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The number of borrowers at least 90 days late on their home loans rose to 3.6 percent at the end of December, the highest in at least five years, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington. That figure, for the first time, is almost double the 2 percent who have been foreclosed on.

Lenders who allow owners to stay in their homes are distorting the record foreclosure rate and delaying the worst of the housing decline, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, a unit of New York-based Moody’s Corp. These borrowers will eventually push the number of delinquencies even higher and send more homes onto an already glutted market.

“We don’t have a sense of the magnitude of what’s really going on because the whole process is being delayed,” Zandi said in an interview. “Looking at the data, we see the problems, but they are probably measurably greater than we think.”

Lenders took an average of 61 days to foreclose on a property last year, up from 37 days in the year earlier, according to RealtyTrac Inc., a foreclosure database in Irvine, California. Sales of foreclosed homes rose 4.4 percent last year at the same time the supply of such homes more than doubled, according to LoanPerformance First American CoreLogic Inc., a real estate data company based in San Francisco.

Reluctant Banks

“Some people stay in their houses until someone comes to kick them out,” said Angel Gutierrez, owner of Dallas-based Metro Lending, which buys distressed mortgage debt. “Sometimes no one comes to kick them out.”

Banks are reluctant to foreclose on homeowners for a variety of reasons that include the cost, said Peter Zalewski, real estate broker and owner of Condo Vultures Realty LLC, a property consulting firm in Bal Harbour, Florida.

Legal fees and maintaining a vacant property while paying the mortgage, insurance and taxes can add up to as much as 15 percent of the value of the home, and it may take months for the foreclosure to work through the legal system, he said.

“The end result is taking back a property that the bank will have to manage, rent out and or sell,” Zalewski said.

In many cases, lenders also have to foot the bill for fixing up vacant homes that have been vandalized.

Empty Houses

Real estate broker Georgia Kapsalis is offering a home for sale in Birmingham, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, where the owner last wrote a mortgage check in July. He still lives in the house, she said.

“Some of the banks just don’t want the houses to be empty, especially if it’s in an area where there’s a lot of theft or there are five other houses empty on the street,” said Kapsalis, who works at Added Value Realty LLC in Livonia, Michigan, another Detroit suburb. “They’ll lose toilets, plumbing, appliances, everything. Banks are getting wise and allowing people to live there longer.”

Alexis McGee, president of Internet database Foreclosures.com in Sacramento, California, said she toured a property where the departing resident tried to make off with the outdoor air conditioning unit by sawing the metal legs off its concrete apron.

“People take what they want to take,” McGee said. “They feel that they’re owed.”

Flooded Market

With home sales dropping and national inventories rising, the lenders have another reason to delay foreclosures, said Howard Fishman, a real estate investor based in Minneapolis.

“What are the banks going to do?” Fishman said. “They don’t want the house. They have a mortgage for $1 million and the house is worth $750,000.”

In February, 5 million existing homes were sold on a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate, down 31 percent from the peak of 7.25 million in September 2005, data compiled by the Chicago-based National Association of Realtors show. More than 4 million existing homes were on the market in February, 53 percent more than the 2.6 million average of the past nine years, the Realtors reported.

“Excess inventories pose the biggest risk to the market,” Michelle Meyer and Ethan Harris, New York-based economists at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., wrote in a report last month. “As long as inventories are high, home prices will fall.”

New Foreclosures

Growing inventory pulled median home prices down to $195,900 in February, a 15 percent drop from the peak of $230,200 in July 2006, the Realtors said.

New foreclosures rose to 0.83 percent of all home loans in the fourth quarter from 0.54 percent a year earlier, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The civil court in St. Lucie County, Florida, is getting about 44 foreclosure cases to file every day. That’s the same number it averaged in a typical month in 2005, said Clerk of the Circuit Court Ed Fry.

Fry said he has 12 full-time employees and two temporary workers he just hired handling nothing but foreclosures. Still, the 50-page filings sit in cardboard boxes for three weeks before the court staff can process them, Fry said. Then it takes another two months to get a date on the court docket, he said.

Mortgage servicers, who collect monthly payments and are responsible for starting the foreclosure process, also were caught short-staffed, said Grant Stern, a mortgage broker and owner of Morningside Mortgage Corp. in Miami Beach, Florida.

