This report looks at the recent conflict in Syria, particularly casualty estimates and an assessment of possible future scenarios. A large part of the report looks at U.S. policy towards Syria, including how Congress will handle humanitarian dilemmas, security of Syrian Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how the country is open to opportunities for terrorism recruitment. It also looks at key developments that have occurred during the conflict, including supports of the Asad government, political dynamics, and minority communities. The report ends with a look at the Syrian economy and current/possible sanctions.

This report provides an overview of the parties and candidates who competed in the Mexican federal elections with a focus on the presidential contest, recaps the election results, and discusses some potential implications of the elections for U.S.-Mexican security cooperation, North American economic integration, and U.S. energy security.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of the Treasury announced changes in January 2012 to its Making Home Affordable (MHA) programs, which are funded by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), to address barriers to borrower participation. These changes include expanding eligibility criteria and extending application deadlines through 2013. Not enough time has passed to assess the extent to which these changes will increase participation. Several large servicers were not able to fully implement the changes by the June 1, 2012, effective date, and servicers that GAO queried had mixed views about possible effects. Treasury consulted with servicers, investors, and federal banking regulators before implementing the changes but did not perform a comprehensive risk assessment for the changes or develop meaningful performance measures in accordance with standards for internal control. As a result, Treasury may have difficulty mitigating potential risks, such as an increase in redefaults or the misuse of funds; effectively assessing program outcomes; or holding servicers accountable."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "From August 2005 to September 2010, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded five contracts to reconstruct a major coastal road in Aceh Province, Indonesia. Three of the contracts were for construction, one contract was for design and supervision, and one contract was for project management. Several factors delayed the road’s completion and increased costs. For example, according to USAID, when one contractor did not make acceptable progress, the agency reduced the scope of work, terminated construction of an 8-mile road section, and hired another contractor to complete the section. Other factors included the Indonesian government’s difficulty in acquiring land for the road and local opposition to the new road alignment."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins ""

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "During our audit of the DIF’s 2011 and 2010 financial statements, we identified deficiencies in controls over FDIC’s process for deriving and reporting estimates of losses to the DIF from resolution transactions involving shared loss agreements. While these deficiencies, individually and collectively, did not constitute a material weakness in internal control over financial reporting, they nevertheless increased the risk of additional undetected errors or irregularities in the DIF’s financial statements. Thus, these control deficiencies collectively represented a significant deficiency in FDIC’s internal control over financial reporting for the DIF related to estimating losses from shared loss agreements."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO earlier reported that unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) could not meet the aviation safety requirements developed for manned aircraft and posed several obstacles to operating safely and routinely in the national airspace system. These include 1) the inability for UAS to detect, sense, and avoid other aircraft and airborne objects in a manner similar to “see and avoid” by a pilot in a manned aircraft; 2) vulnerabilities in the command and control of UAS operations; 3) the lack of technological and operational standards needed to guide the safe and consistent performance of UAS; and 4) the lack of final regulations to accelerate the safe integration of UAS into the national airspace. GAO stated in 2008 that Congress should consider creating an overarching body within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to address obstacles for routine access. FAA’s Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) has taken on a similar role. FAA has implemented GAO’s two recommendations related to its planning and data analysis efforts to facilitate integration."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The three lead Air Force major commands—Air Mobility Command, Air Force Special Operations Command, and Air Combat Command—all utilize training requirements review boards composed of subject-matter experts to determine training requirements for specific aircraft. These boards determine which training requirements can be completed in live or virtual environments based upon factors such as specific combatant command mission requirements and the capabilities of fielded simulators and networks. All three commands use a combination of live and virtual approaches, but the mix varies by aircraft. For example, Air Combat Command specifies that approximately 25 percent of its training requirements could be met virtually. The other two commands conduct approximately 50 percent of their training virtually."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Market participants indicated that primary market disclosure for municipal securities—official statements—generally provides useful information, but investors and market participants cited a number of limitations to continuing disclosures. The most frequently cited limitations were timeliness, frequency, and completeness. For example, investors and other market participants said that issuers do not always provide all the financial information, event notices, or other information they pledged to provide for the lifetime of a security. While GAO's analysis of current regulatory requirements for municipal securities disclosure found that they largely reflected the seven principles of effective disclosure, regulators and market participants said that there are some limitations on the enforceability and efficiency of the regulations. However, the effect of these limitations on individual investors largely is unknown because limited information exists about the extent to which individual investors use disclosures to make investment decisions. Nevertheless, regulators remain concerned about this market, in part due to its size and the participation of individual investors. As discussed below, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) have been taking or plan to take actions to improve disclosure."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Based on our analysis, none of the five MDA schedules we reviewed fully met all nine of the schedule best practices, including the practice of capturing all activities. The schedules were inconsistent in meeting best practices, and some had major deficiencies. These results are significant because a reliable schedule is one key factor that indicates a program is likely to achieve its planned outcomes. Our analysis suggests that estimated time frames and costs of these programs are either not reliable or the program is missing information that could make it more efficient. The MDA schedule results are similar to those of other agencies that GAO has analyzed. We are recommending actions that would better ensure compliance with schedule best practices for the five programs reviewed as well as for the long-term MDA program. The Department of Defense (DOD) concurred with our recommendations."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Over the last decade, working women’s access to and participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans have improved relative to men. Indeed, from 1998 to 2009, women surpassed men in their likelihood of working for an employer that offered a pension plan, largely because the proportion of men covered by a plan declined. Furthermore, as employers have continued to terminate their defined benefit (DB) plans and have switched to defined contribution (DC) plans, the proportion of women who worked for employers that offered a DC plan increased. Correspondingly, women’s participation rates in DC plans increased slightly over this same period while men’s participation fell, thereby narrowing the participation difference between men and women to 1 percentage point. At the same time, however, women contributed to their DC plans at lower levels than men."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As of the most recent agency data submitted in September 2011, 24 agencies identified almost 2,900 total centers, established plans to close 1,186 of them by 2015, and estimated they would realize over $2.4 billion in cost savings in doing so. However, while the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) required agencies to complete missing elements in their data center inventories and plans by the end of September 2011, only 3 agencies submitted complete inventories and only 1 agency submitted a complete plan. For example, in their inventories, 17 agencies do not provide full information on their information technology facilities and energy usage, and 8 provide only partial information on their servers. Further, in their consolidation plans, 13 agencies do not provide a full master program schedule and 21 agencies do not fully report their expected cost savings. Officials from several agencies reported that some of this information was unavailable at certain facilities or that the information was still being developed. In a prior report, GAO recommended that agencies complete the missing elements from their inventories and plans. Until these inventories and plans are complete, agencies …

