Annual financial report of the Texas Lottery Commission for fiscal year 2008, providing statements of assets, expenditures, revenues, and other relevant data as well as the report of an independent auditor.

This report provides information on the 2001 World Conference Against Racism and the circumstances of U.S. withdrawal. It discusses preparations for the Durban Review Conference, including U.S. policy and reaction from other governments. It highlights possible issues for the 111th Congress, including the Review Conference preparatory process, U.S. funding of the Conference, and the political and diplomatic impact of U.S. engagement.

On June 30th, 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed regulations that would revise a 2003 Clean Water Act rule governing waste discharges from large confined animal feeding operations. This report details the 2003 rule and the Waterkeeper Alliance Decision and the EPA's response, including agricultural stormwater discharges, duties to apply for a permit, nutrient management plans, and aspects of the effluent limitation guidelines for confined animal feeding operations.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Strong productivity gains in the U.S. economy hinge, in part, on transportation networks working efficiently. Continued development and efficient management of the nation's freight transportation system--especially highways and rail lines that connect international gateways and intermodal facilities to retailers, producers, and consumers--are important to sustaining the nation's competitive position in the global economy. However, the increasing congestion on the transportation system poses a threat to the efficient flow of the nation's goods and has strained the system in some locations. Moreover, recent growth in international trade has placed even greater pressures on ports, border crossings, and distribution hubs. Congestion delays that significantly constrain freight mobility in these areas could result in increased economic costs for the nation. The Federal Highway Administration has calculated that delays caused by highway bottlenecks cost the trucking industry alone more than $8 billion a year. Recognizing that freight congestion has been well-defined and studied, Congress asked us to research technologies and projects currently in place or in development that could improve freight mobility, including low-cost approaches. In doing our work, we learned that the National Cooperative Freight Research Program (NCFRP) is currently conducting …

This report includes some issues for Congress to consider which include the slow rate of integration between the United States Border Patrol's (USBP) biometric database of illegal aliens and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) biometric database of criminals and terrorists; the number of unauthorized aliens who die attempting to enter the country each year; the organized human smuggling rings that have proliferated as entering the country has become more difficult; and the threat posed by terrorists along the sparsely defended Northern border as well as the more porous Southwest border.

Report on the activities of the Border Trade Advisory Committee, submitted in compliance with SB 183 of the 79th Regular Session.

In this project, both the fundamental chemistry of actinides in alkaline solutions (relevant to those present in Hanford-style waste storage tanks), and their dissolution from sludge simulants (and interactions with supernatants) have been investigated under representative sludge leaching procedures. The leaching protocols were designed to go beyond conventional alkaline sludge leaching limits, including the application of acidic leachants, oxidants and complexing agents. The simulant leaching studies confirm in most cases the basic premise that actinides will remain in the sludge during leaching with 2-3 M NaOH caustic leach solutions. However, they also confirm significant chances for increased mobility of actinides under oxidative leaching conditions. Thermodynamic data generated improves the general level of experiemental information available to predict actinide speciation in leach solutions. Additional information indicates that improved Al removal can be achieved with even dilute acid leaching and that acidic Al(NO3)3 solutions can be decontaminated of co-mobilized actinides using conventional separations methods. Both complexing agents and acidic leaching solutions have significant potential to improve the effectiveness of conventional alkaline leaching protocols. The prime objective of this program was to provide adequate insight into actinide behavior under these conditions to enable prudent decision making as tank waste treatment protocols develop.

Many Members of Congress charge that China's policy of accumulating foreign reserves (especially U.S. dollars) to influence the value of its currency constitutes a form of currency manipulation intended to make its exports cheaper and imports into China more expensive than they would be under free market conditions. Although China made modest reforms to its currency policy in 2005, Members contend the forms have not gone far enough and have warned of potential legislative action. This report summarizes the main findings CRS Report RL32165, China's Currency: Economic Issues and Options for U.S. Trade Policy.

This report discusses China’s Economic Conditions.

