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“Congress ought to recognize that these firms are insolvent, that it is allowing these firms to continue to exist as bastions of privilege, financed by the taxpayer,” Poole was quoted as saying in an interview held on Wednesday.

Chances are increasing that the government may need to bail out the two mortgage companies, Poole was quoted as saying.

Shares of the two companies have taken a beating recently on worries about whether they can withstand more losses and support housing as well as concerns that they may need to raise massive amounts of new capital.

The Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama (D-Illinois) voted for the final bill, despite intense lobbying by supporters who used Obama’s own online organizing technology to try to hold him to his promise to fight any bill that included amnesty. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted against the bill.

The 68 to 29 vote puts an end to more than a year of debate over whether the government should be able to collect millions of e-mails and phone calls daily from U.S.-based communication switches without any probable cause. It also answers whether Congress believes the nation’s telecoms and president had a duty to follow the rules set out in 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed after the abuses of the 1950s and 60s.

Cluster bombs spread tiny bomblets across large areas when dropped from planes or fired from artillery. But they sometimes do not all explode on impact, posing a lingering risk to civilians, especially children, after a conflict.

Under the new policy, from 2018 more than 99 percent of cluster bombs used by the U.S. military would have to meet standards requiring that they contain bomblets that explode on or just before impact, defense officials said.

The new policy, signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, also requires the U.S. military to eliminate excess supplies of cluster weapons by next June.

Human rights advocates criticized the change, saying it was unacceptable for the United States, the leading user and exporter of the bombs, to wait 10 years to accept a standard lower than an all-out ban advocated by the United Nations.

More than 100 countries meeting in Ireland in May formally agreed to ban the use of cluster bombs under a draft treaty that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged states to sign and ratify quickly.

The so-called Oslo process against the bombs, modeled on a campaign against anti-personnel mines a decade ago, is due to end with the signing of a treaty in the Norwegian capital in December.

The contractor shall conduct internet awareness services in support of the Governments activities to include Indications and Warning, Force Protection, and situational awareness.

The purpose of the services will be to identify and assess stated and implied threat, antipathy, unrest, and other contextual data relating to selected internet domains. The contractor will prioritize foreign language domains that relate to specific areas of concern.

The contractor will analyze various web pages, chat rooms, blogs and other internet domains to aggregate and assess data of interest to the Government. It will also identify new internet domains that directly relate to the Governments specific local requirements.

The contractor will include a principle cyber investigator, a locally specialized threat analyst, a foreign speaking analyst with cyber investigative skills, and a constant watch team. It will organize additional native language translations at the direction of the Governments designated Contracting Officers Representative (COR), following mutual agreement.

The deliverable product will consist of a written report, delivered weekly to the COR. The report will contain raw data and supporting analysis to add value to raw materials. The contractors sources will be captioned under alias to preserve access, but upon request, the contractor will consider releasing specific URLs on an as needed basis based on the Governments request, if explicit threat materials or imminent threat to personnel or facilities are discovered.

The contractor shall immediately contact via telephone and/or email the designated COR upon receipt of any and all stated or implied threats that contain timing and/or targeting information relating to personnel, facilities or activities, and to specifically designated areas of concern.

As part of this alerting, if the contractor identifies a stated or implied threat that contains timing, targeting or both, it will deliver the raw URL and any supporting URLs relating to the threat materials. It will also make an investigator available within 8 hours of request for analytic discussions regarding the threat.

Rivers are swollen. Columbia River dams are running full bore. Wind farm blades are spinning.

That should be good news for the Northwest, where hydropower is cheap and wind is a leader in renewable energy. And it should be good news for California, a huge electricity consumer that often sucks up Oregon’s springtime surplus.

But a doubling of wind-power supplies and an unusually concentrated surge in water levels have challenged this season’s power operations like never before.

“You throw a spiky late runoff into the equation, and a little extra wind, and it definitely gets interesting,” said Kieran Connolly, a power manager for Bonneville Power Administration.

The result: wasted power generation, excessive spill through the dams and a sometimes frenzied juggling of dam and transmission schedules.

High water levels benefit power supplies and migrating fish, but the levels in recent weeks have been too much of a good thing.

Oregon and Washington can’t use all the electricity that’s available. And southbound transmission lines that are at capacity can’t take the extra power California consumers otherwise would eagerly devour.

In some cases, power producers are paying customers to take electricity off their hands.

Corporate “federal agency” debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by the companies also plummeted relative to government debt as investors reduced positions in response to the latest worries, analysts said.

Monday’s carnage was only the latest setback for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which each have lost more than three-quarters of their stock market value since last August when a crisis initially believed contained to the subprime mortgage market erupted into a global credit crisis.

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The shares crumbled after a Lehman Brothers report said a pending accounting change could force Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to raise an enormous amount of capital at a difficult time. The rule aimed at forcing companies to account for securitized assets on their balance sheets could mandate Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to boost capital by $29 billion and $46 billion, respectively, the analysts wrote in a client note on Monday.

In a caveat, Lehman’s analysts, led by Bruce Harting, said the companies may get exemptions given the gravity of the impact on the fragile U.S. housing market.

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Global economic uncertainty over the past few years has pushed gold prices into the stratosphere, and few people have felt that rise as much as Hong Kong entrepreneur Lam Sai-wing has. He has spent the past decade constructing a palace of gold, decked out in six tons of the precious metal. In recent years, the palace has become an attraction mainland Chinese tour groups couldn’t miss, and a boon for Mr. Lam’s retail jewelry business, Hong Kong-listed Hang Fung Gold Technology.

Since gold prices hit four-digit territory earlier this year, Mr. Lam has been taking apart his hall of gold as quickly as he once raced to construct it. He is melting down golden chandeliers, armchairs and armored knights and selling gold by the ton to fuel growth plans that include hundreds of new retail outlets in mainland China. But even with the selloff, one thing is certain: The toilet stays.

The most telling came from Marks & Spencer, Taylor Wimpey and John Lewis – emblems all of a peculiarly middle-class, middle-England solidity. The first reported a 5 per cent drop in like-for-like sales over three months, which led to 25 per cent being wiped off its share value. The building company had to admit that it had failed to raise the finance it hoped for, almost halving its share value at a stroke. The value of the company is now a fraction of what it was when the two companies – Taylor Woodrow and Wimpey – merged a year ago.

It will have escaped no one that the pain being felt by ordinary consumers and by the building giants is connected. For the best part of a decade, rising house prices have encouraged homeowners to feel richer than perhaps they really were, and helped to fuel the consumer boom of which the then chancellor, and now Prime Minister, was so proud.

Rather than a reasonable correction that would have re-established the virtues of sound credit and given hope, at long last, to first-time buyers, however, what the country has experienced in recent months has been the worst of two possible worlds. Credit has been squeezed to the point where the number of new mortgages has shrunk exponentially, almost freezing the housing market, while inflation has simultaneously reared its ugly head.