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WASHINGTON – The Obama administration says the federal government has nearly reached its borrowing limit — again.
Treasury officials said Tuesday that the White House plans to request another $1.2 trillion in borrowing authority Friday. The increase is necessary, they say, because the government will be within $100 billion of its current limit by then.
In the past, such a request would be routine. But this one follows a summer of intense partisan debate over the nation's record debt, which has yet to end despite a last-minute deal reached in August that averted a potential default.
The increase would boost the debt limit to $16.4 trillion. Congress and the Obama administration agreed to raise it to that level in three steps as part of the August deal. Officials say that should be enough to allow the government to keep borrowing until the end of 2012, or just after the presidential election.
Congress can reject the request, although Obama can veto their objection. If Congress doesn't act by Jan. 14, the increase will take place automatically.
The debt limit is the amount the government can borrow to finance its operations. It has soared because the government has run record deficits over the past decade. The borrowed money has helped pay for two wars, stimulate the nation's economy after the worst recession since the Great Depression and finance broad tax cuts initiated during the Bush administration.
The enormity of the debt has also stoked a debate in Congress over spending and taxes. Polls show growing voter anger with the inability of both parties to reach solutions to the country's budget problems.
In August, Congress and the administration agreed to raise the borrowing limit by $2.1 trillion in three steps. The deal was reached hours before a potential default on the nation's debt and only after the parties also agreed to cut more than $2 trillion from the deficit over the next 10 years.
Three days after the agreement was signed into law, credit rating agency Standard & Poor's downgraded long-term U.S. debt. The difficulty Congress and the White House had in reaching agreement was a key reason for the downgrade, S&P said.
The parties remain at odds over how to reduce the deficit. In November, a bipartisan panel failed to meet a deadline to agree on $1.2 trillion of the cuts. That means automatic cuts of that amount will begin in January 2013 — a condition included in last summer's deal.
Republicans want to modify the timetable for the automatic cuts, largely because it includes steep cuts to the nation's defense budget.
Congress agreed to raise the debt limit by $400 billion in August and by another $500 billion in September.
House Republicans voted against the second increase. But they failed to block it because the Senate approved it. The increases are scheduled to take effect unless both chambers vote against them.

(Reuters) – Brian Keith is busier than ever as the architecture firm he works for rushes to wrap up work on a 300-unit apartment complex in Dallas.

The project is one of dozens the firm, JHP Architecture, has on its hands -- a surge of business driven by a rise in demand in the United States for rental properties.

The increased demand has forced JHP to expand, and it expects to keep hiring at least through the first quarter.

"We're seeing overall work come back and there's a backlog of contracts to go through," said Keith, director of urban design and planning at JHP. "There's strong interest in multi-family units and plenty of pent-up demand."

With U.S. unemployment at a lofty 8.6 percent, home foreclosures rising and property prices under pressure, more and more Americans have given up the dream of owning, opting instead to rent, a shift that is remaking the face of the U.S. housing industry.

The percentage of Americans who own their home dropped from a peak of 69.2 percent in late 2004 to a 13-year low of 65.9 percent in the second quarter. It edged up to 66.3 percent in the third quarter of this year.

On the flip side, the percentage of rental properties that are empty fell to 9.8 percent in the third quarter from 10.3 percent a year earlier.

In a recent report, Oliver Chang, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, dubbed 2012 "The Year of the Landlord."

"Rents are rising, vacancies are falling, household formations are growing and rental supply is limited," the Morgan Stanley report stated. "We believe the demand for rental properties will continue to grow."

Groundbreaking for new housing jumped 9.3 percent in November to the highest level in 19 months, fueling optimism that the battered housing market was regaining its footing.

The gains, however, were almost solely in multifamily housing. Groundbreaking for structures with five or more units shot up more than 30 percent from October to now stand at nearly double the year-ago level.

Prices reflect the shift in demand. Rental costs are up 2.4 percent over the last year, compared with an increase of just 0.6 percent in 2010.