This report examines the importance to the U.S. economy of China’s investment in U.S. securities, as well as U.S. concerns over the possibility that China might unload a large share of those holdings, the likelihood that this would occur, and the potential implications such action could have for the U.S. economy. The report concludes that a large sell-off of Chinese Treasury securities holdings could negatively affect the U.S. economy, at least in the short-run. As a result, such a move could diminish U.S. demand for Chinese products and thus could lower China’s economic growth as well. The issue of China’s large holdings of U.S. securities is part of a broader question that has been raised by many economists: What are the implications of the heavy U.S. reliance on foreign investment to maintain healthy economic growth and to finance the budget deficit?

Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act requires states to identify water that is impaired by pollution, even after application of pollution controls. For those waters, states must establish a total maximum daily load of pollutants to ensure that water quality standards can be attained. This report contains background information, implementation, and issues for Congress as relating to the Clean Water Act.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. military has long used contractors to provide supplies and services to deployed U.S. forces as well as for post-conflict support. The Department of Defense's (DOD) use of contractors has grown significantly to the extent that the force in Iraq is composed of approximately 143,000 military personnel and 149,000 DOD contractor personnel. Congress,GAO, and others have frequently reported on or expressed concerns about the long-standing challenges that DOD faces when managing operational contract support. These challenges include a failure to adequately plan for the use of contractors, poorly defined or changing requirements, a lack of deployable contracting personnel with contingency contracting experience, and difficulties in coordinating contracts and contractor management across military services in joint contingency environments. Furthermore, as we have previously reported, DOD has not provided a sufficient number of trained contract oversight and management personnel in contingency operations, and visibility of contracting activities and contractors has been limited. As we have testified, problems associated with DOD's inability to overcome these challenges have resulted in higher costs, schedule delays, unmet goals, and negative operational impacts. To respond to these concerns, Congress enacted an amendment …

Pc1-2 ULF waves are strongly associated with the presence of various ions in the magnetosphere. We investigate the role of heavy ion resonances in nonuniform plasmas near the equatorial region. By adopting the invariant imbedding method, the coupled plasma wave equations are solved in an exact manner to calculate the resonant absorption at the ion-ion hybrid resonance. Our results show that irreversible mode conversion occurs at the resonance, which absorbs the fast wave energy. It is found that waves near the resonances appear with linear polarization, and their amplitude and frequency are sensitive to the properties of the heavy ion plasma composition. We examine how these resonances occur for various H+ - He+ populations in detail by performing an accurate calculation of the mode conversion effciency. Because the multi-ion hybrid resonance locations in cold plasmas are determined by simple parameters such as the fraction of the ion number density of each species and the magnetic field, we suggest that it is possible to monitor heavy ion composition by examining the peak frequencies of linearly polarized wave events in either electric field or magnetic field spectral data.

This report presents the results of the corrosion rates that were measured using electrochemical methods for tanks 241-AN-102 (AN-102), 241-AP-107 (AP 107), and 241-AP-108 (AP-108) performed under test plant RPP-PLAN-38215. The steel used as materials of construction for AN and AP tank farms was A537 Class 1. Test coupons of A537 Class 1 carbon steel were used for corrosion testing in the AN-107, AP-107, and AP-108 tank waste. Supernate will be tested from AN-102, AP-107, and Ap-108. Saltcake testing was performed on AP-108 only.

This report contains an preliminary analysis of oversight provisions on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.

The Columbia River Distinct Population Segment of bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus) was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1998. One of the identified major threats to the species is fragmentation resulting from dams on over-wintering habitats of migratory subpopulations. A migratory subgroup in the Tucannon River appeared to utilize the Snake River reservoirs for adult rearing on a seasonal basis. As a result, a radio telemetry study was conducted on this subgroup from 2002-2006, to help meet Reasonable and Prudent Measures, and Conservation Recommendations associated with the lower Snake River dams in the FCRPS Biological Opinion, and to increase understanding of bull trout movements within the Tucannon River drainage. We sampled 1,109 bull trout in the Tucannon River; 124 of these were surgically implanted with radio tags and PIT tagged, and 681 were only PIT tagged. The remaining 304 fish were either recaptures, or released unmarked. Bull trout seasonal movements within the Tucannon River were similar to those described for other migratory bull trout populations. Bull trout migrated upstream in spring and early summer to the spawning areas in upper portions of the Tucannon River watershed. They quickly moved off the spawning areas in the fall, and …

