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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Authority of the City of San Antonio, Bexar County, and VIA Metropolitan Transit Authority to use the proceeds of a sales and use tax for a streetcar project in light of certain representations that were made preceding and election to create an advanced transportation district (RQ-1048-GA)

This report provides the results of recent elections in Latin America and the Caribbean. It contains three tables organized by region that list the date of each country's independence, the name of the newly elected president or prime minister, and the projected date of the next election. Information in this report was gathered from numerous sources, including the U.S. State Department, the CIA's Open Source, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), and other news sources.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Many Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCOs) reported that they are implementing several leading practices important to making strategic decisions about training delivery, such as determining the best mix of decentralized and centralized training and considering government-wide reform when planning training. However, many CHCOs reported they are not implementing some practices that support making more cost-effective training investment decisions, such as prioritizing training so that the most important needs are met first and evaluating the benefits of training. In addition, many CHCOs do not have information from component or sub-agency leaders regarding their level of investments and priorities. Consequently, some agencies are duplicating internal across their agencies. Federal agencies also need reliable information on how much they spend on training and for what purposes. However, several CHCOs reported they do not completely and reliably track training costs agency-wide."

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This report discusses the Carbon Tax, Design and Implementation, equity, Operability and Contribution to Deficit Reduction. It also points out how policymakers have considered a number of options for raising additional federal revenue including a carbon tax.

This report discusses the current debate over "net neutrality." While there is no single accepted definition of "net neutrality," most agree that any such definition should include the general principles that owners of the networks that compose and provide access to the Internet should not control how consumers lawfully use that network, and they should not be able to discriminate against content provider access to that network.

This report examines congressional activity related to the three most recent National Football League(NFL) work stoppages, which occurred in 1982, 1987, and 2011, and the 1994 Major League Baseball (MLB) strike.

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During the period from fiscal year (FY) 2009 to FY 2011, there were a total of 21 incidents involving radioactively contaminated shipment trailers and 9 contaminated waste packages received at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) Area 5 Radioactive Waste Management Site (RWMS). During this time period, the EnergySolutions (ES) Clive, Utah, disposal facility had a total of 18 similar incidents involving trailer and package contamination issues. As a result of the increased occurrence of such incidents, DOE Environmental Management Headquarters (EM/HQ) Waste Management organization (EM-30) requested that the Energy Facility Contractors’ Group (EFCOG) Waste Management Working Group (WMWG) conduct a detailed review of these incidents and report back to EM-30 regarding the results of this review, including providing any recommendations formulated as a result of the evaluation of current site practices involving handling and management of radioactive material and waste shipments.

The volume of methane released through the Arctic Ocean to the atmosphere and its potential role in the global climate cycle have increasingly become the focus of studies seeking to understand the source and origin of this methane. In 2009, an international, multi-disciplinary science party aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea successfully completed a trans-U.S. Beaufort Shelf expedition aimed at understanding the sources and volumes of methane across this region. Following more than a year of preliminary cruise planning and a thorough site evaluation, the Methane in the Arctic Shelf/Slope (MITAS) expedition departed from the waters off the coast of Barrow, Alaska in September 2009. The expedition was organized with an international shipboard science team consisting of 33 scientists with the breadth of expertise necessary to meet the expedition goals. NETL researchers led the expedition’s initial core processing and lithostratigraphic evaluations, which are the focus of this report. This data report is focused on the lithostratigraphic datasets from the recovered vibra cores and piston cores. Operational information about the piston and vibra cores such as date acquired, core name, total length, water depth, and geographic location is provided. Once recovered, gas samples were immediately collected from cores. In …

Lessons Learned from PNNL Support to Army Corp of Engineers Munitions Sites

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Metal-organic and zeolite imidazolate frameworks (MOFs and ZIFs) have been investigated for the realization as separation media with high selectivity. These structures are held together with strong bonds, making them architecturally, chemically, and thermally stable. Therefore, employing well designed building units, it is possible to discover promising materials for gas and vapor separation. This grant was focused on the study of MOFs and ZIFs with these specific objectives: (i) to develop a strategy for producing MOFs and ZIFs that combine high surface areas with active sites for their use in gas adsorption and separation of small organic compounds, (ii) to introduce active sites in the framework by a post-synthetic modification and metalation of MOFs and ZIFs, and (iii) to design and synthesize MOFs with extremely high surface areas and large pore volumes to accommodate large amounts of guest molecules. By the systematic study, this effort demonstrated how to introduce active functional groups in the frameworks, and this is also the origin of a new strategy, which is termed isoreticular functionalization and metalation. However, a large pore volume is still a prerequisite feature. One of the solutions to overcome this challenge is an isoreticular expansion of a MOF’s structure. With triangular …

Crystalline and glass composite materials are currently being investigated for the immobilization of combined High Level Waste (HLW) streams resulting from potential commercial fuel reprocessing scenarios. Several of these potential waste streams contain elevated levels of transition metal elements such as molybdenum (Mo). Molybdenum has limited solubility in typical silicate glasses used for nuclear waste immobilization. Under certain chemical and controlled cooling conditions, a powellite (Ba,Ca)MoO{sub 4} crystalline structure can be formed by reaction with alkaline earth elements. In this study, single phase BaMoO{sub 4} and CaMoO{sub 4} were formed from carbonate and oxide precursors demonstrating the viability of Mo incorporation into glass, crystalline or glass composite materials by a melt and crystallization process. X-ray diffraction, photoluminescence, and Raman spectroscopy indicated a long range ordered crystalline structure. In-situ electron irradiation studies indicated that both CaMoO{sub 4} and BaMoO{sub 4} powellite phases exhibit radiation stability up to 1000 years at anticipated doses with a crystalline to amorphous transition observed after 1 X 10{sup 13} Gy. Aqueous durability determined from product consistency tests (PCT) showed low normalized release rates for Ba, Ca, and Mo (<0.05 g/m{sup 2}).

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Ground vibration was measured at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Point 4 during the winter shutdown in February 2012. This report contains the results, including power and coherence spectra. We plan to collect and analyze vibration data from representative collider halls to inform specifications for future linear colliders, such as ILC and CLIC. We are especially interested in vibration correlations between final focus lens locations.

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