This report provides background information and presents potential issues (and costs) for Congress concerning the U.S. Navy's ship force-structure goals and shipbuilding plans.

This report focuses on the role of the Clerk of the House of Representatives and the Secretary of the Senate in implementing the new lobbying registration and disclosure requirements and provides an overview of the guidance document they have jointly issued.

This report seeks to shed some light on the past relationship between ballistic missile defenses and negotiations on offensive arms control treaties. It provides an historical review of the way in which the United States and Soviet Union addressed ballistic missile defense issues during their negotiations on the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) in the 1980s and early 1990s. It also provides a review of U.S. missile defense policy and summarizes data on missile defense spending during the 1980s, 1990s, and the past decade. The report then reviews the recent record on the way the New START negotiations addressed ballistic missile defense issues and offers some observations about whether this historical record may provide insights into how the United States might proceed with its ballistic missile defense programs in the future.

The U.S. program of assistance to Afghanistan is intended to stabilize and strengthen the Afghan economic, social, political, and security environment so as to blunt popular support for extremist forces in the region. Since 2001, nearly $47 billion has been appropriated toward this effort. This report provides a "big picture" overview of the U.S. aid program and congressional action. It describes what various aid agencies report they are doing in Afghanistan. It does not address the effectiveness of their programs.

This report discusses the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a free trade agreement that includes nations on both sides of the Pacific. Original members of the TPP were Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore. The United States, Australia, Peru, and Vietnam have committed themselves to joining and expanding this group. This report discusses similar trade partnerships, the importance of Asia to U.S. trade and security interests, and U.S. participation in the TPP.

Legislative branch revolving funds support the "business-type activities" of the House, Senate, and legislative branch agencies. This report traces the establishment, use, and recent development of these funds. Where available, the current status of funds is provided, using standard federal government budget object classifications.

This report discusses the rebanding plan announced by the Federal Communications Commission in 2004 to consolidate public safety frequencies and those used by some other operators, such as utilities. The plan was announce in an attempt to eliminate interference caused by the close proximity and interleaving of commercial and public safety channels.

This report discusses gas hydrates, which are potentially huge resource of natural gas for the United States. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there are about 85 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of technically recoverable gas hydrates in northern Alaska. The Minerals Management Service estimated a mean value of 21,000 TCF of in-place gas hydrates in the Gulf of Mexico. By comparison, total U.S. natural gas consumption is about 23 TCF annually. Gas hydrates are both a potential resource and a risk, representing a significant hazard to conventional oil and gas drilling and production operations, and to date gas hydrates have no confirmed commercial production.

This report collects statistics from a variety of sources on casualties sustained during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), which began on October 7, 2001. OEF actions took place primarily in Afghanistan; however, OEF casualties also includes American casualties in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Guantanamo Bay (Cuba), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Yemen.

This report provides background information and potential issues for Congress on the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), a relatively inexpensive Navy surface combatant equipped with modular "plug-and-fight" mission packages. The Navy's proposed FY2012 budget requests funding for the procurement of four LCSs. Current issues for Congress concerning the LCS program include changes or potential changes to the composition of LCS mission modules announced by the Navy in January 2011, the combat survivability of the LCS, and hull cracking on LCS-1. Congress's decisions on the LCS program could affect Navy capabilities and funding requirements, and the shipbuilding industrial base.

This report provides a brief overview of the European Union (EU), an economic and political partnership between 27 sovereign member states. The report describes the formation of the EU, the three main institutions of the EU, and the EU's relationship with the United States.

Today's 911 system is built on an infrastructure of analog technology that does not support many of the features that most Americans expect to be part of an emergency response. Efforts to splice newer, digital technologies onto this aging infrastructure have created points of failure where a call can be dropped or misdirected, sometimes with tragic consequences. Callers to 911, however, generally assume that the newer technologies they are using to place a call are matched by the same level of technology at the 911 call centers, known as Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs). This report discusses possible paths toward the modernization of the 911 infrastructure.

This report reviews the management and performance of La Vega Independent School District's (LVISD) educational, financial, and operational functions.

With the long-term goal in mind of investigating if one could possibly design a 'universal solid-sample comminution technique' for debris and rubble, we have studied pulsed-laser ablation of solid samples that were contained within a surrounding fluid. Using pulses with fluences between 2 J and 0.3 J, wavelengths of 351 and 527 nm, and samples of rock, concrete, and red brick, each submerged in water, we have observed conditions in which {micro}m-scale particles can be preferentially generated in a controlled manner, during the laser ablation process. Others have studied laser peening of metals, where their attention has been to the substrate. Our study uses non-metallic substrates and analyzes the particles that are ablated from the process. The immediate impact of our investigation is that laser-comminution portion of a new systems concept for chemical analysis has been verified as feasible.

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Using the entire sample of 467 million {Upsilon}(4S) {yields} B{bar B} decays collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy B factory at SLAC, we perform a 'GLW' analysis of B{sup {+-}} {yields} D{sup {+-}} decays, using decay modes in which the neutral D meson decays to either CP-eigenstates or non-CP-eigenstates. We measure the partial decay rate charge asymmetries for CP-even and CP-odd D final states to be A{sub CP+} = 0.25 {+-} 0.06 {+-} 0.02 and A{sub CP-} = -0.09 {+-} 0.07 {+-} 0.02, respectively, where the first error is the statistical and the second is the systematic uncertainty. The parameter A{sub CP+} is different from zero with a significance of 3.6 standard deviations, constituting evidence for direct CP violation. We also measure the ratios of the charged-averaged B partial decay rates in CP and non-CP decays, R{sub CP+} = 1.18 {+-} 0.09 {+-} 0.05 and R{sub CP-} = 1.07 {+-} 0.08 {+-} 0.04. We infer frequentist confidence intervals for the angle {gamma} of the (db) unitarity triangle, for the strong phase difference {delta}{sub B}, and for the amplitude ratio r{sub B}, which are related to the B{sup -} {yields} D{sup -} decay amplitude by r{sub B}e{sup i({delta}{sub …

We present measurements of B-meson decays to the final states {eta}{prime} {rho}, {eta}{prime} f{sub 0}, and {eta}{prime} K*, where K* stands for a vector, scalar, or tensor strange meson. We observe a significant signal or evidence for {eta}{prime} {rho}{sup +} and all the {eta}{prime}K* channels. We also measure, where applicable, the charge asymmetries, finding results consistent with no direct CP violation in all cases. The measurements are performed on a data sample consisting of 467 x 10{sup 6} B{bar B} pairs, collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II e{sup +}e{sup -} collider at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Our results favor the theoretical predictions from perturbative QCD and QCD Factorization and we observe an enhancement of the tensor K*{sub 2} (1430) with respect to the vector K*(892) component.