The combined CloudSat and CALIPSO satellite observations provide the first simultaneous measurements of cloud and precipitation vertical structure, and are used to examine the representation of tropical clouds and precipitation in the Community Atmosphere Model Version 3 (CAM3). A simulator package utilizing a model-to-satellite approach facilitates comparison of model simulations to observations, and a revised clustering method is used to sort the subgrid-scale patterns of clouds and precipitation into principal cloud regimes. Results from weather forecasts performed with CAM3 suggest that the model underestimates the horizontal extent of low and mid-level clouds in subsidence regions, but overestimates that of high clouds in ascending regions. CAM3 strongly overestimates the frequency of occurrence of the deep convection with heavy precipitation regime, but underestimates the horizontal extent of clouds and precipitation at low and middle levels when this regime occurs. This suggests that the model overestimates convective precipitation and underestimates stratiform precipitation consistent with a previous study that used only precipitation observations. Tropical cloud regimes are also evaluated in a different version of the model, CAM3.5, which uses a highly entraining plume in the parameterization of deep convection. While the frequency of occurrence of the deep convection with heavy precipitation regime from CAM3.5 …

This report briefly discusses the context in which federal budget process changes are made and identifies selected reform proposals by major category.

The work has consisted of three projects. The first one is a continuation of the previous work that was done on the generation of zonal flows due to the four wave modulational instability. In this work, we examined the growth of streamers. This work was done with undergraduate student, and was presented at an APS DPP meeting. A summary of the work is given below. Another project was a study of the stability of curvature driven modes with tied field line geometry. The purpose of this study was to see if this instability was relevant to the observed 'blob' phenomenon in the edge. A summary of this work is given starting in Section II. This work was done with undergraduate student. The final project was an extension of electrostatic work that had been done on the parallel velocity shear instability. In this work, we included electromagnetic effects. We performed the linear stability analysis and discovered a new regime of instability. This work was done in collaboration with undergraduate student, who presented the work at an APS DPP meeting. Details of this are shown in Section III.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), developed an electronic syndromic surveillance system called BioSense that uses health-related data to identify patterns of disease symptoms prior to specific diagnoses. In late 2007, CDC began to redesign the program to improve collaboration with stakeholders and address identified management weaknesses. Pursuant to House Report 110-231, GAO evaluated the BioSense program, focusing on the cost and timeline estimates and performance measures and benchmarks for implementing the program, among other objectives. To accomplish this, GAO analyzed relevant program documentation and interviewed CDC officials responsible for developing and implementing BioSense."

On November 19, 2008, Iceland and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) finalized an agreement on a $6 billion economic stabilization program supported by a $2.1 billion loan from the IMF. Iceland's banking system had collapsed as a culmination of a series of decisions the banks made that left them highly exposed to disruptions in financial markets. The collapse of the banks also raises questions for U.S. leaders and others about supervising banks that operate across national borders, especially as it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the limits of domestic financial markets.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The World Bank Group lends about $40 billion annually to developing countries. Critics have claimed that some projects have harmed the environment and the local population. Title XIII of the International Financial Institutions Act of 1977 outlines in part the U.S. government's requirements for reviewing potential environmental and social impacts of proposed multilateral development bank projects. GAO was asked to assess the U.S. government's international environmental oversight efforts by examining (1) how U.S. agencies implement legislative requirements to review the potential environmental concerns associated with proposed World Bank Group projects, and (2) agencies' ability to identify and address these concerns. GAO reviewed Title XIII, World Bank Group reports, and U.S. agency documents and met with representatives from U.S. government agencies, the World Bank Group, and nongovernmental organizations."

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This report examines the background of Iran's nuclear policy, the current status of Iran's nuclear facilities, the effects of international sanctions on Iran, recent sabotages on the Iran Enrichment Program, an estimated timeline of Iran's nuclear weapon capabilities, and whether or not Iran even has a nuclear weapons program.