WASHINGTON — In the nearly four months since Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson challenged mortgage lenders to modify distressed home loans voluntarily to ease record numbers of foreclosures, it remains difficult to gauge the program’s success. McClatchy followed several homeowners as they worked with - and sometimes battled - lenders and loan collectors during the mortgage modification process, called Hope Now. These homeowners got their loan problems fixed, either temporarily or permanently, but the process was arduous and varied. Some got stays from foreclosure, while others merely saw the threat pushed into the future. For many, the total values of their loans didn’t drop and remained larger than the current values of their homes. ‘You have to fight for your house. If you are in my situation, you have to be persistent and do everything you can imagine,’ said Chris Jennings, a homeowner in Shasta Lake, Calif., a sleepy town not far from the Oregon border. An antiques dealer without a fixed income, Jennings had refinanced his home two years ago with an adjustable-rate loan that was about to tick up on Feb. 15, adding $440 to his monthly payment. He’d assumed, like many other Americans, that […]
NEW ORLEANS – Imagine that your home was reduced to mould-covered wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government provided-trailer that gives off formaldehyde fumes you finally win a federal grant. Then a collector announces that you have to pay back thousands of dollars. Thousands of Katrina victims may be in the same boat. A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments. The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle ‘approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort.’ The bid invitation said: ‘The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000.’ The biggest grant amount allowed […]
Last month, 274,487 state residents received food stamps. That’s up from 246,890 just five years ago, according to data from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources. A total of 122,877 of the state’s estimated 743,064 households currently receive food stamps. That’s up from 105,365 households in 2003. But while the number of people on the program has jumped sharply, the federal government has raised the average per-person monthly benefits over that time by just $12 to $85. Meanwhile, the cost of food is expected to jump by up to 4 percent this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Food costs have been increasing by at least 2.4 percent each year since 2004. Added to that budget strain are record gasoline prices. Nationally, the average cost of a gallon of regular gas today is $3.26, according to the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report. A year ago, the average cost was $2.59 a gallon. Sarah Young, a policy specialist with the Department of Health and Human Resources, says the agency is seeing more of the state’s working poor applying for food stamps in order to make ends […]
LONDON and BANGKOK — Rice prices jumped 30 per cent to an all-time high on Thursday, raising fears of fresh outbreaks of social unrest across Asia where the grain is a staple food for more than 2.5bn people. The increase came after Egypt, a leading exporter, imposed a formal ban on selling rice abroad to keep local prices down, and the Philippines announced plans for a major purchase of the grain in the international market to boost supplies. Global rice stocks are at their lowest since 1976. On Friday the Indian government imposed further restrictions on the exports of rice to combat rising local inflation, with traders warning that the new regime would de facto stop all India’s non-basmati rice sales. The measures include raising the minimum price for selling abroad non-basmati rice by 53 per cent to $1,000 a tonne. Exports of premium basmati rice are likely to continue, although volumes could also suffer as the government also increased the minimum export price and scrapped export tax incentives. While prices of wheat, corn and other agricultural commodities have surged since late 2006, the increase in rice prices only started in January. The Egyptian export […]
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — If it was not yet clear to Washington that a new political order prevailed here, the three-day visit this week by America’s chief diplomat dealing with Pakistan should put any doubt to rest. The visit by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte turned out to be series of indignities and chilly, almost hostile, receptions as he bore the brunt of the full range of complaints that Pakistanis now feel freer to air with the end of military rule by Washington’s favored ally, President Pervez Musharraf. Faced with a new democratic lineup that is demanding talks, not force, in the fight against terrorism, Mr. Negroponte publicly swallowed a bitter pill at his final news conference on Thursday, acknowledging that there would now be some real differences in strategy between the United States and Pakistan. He was upbraided at an American Embassy residence during a reception in his honor by lawyers furious that the Bush administration had refused to support the restoration of the dismissed judiciary by Mr. Musharraf last year. Mr. Negroponte once told Congress that Mr. Musharraf was an ‘indispensable’ ally, but the diplomat was finally forced to set some distance after […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
