This report details the legislative, political, and legal contexts of H.J.Res 78 (Religious Freedom Amendment) and analyzes its legal effect.

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This report provides information about the Foreign Policy Agency Reorganization in the 105th Congress. This report also provides the background on foreign policy consolidation issues, discusses foreign policy implications, and tracks legislation.

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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

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 Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents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; Whether article 6252-9b, section 7A(a), V.T.C.S., prohibits a former member of the Polygraph Examniers Board from appearing before the board in connection with sponsoring a polygraph intern (RQ-362)

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; Whether the Harris County Bail Bond Board is authorized to issue more than one bail bond license to a corporate surety, and related questions (RQ-463)

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO updated its report on frequently asked questions on the federal debt, focusing on: (1) how debt is defined and measured; (2) who holds federal debt; (3) how much it has grown in recent years; and (4) its significance to the national economy."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the benefits of constructing the Lewis and Clark Rural Water Project, focusing on: (1) what benefits could derive from the Lewis and Clark project; (2) who could receive these benefits; and (3) how these benefits are valued."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on the Medicare Subvention Demonstration Program, focusing on the sufficiency of the Department of Defense's (DOD) data systems for: (1) determining DOD's historical level of effort (LOE) and Medicare payments; and (2) managing the demonstration and assessing its cost effects."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on: (1) the status of the Department of Labor's efforts to improve the Davis-Bacon Act wage determination process; and (2) whether the changes Labor is making are likely to address the timeliness and accuracy of wage determinations."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Farm Service Agency (FSA), focusing on the: (1) number of FSA county offices with three or fewer permanent full-time employees; (2) characteristics of these offices, including their proximity to another county office, their workload, the level of FSA program benefits delivered, the relative contribution of farming to total county income, and the number of farms and farmland acres in the counties served by these offices; and (3) ways in which varying the criteria associated with these characteristics can affect the number of county offices that are candidates for closure and consolidation."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed federal programs created to address the needs of at-risk and delinquent youths, focusing on: (1) identifying at-risk and delinquent youth programs that included mentoring as a type of service; (2) who administers the programs; (3) the objectives of the programs; and (4) the authorizing legislation for the programs."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reported on the Department of the Treasury's decision to change the calculation of the interest rates used since 1980 to determine the investment returns for a number of government trust funds, including Social Security and Medicare, focusing on: (1) how and why Treasury changed its rules for calculating interest rates in 1980 and 1998; (2) the effects of these changes on the unified budget and on the financial status of Social Security and Medicare trust funds; and (3) what other trust funds were affected by Treasury's decision."

The Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) at Argonne National Laboratory-West (ANL-W) was shutdown in September, 1994. This sodium cooled reactor had been in service since 1964, and by the US Department of Energy (DOE) mandate, was to be placed in an industrially and radiologically safe condition for ultimate decommissioning. The deactivation of a liquid metal reactor presents unique concerns. The first major task associated with the project was the removal of all fueled assemblies. In addition, sodium must be drained from systems and processed for ultimate disposal. Residual quantities of sodium remaining in systems must be deactivated or inerted to preclude future hazards associated with pyrophoricity and generation of potentially explosive hydrogen gas. A Sodium Process Facility (SPF) was designed and constructed to react the elemental sodium from the EBR-II primary and secondary systems to sodium hydroxide for disposal. This facility has a design capacity to allow the reaction of the complete inventory of sodium at ANL-W in less than two years. Additional quantities of sodium from the Fermi-1 reactor are also being treated at the SPF.

Because toxic solvents and other hazardous materials are commonly used in analytical methods, characterization procedures result in significant and costly amount of waste. We are developing alternative analytical methods in the radiological and organic areas to reduce the volume or form of the hazardous waste produced during sample analysis. For the radiological area, we have examined high-pressure, closed-vessel microwave digestion as a way to minimize waste from sample preparation operations. Heated solutions of strong mineral acids can be avoided for sample digestion by using the microwave approach. Because reactivity increases with pressure, we examined the use of less hazardous solvents to leach selected contaminants from soil for subsequent analysis. We demonstrated the feasibility of this approach by extracting plutonium from a NET reference material using citric and tartaric acids with microwave digestion. Analytical results were comparable to traditional digestion methods, while hazardous waste was reduced by a factor often. We also evaluated the suitability of other natural acids, determined the extraction performance on a wider variety of soil types, and examined the extraction efficiency of other contaminants. For the organic area, we examined ways to minimize the wastes associated with the determination of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in environmental samples. Conventional …

The Alder Mine, an abandoned gold, silver, copper, and zinc mine in Okanogan County, Washington, produces heavy metal-laden effluent that affects the quality of water in a tributary of the Methow River. The annual mass loading of heavy metals from two audits at the Alder Mine was estimated to exceed 11,000 kg per year. In this study, water samples from stations along Alder Creek were assayed for heavy metals by ICP-AES and were found to exceed Washington State's acute freshwater criteria for cadmium (Cd), copper (Cu), selenium (Se), and zinc (Zn).