Steve Blitz, senior economist at ITG Investment Research, says the lure of higher returns is spurring the development of apartment buildings. He argued the next "boom" in residential construction has already started.

"The reason rents were rising is that through the past 15 years there has been an under-building of rental properties because typical renters were increasingly able to garner cheap financing to buy a house," he wrote in a research note.

While the rise in demand is great news for builders and developers, it remains unclear what the pick-up in homebuilding will mean for the economy as a whole.

"Residential construction will be a plus to GDP in 2012, but house price declines will be a negative. So net, net housing will be neutral or a small drag on the economy," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

At its peak at the end of 2005, homebuilding accounted for about 6.2 percent of overall economic activity. Now, it is only about 2.4 percent.

U.S. housing starts in April 2009 hit their lowest level on records dating to January 1959. While multifamily starts have given them a lift, 2011 may be the weakest year ever for construction of single-family homes.


"Business is slightly down from last year," said Bill Zach, a third-generation homebuilder. His family business, the Zach Building Co. in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, area, is mainly focused on single-family units.


To Zach, that his firm is still in business when so many of his competitors have gone bust represents some success.


"It used to be my competition was every guy that owned a pick-up truck and called himself a builder. Hundreds of them," Zach said. "That's no longer the case, those guys are dropping by the wayside."


But there are signs of a turn and signals that the housing market may be close to finding a bottom.


The Architecture Billings Index, a gauge of future construction, picked up last month, breaking above the 50 level to signal growth in billings.


And the stock of homebuilders, as measured by a Dow Jones index, has shot up more than 30 percent since early October.


"Residential construction is finally beginning to rise from its post-recession lows," said Joseph Lavorgna, chief U.S. economist for Deutsche Bank. "The true test for starts and (building) permits, as well as most of the sales metrics, will come during the spring buying season."


(Reporting by Margaret Chadbourn; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Leslie Adler)

NEW DELHI – The powerful lower house of India's Parliament passed a contentious anti-corruption bill Tuesday after hours of fierce debate even as a protest leader began a three-day hunger strike demanding Parliament adopt his tougher proposals.
The "Lokpal" or watchdog bill was passed after several amendments suggested by opposition lawmakers. The bill now must be passed by the upper house and signed by the president before it comes into effect.
"Let us pass this bill because the people are waiting for us," Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said at the end of an impassioned speech.
The bill was passed by voice vote by a majority of the members present. The lawmakers, however, rejected a portion of the bill that aimed to amend the constitution and make the watchdog a constitutional body because the government wasn't able to garner the support of two-thirds of the members voting.
The legislative showdown is the culmination of months of angry political debate and public protests that brought tens of thousands of middle-class Indians fed up with rampant corruption into the streets and put a government battered by scandals deeper on the defensive.
Hoping to defuse activist Anna Hazare's anti-corruption crusade, the government initiated debate Tuesday on a bill to create an anti-graft watchdog. But that failed to satisfy Hazare, who began his fast in India's business capital, Mumbai, demanding the proposed ombudsman be made more powerful.
After close to six hours of debate, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rose to defend the government's bill, saying that the powers of the proposed watchdog needed to have checks in place.
"Let us not create something that will destroy all that we cherish all in the name of combating corruption," he said.
"I urge all my colleagues in Parliament to rise to the occasion and look beyond politics to pass this law," Singh said.
Hazare has called the government's anti-graft legislation an attempt to fool the country.
Hazare's main complaint with the anti-graft bill before Parliament is that the proposed corruption ombudsman would not have authority over the country's top investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation. He says the ombudsman position would be too weak without that authority.
In New Delhi, India's Parliament began its debate with the government saying that the legislation maintained the "fine balance" between the powers of the legislature, the judiciary and the executive branch.
Sushma Swaraj, the leader of the main opposition, right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, however, said that as the country waited for a "strong and effective" anti-corruption watchdog, the government was offering a bill that was "so full of holes and flaws that it has disappointed all of us."
Swaraj's party has thrown its weight behind Hazare's protest.
The legislation covers senior politicians and officials. The prime minister's office is under its purview, but with restrictions. But it gives the ombudsman no powers to conduct independent investigations into complaints of graft.
Hazare has fasted three times already. He started with a five-day fast in April, after which the government invited members of his team to help draft the legislation.
In the end the bill that was passed by the lower house kept the CBI free from the control of the watchdog. The changes that the government accepted included Swaraj's demand that the provisions of the anti-corruption law not be binding on state governments, who should be free to enact their own anti-corruption legislation.
Eight hours were set aside for the debate in Parliament's lower house on Tuesday but the debate lasted close to 11 hours. The upper house is set to debate and likely pass the legislation on Wednesday.

