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Jim Shea, chairman of Gulf Stream Coach, which built 50,000 trailers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency for $520 million, said his company decided that its results were “irrelevant information” because FEMA already knew about high formaldehyde levels. The agency and the company were working together to improve ventilation, he said, and FEMA later turned down company offers to conduct more tests.

In hindsight Gulf Stream should have shared information from its sampling, Shea said. “Anything that would have been helpful to public health in any kind of way with this in retrospect, we would have loved to have been able to shed more light on it,” he said.

The testimony came as Democrats and Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform clashed over builders’ responsibility for the housing debacle that unfolded after the August 2005 storm, raising both public health alarms along the Gulf Coast and doubts about how the government will house Americans in future emergencies.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended this winter that all Katrina trailer residents be moved to safer housing after finding elevated formaldehyde levels in 42 percent of trailers. Four companies — Gulf Stream, Forest River, Keystone and Pilgrim International — were identified as having significant problems.

Appearing under oath, executives of those companies each acknowledged CDC findings that some of their products contained unsafe levels of formaldehyde, a common industrial chemical used in glues to make particle board and plywood. It has been linked to cancer and higher rates of respiratory illness.

But company officials and some GOP lawmakers blamed the federal government for failing to set any binding indoor air-quality standards for formaldehyde in trailers or any other U.S. housing. Republicans from Indiana, where the recreational vehicle industry is based, defended builders’ records and integrity.

“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.