NEW YORK — American homes are more cluttered than ever with devices, and they all need power: Cellphones and iPads that have to be charged, DVRs that run all hours, TVs that light up in high definition.

But something shocking is happening to demand for electricity in the Age of the Gadget: It’s leveling off.

Over the next decade, experts expect residential power use to fall, reversing an upward trend that has been almost uninterrupted since Thomas Edison invented the modern light bulb.

In part it’s because Edison’s light bulb is being replaced by more efficient types of lighting, and electric devices of all kinds are getting much more efficient. But there are other factors.

New homes are being built to use less juice, and government subsidies for home energy savings programs are helping older homes use less power. In the short term, the tough economy and a weak housing market are prompting people to cut their usage.

As a result, many families can expect their monthly bills to remain in check, even if power prices rise. For utility executives, who can no longer bank on ever-growing demand, a major shift is under way: They’re finding ways to profit when people use less power.

‘It’s already […]

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Where does Jimmy Carter live? Well, close your eyes and imagine the kind of house an ex-president of the United States might live in. The sort of residence befitting the former leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Got it? Right, now scrub that clean from your mind and instead imagine the sort of house where a moderately successful junior accountant and his family might live.

It’s what in America is called a ‘ranch house’, or, as we’d say, ‘a bungalow’. There are no porticoes. No columns. No sweeping lawns. There’s just a small brick single-storey structure that Jimmy and his wife, Rosalynn, built on Woodland Drive back in 1961 when he was a peanut farmer and she was a peanut farmer’s wife, right in the heart of the town in which they grew up. Though Plains, Georgia is barely a town. A street, might be a more accurate description. A single road going nowhere much.

At the end of the drive there’s a fleet of black Suburbans, giant SUVs with blacked-out windows: not too many junior accountants would have a crack team of secret service agents on site, it’s true. But it’s hard to overstate how modest it is. It’s […]

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PARIS — The official euphoria with which the U.S. and European governments celebrated the fall of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya has given way to growing concern that many among the new Libyan leadership are radical Muslims with links to al-Qaeda. Revelations are surfacing also of a close collaboration of Western governments with the deposed dictator.

The overwhelming presence of radical Muslims among the rebel Libyan leadership has been known in Paris at least since early March. But the dangers from this are now beginning to be discussed openly in Western capitals.

On Mar. 8, François Gouyette, ambassador to Tripoli until late February, told a select group of deputies at a closed session of the French parliamentary commission of foreign affairs that the rebellion, especially in the east of the country, comprised mostly ‘radical Muslims’.

‘In the east of the country, especially in the city of Derna, which was taken very easily by the insurrection, there is without question a high concentration of radical Muslims,’ Gouyette told the deputies. ‘Hundreds of Libyan combatants taking part in the international jihad in Afghanistan and in Iraq originate from this region.

‘Many of these combatants are back in Libya,’ Gouyette warned. IPS has the minutes […]

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Many of the country’s largest banks received $6 billion in kickbacks from mortgage insurers over the course of a decade, according to a previously undisclosed investigation by the Inspector General of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The allegations, since referred to the Department of Justice, stem from lenders’ demand that insurers cut them in on the lucrative business of insuring the mortgages they produced during the housing boom.

In exchange for their business, companies such as Citigroup Inc, Wells Fargo & Co, SunTrust Banks Inc. and Countrywide allegedly required reinsurance partnerships on generous terms that violated the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, a 1974 law prohibiting abusive home sales practices.

During a two-day presentation in the summer of 2009, HUD’s team presented DOJ attorneys with a thick binder of evidence that major banks had engineered a decade-long kickback scheme, people familiar with the investigation say.

Documents from the investigation show that the inspector general’s staff concluded that banks and insurance companies had created elaborate financial structures that had the appearance of reinsurance but failed to transfer significant amounts of risk to their bank underwriters.

Some of the deals were designed to return a 400% profit on a bank’s investment during good years and […]

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SAN ANGELO, TX — When Texas went to court last year to block President Obama’s healthcare overhaul, Gov. Rick Perry pledged to do everything in his power to ‘protect our families, taxpayers and medical providers.’ Texas, he said, could manage its own healthcare.

But in the 11 years the Republican presidential hopeful has been in office, working Texans increasingly have been priced out of private healthcare while the state’s safety net has withered, leaving millions of state residents without medical care.

‘Texas just hasn’t proven it can run a health system,’ said Dr. C. Bruce Malone III, an orthopedic surgeon and president of the historically conservative Texas Medical Assn.

More than a quarter of Texans lack health insurance, the highest rate in the nation, placing a crushing burden on hospitals and doctors who treat patients unable to pay.

Those costs are passed to the insured. Insurance premiums have risen more quickly in Texas than they have nationally over the last seven years. And when compared with incomes, insurance in Texas is less affordable than in every state but Mississippi, according to the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund.

That has taken a toll, as nearly a third of the state’s children did not receive an annual physical and […]

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