This report summarizes provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act Amendments of 1994 and outlines this Act's implementation schedule for use by Members of Congress and their staff.

The growing U.S. trade imbalance with China, and alleged Chinese unfair trade practices, have become of major concern to many U.S. policymakers. Over the past few years, the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown at a faster rate than that of any other major U.S. trading partner. In 1993, the U.S. trade deficit with China totalled $22.8 billion, the second largest U.S. bilateral trade imbalance after Japan. Many trade analysts have attributed the growing U.S.-China trade deficit to a variety of Chinese restrictive trade practices. Other areas of concern to the United States have included China's alleged violation of U.S. intellectual property rights, transshipments of textiles to the United States in violation of U.S. textile quotas, and China's alleged use of forced labor for products exported to the United States.

On May 19, 1994, the Senate passed, by a vote of 95 to 3, S. 2019, the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1994, a comprehensive proposal to reauthorize and amend the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). During floor debate on the bill, the Senate considered numerous amendments, many of which were adopted. This report summarizes selected provisions of S. 2019, as passed.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Effect of amendments to Education Code section 4.25(a), (b) by the Seventy-third Legislature’s House Bills 681 and 1372 and Senate Bill 7 (RQ-464)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification;Whether a salary grievance committie established under chapter 152 of the Local Government Code is authorized to here a judge of the peace grievance concerning an auto allowance.(ID# 22241).

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether county tax assessor's filing for school board trustee effects an automatic resignation from the tax assessor's office, and related question (ID# 26736)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Authority of a county treasurer to pay for an autopsy performed, at the request of a justice of the peace of the county, on the body of a person killed in a traffice accident in a neighboring county (ID# 25244)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Reconsideration of Letter Opinion No. 93-33 (1993) as to whether a state employee may serve on the board of directors of a municipal utility district and recieve compensation in the form of a per diem and reimbursement of expenses (ID# 22433)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Representation of a state-employed physician who fills a petition under section 574.104 Health and Safety Code, to administer psychoactive medications (ID#27283)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether section 601.002 of the Government Code empoers a first assisstant district attorney to perform the duties of a district attorney who has resigned (ID# 28423)

Letter opinion issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Dan Morales, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Proper construction of Attorney General Opinion JM-988 (1988) (ID# 30083)

The International Petroleum Statistics Report presents data on international oil production, demand, imports, exports, and stocks. The report has four sections. Section 1 contains time series data on world oil production, and on oil demand and stocks in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This section contains annual data beginning in 1985, and monthly data for the most recent two years. Section 2 presents an oil supply/demand balance for the world. This balance is presented in quarterly intervals for the most recent two years. Section 3 presents data on oil imports by OECD countries. This section contains annual data for the most recent year, quarterly data for the most recent two quarters, and monthly data for the most recent twelve months. Section 4 presents annual time series data on world oil production and oil stocks, demand, and trade in OECD countries. World oil production and OECD demand data are for the years 1970 through 1992; OECD stocks from 1973 through 1992; and OECD trade from 1982 through 1992.

The small-scale cookoff bomb test was developed by the Navy at China Lake as a method for evaluation of the violence of thermal decomposition of explosives and propellants. The UN {open_quotes}Recommendations on the Transport of Dangerous Goods - Tests and Criteria{close_quotes} (ST/SG/AC.10/11) have accepted the small-scale cookoff bomb test as a test for classification of a substance as an explosive (class 1 substance) for storage and shipment. The US Departments of Transportation and Defense have agreed to use the UN tests as US criteria for storage and shipment. The UN scheme is designed to assess the relative hazard of explosives so that an appropriate classification for transport can be made by the competent authority (DOT). Three thermal tests have been approved: the Koenen test, the internal ignition test and the small-scale cookoff bomb (SSCB) test. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has designed a dissolution work station for removal of the plastic bonded explosives (PBXs) LX-10-1 and PBX-9404 from two artillery fired atomic projectiles (AFAPs) using dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) as the solvent. The DOE Explosives Safety Manual allows up to 33% solutions of explosives to be handled as non-explosive in the laboratory and 25% solutions to be stored as non-explosives unless the …

A lattice gas automaton was implemented on a massively parallel machine (the BBN TC2000) and a vector supercomputer (the CRAY C90). The automaton models Burgers equation {rho}t + {rho}{rho}{sub x} = {nu}{rho}{sub xx} in 1 dimension. The lattice gas evolves by advecting and colliding pseudo-particles on a 1-dimensional, periodic grid. The specific rules for colliding particles are stochastic in nature and require the generation of many billions of random numbers to create the random bits necessary for the lattice gas. The goal of the thesis was to speed up the process of generating the random bits and thereby lessen the computational bottleneck of the automaton.