On May 30, 1998 scrap metal containing radioactive Cesium-137 (Cs-137) was accidentally melted in a furnace at the Acerinox steel mill in Algeciras, Spain. Cs-137 was released from the mill's smokestack, and spread across the western Mediterranean Sea to France and Italy and beyond. The first indication of the release was radiation levels up to 1000 times background reported by Swiss, French, and Italian authorities during the following two weeks. Initially no elevated radiation levels were detected over Spain. A release of hazardous material to the atmosphere is the type of situation the Atmospheric Release Advisory Capability (ARAC) emergency response organization was designed to address. The amount and exact time of the release were unknown, though the incident was thought to have taken place during the last week in May. Using air concentration measurements supplied by colleagues of ARAC in Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Russia and the European Union, ARAC meteorologists estimated the magnitude and timing of the release (Vogt, 1999). Correctly locating the downwind footprint is the most important goal of emergency response modeling. In this study, we compare predicted results for the Algeciras event based on four wind data sources: (1) US Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction …

We present preliminary results of a new measurement of the b quark fragmentation function in Z{sup 0} decays using a novel kinematic B hadron energy reconstruction technique. The measurement is performed using 150,000 hadronic Z{sup 0} events recorded in the SLD experiment at SLAC between 1996 and 1997. The small and stable SLC beam spot and the CCD-based vertex detector are used to reconstruct topological B-decay vertices with high efficiency and purity, and to provide precise measurements of the kinematic quantities used in this technique. We measure the B energy with good efficiency and resolution over the full kinematic range. We compare the scale B hadron energy distribution with several functional forms of the B hadron energy distribution and predictions of several models of b quark fragmentation. Several functions including JETSET + Peterson are excluded by the data. The average scaled energy of the weakly decaying B hadron is measured to be x{sub B} = 0.719 {+-} 0.005 (stat) {+-} 0.007 (syst) {+-} 0.001 (model) (preliminary).

The material of choice for a solid oxide fuel cell cathode based on a yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolyte is doped lanthanum manganite, (La, Sr)MnO{sub 3}. It excels at many of the attributes necessary for a system to work at the required operating temperature and is flexible enough to allow for materials optimization. Although strontium-doping increases the electronic conductivity of the material, the ionic conductivity of the material remains negligible under operating conditions. Studies have shown that the internal equilibrium of the material heavily favors oxidation of the manganese and rather than the loss of lattice oxygen as a charge compensation mechanism. This lack of oxygen vacancies in the structure retards the ability of the material to conduct oxygen ions; thus the optimized system requires a large number of engineered triple point boundary locations to work efficiently. We have successfully doped the host LSM lattice to alter the interred equilibrium of the material to increase its ionic conductivity and thus lower the cathodic overpotential of the system. Our presentation will discuss these new materials, the results of cell tests, and a number of characterization experiments performed.

Large catchment basins may be viewed as ecosystems with interactive natural and cultural attributes. Stream regulation severs ecological connectivity between channels and flood plains by reducing the range of natural flow and temperature variation, reduces the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain native biodiversity and bioproduction and promotes proliferation of non-native biota. However, regulated rivers regain normative attributes, which promote recovery of native biota, as distance from the dam increases and in relation to the mode of regulation. Therefore, reregulation of flow and temperature to normative pattern, coupled with elimination of pollutants and constrainment of nonnative biota, can naturally restore damaged habitats from headwaters to mouth. The expectation is rapid recovery of depressed populations of native species. The protocol requires: restoration of seasonal temperature patterns; restoration of peak flows needed to reconnect and periodically reconfigure channel and floodplain habitats; stabilization of base flows to revitalize the shallow water habitats; maximization of dam passage to allow restoration of metapopulation structure; change in the management belief system to rely on natural habitat restoration as opposed to artificial propagation, installation of artificial instream structures (river engineering) and artificial food web control; and, practice of adaptive ecosystem management.