided during the free flight when the trajectory that it follows is subject only to the external influences of gravity and atmospheric drag” and a cruise a missile as “a long-range, low-flying guided missile that can be launched from air, sea, and land.” Ballistic and cruise missile development and proliferation continue to pose a threat to the U.S.

The United States and its allies are helping Afghanistan emerging from more than 22 years of warfare, although substantial risk to Afghan stability remains. Before the U.S. military campaign against the orthodox Islamist Taliban movement began on October 7, 2001, Afghanistan had been mired in conflict since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The defeat of the Taliban has enabled the United States and its coalition partners to send forces throughout Afghanistan to search for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and leaders that remain at large, including Osama bin Laden. As the war against remaining Al Qaeda and Taliban elements winds down, the United States is shifting its military focus toward stabilizing the interim government, including training a new Afghan national army, and supporting the international security force (ISAF) that is helping the new government provide security.

Article II of the Constitution provides that the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and counsels, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for and which shall be established by law.” As a supplement to this authority, the The constitution further provides that “[t]he President shall have the Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” The Recess Appointments Clause was designed to enable the President to ensure the unfettered operation of the government during periods when the Senate was not in session and therefore unable to perform its advice and consent function.

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A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Federal agencies spend billions of dollars every year on information technology and are increasingly using performance-based contracting methods where agencies specify desired outcomes and allow contractors to design the best solutions to achieve those outcomes. Share-in-savings contracting is one such method under which a contractor provides funding for a project, and the agency compensates the contractor from any savings derived as a result of contract performance. The E-Government Act of 2002 authorized the use of share-in-savings contracting for information technology and required implementing regulations by mid-September 2003. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reported in December 2004 that no share-in-savings contracts had been awarded. The act's authority expires in September 2005. The act required GAO to assess the effectiveness of share-in-savings contracts. Because no such contracts have been awarded, GAO cannot provide an assessment. Instead, GAO reviewed the status of regulations and tools available to agencies in developing these contracts and identified the reasons agencies have not used the authority provided by the act. OMB and the General Services Administration (GSA) generally agreed with GAO's report."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "With the number of airplane passengers using U.S. airports expected to grow to almost 1 billion by the year 2015, ground access to U.S. airports has become an important factor in the development of our nation's transportation networks. Increases in the number of passengers traveling to and from airports will place greater strains on our nation's airport access roads and airport capacity, which can have a number of negative economic and social effects. U.S. transportation policy has generally addressed these negative economic and social effects from the standpoint of individual transportation modes and local government involvement. However, European transportation policy is increasingly focusing on intermodal transportation as a possible means to address congestion without sacrificing economic growth. This report addresses the development of intermodal capabilities at U.S. airports, including (1) the roles of different levels of government and the private sector; (2) the extent such facilities have been developed; (3) benefits, costs, and barriers to such development; and (4) strategies to improve these capabilities. GAO provided a draft of this report to the Department of Transportation (DOT) and Amtrak. DOT generally concurred with the report, and …

Spontaneous combustion has always been a problem in coal utilization especially in the storage and transportation of coal. In the United States, approximately 11% of underground coal mine fires are attributed to spontaneous coal combustion. The incidence of such fires is expected to increase with increased consumption of lower rank coals. The cause is usually suspected to be the reabsorption of moisture and oxidation. To understand the mechanisms of spontaneous combustion this study was conducted to (1) define the initial and final products during the low temperature (10 to 60 C) oxidation of coal at different partial pressures of O{sub 2}, (2) determine the rate of oxidation, and (3) measure the reaction enthalpy. The reaction rate (R) and propensity towards spontaneous combustion were evaluated in terms of the initial rate method for the mass gained due to adsorbed O{sub 2}. Equipment that was used consisted of a FT-IR (Fourier Transform-Infrared Spectrometer, Perkin Elmer), an accelerated surface area porosimeter (ASAP, Micromeritics model 2010), thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA, Cahn Microbalance TG 121) and a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC, Q1000, thermal analysis instruments). Their combination yielded data that established a relation between adsorption of oxygen and reaction enthalpy. The head space/ gas chromatograph/ mass …

This report describes complete results of the project entitled ''Enhanced Recovery Utilizing Variable Frequency Drives and a Distributed Power System''. This demonstration project was initiated in July 2003 and completed in March 2005. The objective of the project was to develop an integrated power production/variable frequency drive system that could easily be deployed in the oil field that would increase production and decrease operating costs. This report describes all the activities occurred and documents results of the demonstration.