The primary and steady-state creep behavior of ductile-phase toughened Nb{sub 5}Si{sub 3}/Nb in-situ composites has been simulated using analytical and finite element (FE) continuum techniques. The microstructure of these composites is complex, consisting of large, elongated primary dendrites of the ductile (Nb) solid-solution phase in a eutectoid matrix with the silicide as the continuous phase. This microstructure has been idealized to facilitate the modeling; the effects of these idealizations on the predicted composite creep rates are discussed. Further, it has been assumed that the intrinsic creep behavior of each phase within the composite is the same as that of the corresponding bulk material. Thus, the experimentally measured creep properties of the bulk Nb{sub 5}Si{sub 3} and (Nb) phases have been analyzed to provide the required material constants in the creep constitutive equation. Model predictions of the steady-state composite creep rate have been compared with the experimental results for a Nb-10 at.% Si alloy. While accurate at low stress, the models under predict the composite creep rate at large stresses because the composite stress exponent is under predicted. In the case of primary creep, the models somewhat over predict the composite creep strain but are reasonably accurate given uncertainties in the …

Theories suggest there is a link between protamine concentrations in individual sperm and male fertility. Previously, biochemical analyses have used pooled samples containing millions of sperm to determine protamine concentrations. These methods have not been able to determine what percentage of morphologically normal sperm are biochemically defective and potentially infertile. Nuclear microscopy has been utilized to measure elemental profiles at the single sperm level. By measuring the amount of phosphorus and sulfur, the total DNA and protamine content in individual sperm from fertile bull and mouse semen have been determined. These values agree with results obtained from other biochemical analyses. Nuclear microscopy shows promise for measuring elemental profiles in the chromatin of individual sperm. The technique may be able to resolve theories regarding the importance of protamines to male fertility and identify biochemical defects responsible for certain types of male infertility.

Vertical gas motions induced by barometric pressure variations can carry radioactive gases out of the rubblized region produced by an underground nuclear explosion, through overburden rock, into the atmosphere. To better quantify transit time and amount of transport, field experiments were conducted at two sites on Pahute Mesa, Kapelli and Tierra, where radioactive gases had been earlier detected in surface cracks. At each site, two tracer gases were injected into the rubblized chimney 300-400 m beneath the surface and their arrival was monitored by concentration measurements in gas samples extracted from shallow collection holes. The first ``active`` tracer was driven by a large quantity of injected air; the second ``passive`` tracer was introduced with minimal gas drive to observe the natural transport by barometric pumping. Kapelli was injected in the fall of 1990, followed by Tierra in the fall of 1991. Data was collected at both sites through the summer of 1993. At both sites, no surface arrival of tracer was observed during the active phase of the experiment despite the injection of several million cubic feet of air, suggesting that cavity pressurization is likely to induce horizontal transport along high permeability layers rather than vertical transport to the surface. …

We study both the complexity and approximability of various graph and combinatorial problems specified using two dimensional narrow periodic specifications (see [CM93, HW92, KMW67, KO91, Or84b, Wa93]). The following two general kinds of results are presented. (1) We prove that a number of natural graph and combinatorial problems are NEXPTIME- or EXPSPACE-complete when instances are so specified; (2) In contrast, we prove that the optimization versions of several of these NEXPTIME-, EXPSPACE-complete problems have polynomial time approximation algorithms with constant performance guarantees. Moreover, some of these problems even have polynomial time approximation schemes. We also sketch how our NEXPTIME-hardness results can be used to prove analogous NEXPTIME-hardness results for problems specified using other kinds of succinct specification languages. Our results provide the first natural problems for which there is a proven exponential (and possibly doubly exponential) gap between the complexities of finding exact and approximate solutions.

In August 1979, Halbach submitted a paper entitled ``Design of Permanent Multipole Magnets with Oriented Rare Earth Cobalt Material.`` In this paper, he presented a novel method of generating multipole magnetic fields using non-intuitive geometrical arrangements of permanent magnets. In subsequent publications, he further defined these concepts. Of particular interest to one of the authors (RFP) was the special magnet array that generated a uniform dipole field. In 1990 Post proposed the construction of an electric machine (a motor/generator) using a dipole field based on Klaus Halbach`s array of permanent magnets. He further proposed that such a system should be employed as an integral part of ``an electromechanical battery`` (EMB), i.e., a modular flywheel system to be used as a device for storing electrical energy, as an alternative to the electrochemical storage battery. This paper reviews Halbach`s theory for the generation of a dipole field using an array of permanent magnet bars, presents a simple analysis of a family of novel ``ironless`` electric machines designed using the dipole Halbach array, and describes the results obtained when they were tested in the laboratory.

Environmental, health and safety (EH&S) risks presented by CIS, CGS and CdTe photovoltaic module production, use and decommissioning have been reviewed and discussed by several authors. Several EH&S concerns exit. The estimated EH&S risks are based on extrapolations of toxicity, environmental mobility, and bioavailability data for other related inorganic compounds. Sparse data, however, are available for CIS, CGS or CdTe. In response to the increased interest in these materials, Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has been engaged in a cooperative research program with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Fraunhofer Institute for Solid State Technology (IFT), the Institute of Ecotoxicity of the GSF Forschungszentrum fair Umwelt und Gesundheit, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to develop fundamental toxicological and environmental data for these three compounds. This workshop report describes the results of these studies and describes their potential implications with respect to the EH&S risks presented by CIS, CGS, and CdTe module production, use and decommissioning.

The rate of thermal decomposition of mercuric sulfide (HgS) has been measured at temperatures from 265 to 345 C. These data have been analyzed using a first-order chemical reaction model for the time dependence of the reaction and the Arrhenius equation for the temperature dependence of the rate constant. Using this information, the activation energy for the reaction was found to be 55 kcal/mol. Significant reaction vessel surface effects obscured the functional form of the time dependence of the initial portion of the reaction. The data and the resulting time-temperature reaction-rate model were used to predict the decomposition rate of HgS as a function of time and temperature in thermal treatment systems. Data from large-scale thermal treatment studies already completed were interpreted in terms of the results of this study. While the data from the large-scale thermal treatment studies were consistent with the data from this report, mass transport effects may have contributed to the residual amount of mercury which remained in the soil after most of the large-scale runs.