`Moral Hazard’

“The most experienced people you can bring in are origination people,” Stern said. “But for a bank it’s a moral hazard to have the same people who originated the loans now modifying those loans. That wouldn’t be desirable. Once around is enough.”

The five largest servicers — Countrywide Financial Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., CitiMortgage Inc., Chase Home Finance Inc. and Washington Mutual Inc. — together manage more than half the home loans in the U.S., according to New York-based National Mortgage News, an industry publication.

While more than 100 mortgage originators have suspended operations, closed or sold themselves since the beginning of 2007, mortgage servicing units are expanding.

Chase Home Finance, a unit of New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the fourth-largest U.S. servicer, expects to spend $200 million more servicing loans in 2008 than it did last year, said spokesman Thomas Kelly.

Delayed Foreclosure

Kelly wouldn’t say how many Chase borrowers have quit paying their mortgages and remain in their homes.

Efforts to keep borrowers paying their bills have slowed the foreclosure process, Mark Rodgers, a spokesman at CitiMortgage, a division of New York-based Citigroup Inc., said in an e-mail message.

“In a number of cases, we have delayed foreclosure proceedings to allow our loss mitigation teams additional time to explore potential solutions to keep distressed borrowers in their homes,” Rodgers said.

Joe Ohayon, vice president of community relations for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage in Frederick, Maryland, a unit of San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, said trying to modify loan terms case by case adds time to the foreclosure process.

“Foreclosure is only a last resort after all available options for keeping the customer in the home have been exhausted,” Ohayon said in an e-mail message.

Affordable Payments

Olivia Riley, a spokeswoman at Seattle-based Washington Mutual, said in an e-mail that the company’s goal is to keep customers in their homes “with payments they can afford.”

Representatives for Calabasas, California-based Countrywide, the biggest U.S. mortgage servicer last year, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Few mortgage companies will admit they allow homeowners to stay in their homes without paying their bills.

“No servicer will say you can live rent-free for six months, go ahead,” said Paul Miller, a mortgage industry analyst at Friedman Billings Ramsey & Co. in Arlington, Virginia. “Eventually, the servicers will clear these guys out.”

Homeowners usually get 90 days to resume paying before foreclosure proceedings begin with the filing of a complaint or notice of non-payment.

State laws determine the length of time between the filing and an auction of the house. In most states, it’s two to six months, according to Foreclosures.com. In Maine, it can be up to a year and in New York, 19 months; in Georgia, it’s as quickly as one month, and in Nevada, it can be 35 days, according to the database.

Borrowers in California who fight foreclosure can stretch the process to 18 months, said Cameron Pannabecker, chapter president of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers and president of Cal-Pro Mortgage Inc. in Stockton.

That doesn’t take into account the woman he knows who hasn’t made a mortgage payment in eight months and hasn’t heard from her lender, Pannabecker said.

Not all the companies in which lawmakers invested are typical defense contractors. Corporations such as PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson have at one point received defense-related contracts, notes the report by the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics.

The poll found that 81 percent of respondents felt “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” That was up from 69 percent last year and 35 percent in early 2003.

Only 4 percent of survey respondents said the country was better off than it was five years ago, while 78 percent said it was worse, the newspaper said.

The Times said Americans were more unhappy with the country’s direction than at any time since the survey started in the early 1990s.

Professor Garvey’s idea of using Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) isn’t a new one, but his methods are.

Traditionally, CAES stows energy in a vast underground reservoir. During peak energy hours, air is released powering a turbine, which in turn produces electricity. There are currently only two CAES sites in the world — in Huntorf, Germany and in McIntosh, Alabama.

Based at Nottingham University, Professor Garvey — whose interest in wind turbines stretches back to his school days — began his research into compressed air storage two years ago.

“I was thinking about how textile composites and textile structures might be relevant in the context of renewable energy,” he told CNN.

In a moment of inspiration, Garvey realized that air could be compressed using a wind turbine or a wave-powered device.

“Drawing a mass down within the blade of the piston itself compresses the air,” he said.

The prospects for his energy storage idea with tidal power are perhaps even better. “With tidal power you can use a hydraulic ram. This can take a large flow of water at a low pressure. Out of that it can then give you a small flow of water at a high pressure.”

