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The Fed asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York yesterday to delay implementation of a ruling that compels the central bank to release the documents.

“The stay is necessary to permit the board to consult with the Department of Justice regarding an appeal to the Supreme Court,” Fed spokesman David Skidmore said.

The appeals court on Aug. 20 denied the Fed’s request to reconsider its decision requiring it to release records of the $2 trillion U.S. loan program.

If the stay is granted, the central bank and the Clearing House Association LLC, an organization of 20 commercial banks that joined the Fed in defense of the lawsuit, will have 90 days to petition the Supreme Court to consider an appeal. The Clearing House has said already it will ask the high court to rule on the case.

At issue are 231 “term sheets” documenting Fed loans to financial firms during 2008. The records, which include the banks’ names and the amounts borrowed, were originally requested by late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman through the Freedom of Information Act, which allows citizens access to government papers.

About 9.9 percent of homeowners had missed at least one mortgage payment as of June 30, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Thursday. That number, adjusted for seasonal factors, was barely down from a record-high of more than 10 percent as of April 30.

The Labor Department said requests for unemployment benefits fell sharply last week. The drop in first-time claims to a seasonally adjusted 473,000 was the first decline in a month and a hopeful sign after a raft of dismal economic reports.

Arturo Millet Reyes said the yacht was taken from private marina on Saturday and that he reported the theft to local police. Millet, 43, who owns a professional soccer team in the Mexican state of Yucatan, said the Mexican Coast Guard had been on the lookout for the yacht.

“I am was very worried about what had happened,” Millet told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “My first concern was what they were going to do with the boat, if they were going to traffic drugs or something.”

The yacht, named “Makin Waves,” washed ashore midmorning Wednesday on Redding Beach, about 480 miles away from Cancun.

Investigators said they saw no signs of violence on the boat, which they were in the process of towing away this afternoon.

Millet said officials told him that the plasma TVs had been removed from the boat. He did not know what other damage may have been done to the yacht, which sells for about $1 million new. Millet said he has stored the yacht at the Cancun marina since he bought it in 2008.

Millet owns the soccer team Merida F.C., which plays in Mexico’s second-tier league.

Dozens of curious people lined Redington Beach this morning, trying to get a closer look at the boat and efforts to get it off the beach.

The vessel out of Jupiter had an expired Florida registration but a current Delaware registration and U.S. documentation, according to the sheriff’s office.

The boat had a Mexican flag at the bow and an American flag at the stern.

United States Coast Guard officials sent search crews looking for a possible missing boater, but suspended search efforts Wednesday night after coming up empty.

The vessel had been registered in Florida and Delaware, but those tags are outdated.

Officials from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office said the vessel is now registered with the federal government.

Witnesses say when the 48 foot vessel named Makin’ Waves washed ashore, the engine was running and the lights were on.

People who live along Redington Beach are shocked.

The search was suspended Wednesday night, Coast Guard officials said.

The empty 48-foot boat washed up on the beach about 1 p.m. Wednesday, triggering a police investigation and a Coast Guard rescue mission.

The Coast Guard sent out two rescue vessels and a helicopter but was not able to locate anybody.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that the vessel is registered to the federal government, CNN-affiliate WFTS reported.

Also when the ship came ashore the engine was still running and lights were on, witnesses told the affiliate.

The sight shocked some.

“We do not see something like this often. I have lived here since 1958 I have never seen a boat this size beached like this,” Rob Klingel told the affiliate.

Danita Gainey who lives in Redington Beach which is near Madeira Beach, said the sight gave her a bad feeling.

“I do not know what to say. I can’t explain it. I don’t want to say anything bad. It’s hard to say anything good when you see something like that,” Gainey said.

That has become abundantly clear is that the Obama administration has taken the Bush-era doctrine of the world as a battlefield and run with it. US special forces are now operating in seventy-five countries across the globe—up from sixty under Bush—and special operations sources say Obama is a major fan of the work of JSOC and other special operations forces.

Over the past few days, the ultra-secretive JSOC has publicly posted several jobs listings that open a small window into the type of work JSOC is performing under the Obama administration. Perhaps the most interesting revelations are those that confirm JSOC’s ongoing interrogation program and its own counterintelligence operations in Washington, DC. The jobs also indicate that the individuals will be working on Special Access Programs (SAPs), which are black-budget black operations, which in some cases involve what are essentially assassinations. Former CIA operative Bob Baer said recently that SAPs allow “for the military, under Title 10…to assassinate. So, essentially, the military in what is called battlefield preparation can go into a country like Yemen we‘re not at war with, and assassinate leaders in al Qaeda or related groups. And this is Pandora‘s box. Once you open it, where else do you go? I mean, do you do it in Thailand? Do you do it in Morocco?”

Navy spokesmen could not say Wednesday if anyone on the ground was alarmed by the drone — officially an MQ-8B Fire Scout Vertical Takeoff and Landing unmanned aerial vehicle — which looks like a small windowless helicopter and was flying at 2,000 feet. The Navy did say that the drone got within 40 miles of Washington before operators were able to re-establish communication and guide it back to its base in southern Maryland.

Still, the Aug. 2 incident resulted in the grounding of all six of the Navy’s Fire Scouts as well as an inquiry into what went wrong. The Navy is calling the problem a “software issue” that foiled the drone’s operators.

Or, as Cmdr. Danny Hernandez, a Navy spokesman, put it: “When they lose contact with the Fire Scout, there’s a program that’s supposed to have it immediately return to the airfield to land safely. That did not happen as planned.”

Navy spokesmen said the Fire Scout, made by Northrop Grumman, was a little more than an hour into a test flight operating out of Naval Air Station Patuxent River on the Chesapeake Bay when operators lost its control link. The drone then flew 23 miles on a north-by-northwest course to enter Washington’s restricted airspace. A half-hour later, Navy spokesmen said, operators re-established control and the drone landed safely back at Patuxent.

Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have slipped from her mind.

“I can remember the shape, but I can’t remember the strokes that you need to write it,” she says. “It’s a bit of a problem.”

Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed “character amnesia”, is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.

Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.

There is even a Chinese word for it: “tibiwangzi”, or “take pen, forget character”.

A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters.

As a result, Li says that she has become almost dependent on her phone.

“When I can’t remember, I will take out my cellphone and find it (the character) and then copy it down,” she says.

Zeng Ming, 22, from the southern Guangdong province, says: “I think it’s a young people’s problem, or at least a computer users’ problem.”

One notoriously forgettable character, Zeng says, is used in the word Tao Tie — a legendary Chinese monster that was so greedy it ate itself.

Still used as a byword for gluttony, the Tao Tie is one of many ancient Chinese concepts embedded in the language.

“It’s like you?re forgetting your culture,” Zeng says.

Character amnesia happens because most Chinese people use electronic input systems based on pinyin, which translates Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet.

The user enters each word using pinyin, and the device offers a menu of characters that match. So users must recognise the character, but they don’t need to be able to write it.

In Japan, where three writing systems are combined into one, mobiles and computers use the simpler hiragana and katakana scripts for inputting — meaning users may forget the kanji, a third strand of Japanese writing similar to Chinese characters.

“We rely too much on the conversion function on our phones and PCs,” said Ayumi Kawamoto, 23, shopping in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza district.