This project provided the funding to operate and maintain the Nevada Desert FACE Facility. This support funds the CO{sub 2}, system repairs and maintenance, basic physical and biological site information, and personnel that are essential for the experiment to continue. They have continued to assess the effects of elevated CO{sub 2} on three key processes: (1) leaf- to plant-level responses of desert vegetation to elevated atmospheric CO{sub 2}; (2) ecosystem-level responses; and (3) integration of plant and ecosystem processes to understand carbon balance of deserts. The focus is the seminal interactions among atmospheric CO{sub 2}, water, and nitrogen that drive desert responses to elevated CO{sub 2} and explicitly address processes that occur across scales (biological, spatial, and temporal).

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This report begins with an inventory of basic information: definitions and guides to histories of the growth of open access publishing and citation archives and descriptions of selected major open access activities. It moves on to summarize major points of difference between proponents and opponents of nongovernmental open access publishing and databases, and then highlights federal, including National Institutes of Health (NIH), open access activities and contentious issues surrounding these developments. The report also briefly describes open access developments in the United Kingdom (where a number of governmental and nongovernmental initiatives have occurred) and in the international arena. Finally, controversial issues which could receive attention in the 109th Congress are summarized.

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House-passed appropriations for Foreign Operations, Labor/Health and Human Services, and Agriculture would provide a total of just over $3.2 billion for international HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria programs, compared with an Administration request of just under $3.2 billion.

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In order to determine if the measured beta activity for a solution containing potassium was exactly as predicted, particularly since the CES gas counter is not calibrated specifically with K-40, an experiment was conducted to compare measured activities from two radioanalytical methods (gamma spectroscopy and gas proportional counting) to calculated activities across a range of potassium concentrations. Potassium, being ubiquitous and naturally radioactive, is a well-known and common interference in gross beta counting methods. By measuring the observed beta activity due to K-40 in potassium-containing solutions across a wide range of concentrations, it was found that the observed beta activity agrees well with the beta activity calculated from the potassium concentration measured by standard inorganic analytical techniques, such as ICP-OES, and that using the measured potassium concentration to calculate the expected beta activity, and comparing this to the observed beta activity to determine if potassium can account for all the observed activity in a sample, is a valid technique. It was also observed that gamma spectroscopy is not an effective means of measuring K-40 activity below approximately 700 pCi/L, which corresponds to a solution with approximately 833 mg/L total potassium. Gas proportional counting for gross beta activity has a much …

Wind power is the fastest growing renewable energy technology and electric power source (AWEA, 2004a). This renewable energy has demonstrated its readiness to become a more significant contributor to the electricity supply in the western U.S. and help ease the power shortage (AWEA, 2000). The practical exercise of this alternative energy supply also showed its function in stabilizing electricity prices and reducing the emissions of pollution and greenhouse gases from other natural gas-fired power plants. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the world's winds could theoretically supply the equivalent of 5800 quadrillion BTUs of energy each year, which is 15 times current world energy demand (AWEA, 2004b). Archer and Jacobson (2005) also reported an estimation of the global wind energy potential with the magnitude near half of DOE's quote. Wind energy has been widely used in Europe; it currently supplies 20% and 6% of Denmark's and Germany's electric power, respectively, while less than 1% of U.S. electricity is generated from wind (AWEA, 2004a). The production of wind energy in California ({approx}1.2% of total power) is slightly higher than the national average (CEC & EPRI, 2003). With the recently enacted Renewable Portfolio Standards calling for 20% of renewables in …