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The U.S. Treasury will provide financing for GM while the asset sale is arranged to a company formed by the government, according to a regulatory filing today. June 1 was the deadline set by the U.S. for GM to restructure outside court.

GM, which would follow Chrysler LLC into bankruptcy, plans to build a new business around assets such as the Cadillac and Chevrolet brands. The 100-year-old automaker, a victim of tumbling sales, fell short in a bid to cut debt by $44 billion by June 1.

“By freeing GM of tens of billions of dollars in debt, bankruptcy will give it a new lease on life,” Lynn LoPucki, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said before the news of Detroit-based GM’s strategy.

Visteon, the former parts unit of Ford Motor Co , said the No. 2 U.S. automaker had made a commitment to support bankruptcy financing for its restructuring efforts to ensure continued supply of parts.

The filing comes at a time when Ford, the only U.S. automaker operating without emergency government loans, is struggling to survive the worst auto sales in nearly three decades which has sent Chrysler into bankruptcy and pushed General Motors Corp to the brink of failure.

GM had moved closer to filing the largest-ever bankruptcy for a U.S. industrial company, but GM and the U.S. Treasury had made a new offer for a crucial debt exchange that is backed by a committee for bondholders.

Ford, still Visteon’s biggest customer and which accounted for about 31 percent of its $1.35 billion of sales last quarter, did not detail the size of its bankruptcy financing for Visteon. Ford spun off Visteon in 2000.

“We have committed to support debtor-in-possession financing, but we anticipate others will also be involved,” Ford spokesman Todd Nissen said.

Kirk Ludtke, senior vice president at CRT Capital Group, said depending on the size, the bankruptcy financing may not have a significant impact on Ford’s liquidity.

“But Visteon is not the only troubled supplier. This could well start to add up,” Ludtke said.

Earlier this month, Ford assumed a $163 million secured revolving credit facility from Visteon’s lenders.

The health of the U.S. auto parts supply base has been a priority for Ford with Chrysler in bankruptcy and GM close to a government-imposed deadline of June 1 to restructure or follow Chrysler down that road.

“Ford’s top priority is to ensure we have sufficient parts and material to protect our production,” Ford global purchasing chief Tony Brown said in a statement.

“Ford has no intention of changing our fundamental business relationship with Visteon, including not buying back businesses or manufacturing operations,” Brown said, adding that Ford had not experienced any production issues as a result of Visteon’s business issues.

Data for gasoline, which showed a smaller-than-expected stock drawdown, and a lower-than-forecast supply increase for distillate stocks were deemed overall bullish by traders.

Prices were already above $64 on better-than-expected U.S. economic data and a decision by OPEC to keep output steady, as expected, betting on a strengthening world economy and tentative signs of increased demand to boost oil prices.

U.S. unemployment in April reached its highest rate in more than a quarter century and is still rising, helping propel mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures to record highs.

Such economic conditions drove up foreclosures of prime fixed-rate mortgages, which represented the largest share of new foreclosures for the first time since the rapid growth and the ensuing collapse of the subprime loan market.

“We clearly haven’t hit the top yet in terms of delinquencies or the bottom of the housing market,” Jay Brinkmann, the association’s chief economist, said in an interview.

Prime fixed-rate loans, made to borrowers with high credit quality, comprise 65 percent of the $9.9 trillion in outstanding first mortgages, according to the industry group.

“The housing market depends on the employment situation,” he said, “and we don’t expect unemployment to bottom out until the middle of next year, so then normally housing would not recover until after employment recovers.”

A record 12.07 percent of loans on one-to-four unit residences were at least one payment past due or in the foreclosure process in the first quarter, on a non-seasonally adjusted basis.

Foreclosure actions were started on an all-time high 1.37 percent of first mortgages in the quarter, a record increase from 1.08 percent the prior quarter.

The share of loans in the foreclosure process rose to a record 3.85 percent from 3.30 percent in the fourth quarter and 2.47 percent a year earlier.

California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada accounted for nearly half of the new foreclosure activity in the quarter and half of the increase in prime fixed-rate foreclosure starts.

Those severely hit states, the biggest winners in the five-year housing boom earlier this decade, continue to worsen as recession overtakes problems spawned by lax lending standards.

“Every job loss, every divorce, every incident like that is going to be turning into a foreclosure because they are so far under water with the homes already,” Brinkmann said.

When a house is “under water,” its price has fallen below the size of the mortgage.