Naturally, storing vast amounts of air requires vast amounts of storage. Professor Garvey envisages a cone-like structure stretching 50 meters wide at the top to around 80 meters across at the base.

The bags are made of a combination of plastics. “A polyester reinforcement at the core with probably a polythene layer around that,” Garvey said.

At a depth of around 600 meters, Professor Garvey calculates that the bags would be able to store 25 megajoules of energy for every meter cubed. The deep water is essential. “Only in deep water, where the pressure is greatest, are the bags a good economic proposition,” Garvey explained.

Although there is an additional cost in fixing reinforcement cables and ballast, Garvey believes the future economic prospects for his invention are good.

He plans to put the storage bags through smaller scale land-based tests, with four-meter-diameter bags, to prove that his calculations are right.

The centrifugal force required to compress the air is too great for small wind turbines to cope with, so much larger turbines will have to be installed for the project to realize its goals.

Currently, wind turbines are situated in relatively shallow water — around 40 meters. So how will the project work if the bags need to be at a depth of 600 meters?

Well, a series of pipes will link turbine and bag and Professor Garvey believes the distances, in Europe at least, wouldn’t have to be too long.

Research into floating turbines is underway and, as Professor Garvey points out there are steep ocean shelves off the west coast of France and Portugal and around the entire periphery of the Mediterranean. “You could put wind turbines on these shelves and within a few hundred meters, or kilometers you could be in 600-meter-deep water,” he said.

Professor Garvey, who has secured a three year grant from German energy provider E.ON, is confident that with the right funding the UK can achieve its stated aim of providing 20 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020.

“Solar thermal energy is an especially attractive renewable power source because it is available when needed most in California – during the peak mid-day summer period,” said Fong Wan, vice president of energy procurement at PG&E. “Through these agreements with BrightSource, we continue to broaden our renewable energy portfolio and provide our customers with some of the cleanest energy in the nation.”

BrightSource’s goal is to substantially lower the cost and increase the use of solar energy throughout the Western United States. “PG&E is making this goal possible by committing to power purchase agreements that will bring the benefit of carbon-free power to their customers,” noted John Woolard, president and CEO of BrightSource in making this announcement. “PG&E is demonstrating true leadership in bringing large scale solar power to California.”

The October 2001 memo was almost certainly meant to provide a legal basis for the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, which President Bush launched the same month the memo was issued. As a component of the Department of Defense, the NSA is a military agency.

“The recent disclosures underscore the Bush administration’s extraordinarily sweeping conception of executive power,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “The administration’s lawyers believe the president should be permitted to violate statutory law, to violate international treaties, and even to violate the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. They believe that the president should be above the law.”

The Nga Awa Purua station is a joint venture between a local iwi land trust, and the Mighty River Power Company.

One center also has access to top-secret data systems at the CIA, the document shows, though it’s not clear what information those systems contain.

Dozens of the organizations known as fusion centers were created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to identify potential threats and improve the way information is shared. The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies. They are expected to play important roles in national information-sharing networks that link local, state and federal authorities and enable them to automatically sift their storehouses of records for patterns and clues.

Though officials have publicly discussed the fusion centers’ importance to national security, they have generally declined to elaborate on the centers’ activities. But a document that lists resources used by the fusion centers shows how a dozen of the organizations in the northeastern United States rely far more on access to commercial and government databases than had previously been disclosed.

Those details have come to light at a time of debate about domestic intelligence efforts, including eavesdropping and data-aggregation programs at the National Security Agency, and whether the government has enough protections in place to prevent abuses.

The list of information resources was part of a survey conducted last year, officials familiar with the effort said. It shows that, like most police agencies, the fusion centers have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.

Centers serving New York and other states also tap into a Federal Trade Commission database with information about hundreds of thousands of identity-theft reports, the document and police interviews show.

Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver’s license photos, while analysts in Rhode Island have access to car-rental databases. In Maryland, authorities rely on a little-known data broker called Entersect, which claims it maintains 12 billion records about 98 percent of Americans.

In its online promotional material, Entersect calls itself “the silent partner to municipal, county, state, and federal justice agencies who access our databases every day to locate subjects, develop background information, secure information from a cellular or unlisted number, and much more.”

Police officials said fusion center analysts are trained to use the information responsibly, legally and only on authorized criminal and counterterrorism cases. They stressed the importance of secret and public data in rooting out obscure threats.