At the Mumbai fairground where he is fasting, Hazare told supporters earlier in the day that the proposed bill was a "fraud perpetuated upon the people by the government" and that they would teach lawmakers a lesson.

He said his supporters would travel across the cntry to campaign against all those political parties who did not support his version of the bill.

He has also asked his supporters to court arrest after he ends his fast on Dec. 29.

Hazare, who claims inspiration from Mohandas K. Gandhi, has called his protest against corruption India's second freedom struggle and has fasted three times already to garner support for his demands.

Thousands of people, many waving Indian flags and wearing the trademark white cap made popular by first independence leader Gandhi and now Hazare, gathered in support. As of Tuesday afternoon, the crowd was thinner than the tens of thousands Hazare drew to an August protest in the Indian capital.

Hazare is not without critics who say his populist campaign attempts to vilify all politicians and hold elected officials hostage.

Dozens of those critics also came out on the streets Tuesday, waving black flags and shouting slogans as Hazare's motorcade passed through the city.

Doctors were monitoring Hazare's health and said that he was running a fever and his blood pressure was high. News reports said that ambulances were waiting on standby near the fairground.

Arvind Kejriwal, a key Hazare aide, said that his supporters had been asking him to break his fast and take medication but until late Tuesday he had refused to do so.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office dealt Oracle a bit of a setback in its high-stakes patent litigation against Google over Android. In a filing just before the Christmas holiday, the USPTO effectively threw out one of the seven patents Oracle is using against Google (full text available at Groklaw), rejecting some 17 of the 21 claims asserted in U.S. patent 6,192,476. Although only one of those claims was being leveraged against Google—claim 14—the rejection of so many claims basically means the entire patent has been invalidated.



Google requested the patent be re-examined by the USPTO, along with others Oracle is asserting against it in the case. The request for re-examination is common in patent litigation: defendants typically assert both that the aren’t infringing on a particular patent, and furthermore that the patent ought not to have been issued in the first place, and therefore is invalid and nobody could infringe on it even if they tried.



Oracle’s infringement case against Google hinges on the Java virtual machine included in Google’s Android operating system; Oracle claims the technology violates a number of Java patents it acquired along with Sun Microsystems in early 2010. Oracle initially asserted 132 infringement claims against seven patents; the list of claims was reduced to a list of 50 on the request of the judge handling the case; of those, only one (claim 14) was against patent 6,192,476. However, that means Oracle still has six patents in play in its case against Google. The judge has requested Oracle further limit the number of claims it brings to trail; Oracle had been hoping to bring 21 claims, but the judge had suggested Oracle focus on just three claims to streamline proceedings.



Generally speaking, Oracle would prefer to go to trail sooner than later. The case was originally supposed to go to trail in October, but a scheduling conflict lead to a delay. Oracle then asked for a January start date, but Google has dragged its feet, saying it can’t be ready for trail before July.



Oracle has until February 20 to request an appeal the preliminary ruling. Preliminary rulings against patents have been later been overturned upon full review, so Oracle may have a chance of hanging on to the patent after all. If Oracle does nothing, it will likely be stripped of the patent.



This article was originally posted on Digital Trends





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(Reuters) – An earthquake of 6.9 magnitude hit southeastern Russia near the border with Mongolia on Tuesday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The epicenter of the quake was 28 miles deep and was about 57 miles northeast of Kyzyl, Russia, USGS said.

(Reporting By John O'Callaghan)