Nearly 70 percent of the economy is based on consumer spending. To keep the economy going we need to keep spending but not waste money in the process. This is where the frugal millionaires come in. They’ve been smart with their money all along and haven’t lost it all and had to remake it. These are the kind of people you want to learn from when it comes to spending your money.

Spending philosophy.

Thousands of Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras are already operating on Britain’s roads.

Police forces across England, Wales and Scotland will soon be able to share the information on one central computer.

Officers say it is a useful tool in fighting crime, but critics say the network is secretive and unregulated.

Kent’s Chief Constable, Michael Fuller, commented: “We’ve seen an increase of some 40% of arrests since we’ve been using this technology.

“I’m very confident that we’re using it properly and responsibly, and that innocent people have nothing to fear from the way we use it.”

A number of local councils are signing up their Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems to the ANPR network. As long as the cameras are technically good enough, they can be adapted to take the software.

In towns such as Bradford, Portsmouth and Luton that means greater coverage for the police and more journeys captured and recorded.

John Dean, who is co-ordinating the ANPR network for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: “It’s the finest intelligence-led policing tool we’ve got.

“It covers so many different areas from crime reduction, crime detection to road safety and everything in between.”

Marked car

But not everyone thinks it is such a good thing.

John Catt found himself on the wrong side of the ANPR system. He regularly attends anti-war demonstrations outside a factory in Brighton, his home town.

“I was threatened under the Terrorist Act. I had to answer every question they put to me, and if there were any questions I would refuse to answer, I would be arrested. I thought to myself, what kind of world are we living in?”

Sussex police would not talk about the case.

The police say they do not know how many cameras there are in total, and they say that for operational reasons they will not say where the fixed cameras are positioned.

‘Limited resources’

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, whose job it is to protect personal data, has concerns about the lack of regulation.

He said: “There’s very little monitoring. I mean, my office has very limited powers.

“We have very limited resources. We are not actively monitoring that area. You’re right to ask the question. No one’s checking it at the moment”

The BBC TV series Who’s Watching You? asked the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, to comment on the Commissioner’s views.

“It’s something that we will look at further legislation about where necessary,” she said.

“I don’t think we should lose sight of the very considerable benefits that this technology also brings us, brings law enforcement.”

Recent research by Huddersfield University found that the public seemed to share that view. The study took place in Leeds as the ANPR system was being introduced. The vast majority supported the cameras if they caught law breakers, with only a few mentioning concerns about police surveillance.

The downdraft in bonds was so heavy it actually dragged down the U.S. stock market, inverting the more normal relationship where U.S. Treasuries tend to track equities.

Selling by mortgage investors, who are often forced to sell U.S. Treasuries to hedge their positions, when yields surpass key levels, added renewed impetus to the downturn.

The decline was largely concentrated in longer-dated maturities, driving the gap between short- and long-term rates, known as the yield curve, to its steepest level on record.

“You’re exploding the issuance at a time when demand for the product you’ve got is a best flat,” said Malcolm Polley, president and chief investment officer at Stewart Capital Advisors. “So rates are going to go up. It’s simple economics.”

Benchmark 10-year notes were down over 1-16/32 and yielding 3.74 percent, up nearly 20 basis points in just one day and over 1.25 percentage points in just six weeks. The spread between 10- and two-year notes widened to 275 basis points, the largest ever gap.

The market has become increasingly bearish since mid-March, when the Federal Reserve first announced its intention to buy up to $300 billion of U.S. Treasuries over six months.

The rise in yields in recent weeks was at first due to signs of economic stabilization and less need for a safe-haven, but recently the trend has shifted toward skittishness over the huge U.S. government borrowing requirement this year.

The Fed bought $6 billion in Treasuries on Wednesday alone, but that was not nearly enough to stem the tide.

During the hearing, the government also stated that the WikiLeaks publication of the full list in March has now been officially referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) “blacklist” is slated to form the backbone of a national, mandatory, internet censorship system.

ACMA admitted that:

* A mere 32% of the secret censorship list is related to a category covering potentially sexually provocative images of persons appearing to be under the age of 18, pages with links to these images or other “child abuse” information. The was politically marketed to the Australian public as primarily a method of preventing child pornography.

* After an unusual delay, the Australian government have now officially referred the publication of the list to the Australian Federal Police. It is alleged that WikiLeaks’ release of the censorship list is illegal under Australian law.

Prices may increase at rates “close to” Zimbabwe’s gains, Faber said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Hong Kong. Zimbabwe’s inflation rate reached 231 million percent in July, the last annual rate published by the statistics office.