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This report discusses about Analysis of Federal-State Financing of the Child Support Enforcement Program.

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The objective of the Aerosol Best Estimate (AEROSOLBE) value-added product (VAP) is to provide vertical profiles of aerosol extinction, single scatter albedo, asymmetry parameter, and Angstroem exponents for the atmospheric column above the Central Facility at the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) site. We expect that AEROSOLBE will provide nearly continuous estimates of aerosol optical properties under a range of conditions (clear, broken clouds, overcast clouds, etc.). The primary requirement of this VAP was to provide an aerosol data set as continuous as possible in both time and height for the Broadband Heating Rate Profile (BBHRP) VAP in order to provide a structure for the comprehensive assessment of our ability to model atmospheric radiative transfer for all conditions. Even though BBHRP has been completed, AEROSOLBE results are very valuable for environmental, atmospheric, and climate research.

A total of 58 urine samples and 10 fecal samples were submitted during the report period (April 1, 2009 through March 31, 2010) to General Engineering Laboratories, South Carolina by the Hanford Internal Dosimetry Program (IDP) to check the accuracy, precision, and detection levels of their analyses. Urine analyses for Sr, 238Pu, 239Pu, 241Am, 243Am 235U, 238U, elemental uranium and fecal analyses for 241Am, 238Pu and 239Pu were tested this year as well as four tissue samples for 238Pu, 239Pu, 241Am and 241Pu. The number of QC urine samples submitted during the report period represented 1.3% of the total samples submitted. In addition to the samples provided by IDP, GEL was also required to conduct their own QC program, and submit the results of analyses to IDP. About 33% of the analyses processed by GEL during the third year of this contract were quality control samples. GEL tested the performance of 21 radioisotopes, all of which met or exceeded the specifications in the Statement of Work within statistical uncertainty (Table 4).

Metal Oxygen Separation Technologies, Inc. (abbreviated MOxST, pronounced most) and Boston University (BU) have developed a new low-cost process for recycling post-consumer co-mingled and heavily-oxidized magnesium scrap, and discovered a new chemical mechanism for magnesium separations in the process. The new process, designated MagReGenTM, is very effective in laboratory experiments, and on scale-up promises to be the lowest-cost lowest-energy lowest-impact method for separating magnesium metal from aluminum while recovering oxidized magnesium. MagReGenTM uses as little as one-eighth as much energy as today's methods for recycling magnesium metal from comingled scrap. As such, this technology could play a vital role in recycling automotive non-ferrous metals, particularly as motor vehicle magnesium/aluminum ratios increase in order to reduce vehicle weight and increase efficiency.

This slide-show discusses how the method of discrete packet analysis improves atmospheric compensation for quasi-CW fluorescence detection methods. This is key to improving remote sensing capabilities.

We report generation of density modulation at terahertz (THz) frequencies in a relativistic electron beam through laser modulation of the beam longitudinal phase space. We show that by modulating the energy distribution of the beam with two lasers, density modulation at the difference frequency of the two lasers can be generated after the beam passes through a chicane. In this experiment, density modulation around 10 THz was generated by down-converting the frequencies of an 800 nm laser and a 1550 nm laser. The central frequency of the density modulation can be tuned by varying the laser wavelengths, beam energy chirp, or momentum compaction of the chicane. This technique can be applied to accelerator-based light sources for generation of coherent THz radiation and marks a significant advance toward tunable narrow-band THz sources.

A total of 76 urine samples and 10 spiked fecal samples were submitted during the report period (April 1, 2010 through March 31, 2011) to GEL Laboratories, LLC in South Carolina by the Hanford Internal Dosimetry Program (IDP) to check the accuracy, precision, and detection levels of their analyses. Urine analyses for 14C, Sr, for 238Pu, 239Pu, 241Am, 243Am, 235U, 238U, 238U-mass and fecal analyses for 241Am, 238Pu and 239Pu were tested this year. The number of QC urine samples submitted during the report period represented 1.1% of the total samples submitted. In addition to the samples provided by IDP, GEL was also required to conduct their own QC program, and submit the results of analyses to IDP. About 31% of the analyses processed by GEL during the first year of contract 112512 were quality control samples. GEL tested the performance of 23 radioisotopes, all of which met or exceeded the specifications in the Statement of Work within statistical uncertainty except the slightly elevated relative bias for 243,244Cm (Table 4).