Finance and Economic

U2 and its frontman Bono, known for their global poverty-fighting efforts, were accused of dodging taxes in Ireland by activists who crashed their performance Friday at England’s Glastonbury festival.

The anti-capitalist group Art Uncut inflated a 20-foot (6-meter) balloon emblazoned with the message “U Pay Your Tax 2.” Security guards wrestled them to the ground before deflating the balloon and taking it away. About 30 people were involved in the angry clash.

Bono fan Gary Noble, 45, said he found the security reponse “all a bit shocking.”

“I love U2 but I think everyone should pay their taxes. The campaigners have a right to voice their opinion,” he said.

Art Uncut argues that while Bono campaigns against poverty in the developing world, his group has avoided paying Irish taxes at a time when his austerity-hit country desperately needs money.

Ireland, which has already accepted an international bailout, is suffering through deep spending cuts, tax hikes and rising unemployment as it tries to pull the debt-burdened economy back from brink of bankruptcy.

“Tax(es) nestling in the band’s bank account should be helping to keep open the hospitals, schools and libraries that are closing all over Ireland,” Art Uncut member Charlie Dewar said ahead of the protest.

U2, the country’s most successful band, was heavily criticized in 2006 for moving its corporate base from Ireland to the Netherlands, where royalties on music incur virtually no tax payday loans.

Bono, guitarist The Edge and U2’s other members _ bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen _ are among the country’s wealthiest residents. Forbes magazine has estimated the band earned $195 million last year, mostly through its hugely profitable “360 Degrees” world tour.

It’s not known how much personal income tax the band members pay in Ireland.

During the years when Ireland was a booming “Celtic Tiger” economy, the members of U2 invested in a wide range of Dublin properties, including a luxury riverside hotel and a planned Norman Foster-designed skyscraper on the River Liffey. Plans for the “U2 Tower” were shelved when property prices collapsed in 2008.

U2 is headlining the first night of the three-day Glastonbury festival, its first appearance at Britain’s most prestigious summer music event. The band was due to perform last year but had to pull out after Bono injured his back.

Some 170,000 people have descended on a farm in southwest England for the extravaganza, which includes sets by Morrissey, Mumford & Sons, Coldplay, Beyonce and scores of other acts.

Rubber boots are the fashion item of choice after heavy rain turned the 900-acre (364-hectare) site into a mudbath. More rain is forecast for later Friday.

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Stocks climbed for a third straight day on Monday, the longest stretch of gains the market has had in nearly a month.

Major indexes opened mixed but moved higher in midday trading, putting the market further away from its longest weekly losing streak since 2002. Last week stocks eked out tiny gains, giving the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index their first rises after a six-week slump.

The downturn, which began in early May, brought the S&P 500 close to its average level over the prior 200 days. So long as the index doesn’t sink far below that level, many technical traders see it as a sign to start buying stocks again. The S&P is now 6 percent below the 2011 high it reached on April 29.

“In the short term, stocks have been oversold, and you’re going to get some sort of bounce, whether justified or not, just for technical reasons,” said Paul Simon, chief investment officer for Tactical Allocation Group, which has $1.5 billion in assets under advisement.

The S&P 500 index is up 7 points, 0.6 percent, at 1,278. The Dow Jones industrial average is up 71 points, or 0.6 percent, to 12,076. The Nasdaq is up 16, or 0.6 percent, to 2,632.

European leaders failed over the weekend to agree on releasing more financial aid to Greece, saying the country must first agree to more budget cuts. Greece’s recent efforts to slash spending have led to street protests and political turmoil in Athens. The Greek government faces a confidence vote on Tuesday.

Prime Minister George Papandreou’s newly-reshuffled government is expected to prevail in the vote, and officials say they expect Greece to get its next installment of emergency loans in July. If Greece were to default, it could trigger losses for the banks that hold Greek bonds and more turmoil in financial markets personal loans for people with bad credit.

Investors are also looking ahead to the Federal Reserve’s two-day policy meeting, which begins Tuesday, and the next round of corporate earnings reports that begin in July, said Oliver Pursche, president of Gary Goldberg Financial Services.

“There’s a little fatigue about hearing about the same problems, and there’s no shock factor anymore,” he said. “So now you’re going to start looking ahead. Earnings season is going to start in three weeks or so.”

Analysts expect operating earnings per share for companies in the S&P 500 index rose 14 percent in the second quarter. They also expect the Fed to keep interest rates at nearly zero, a record low.

Fertilizer producer Agrium Inc. raised its forecast for second-quarter earnings after record crop prices pushed up demand for its products. Its stock rose 2.8 percent.

Nabors Industries Ltd., a driller for oil and gas, warned that its pressure pumping and international businesses have been weaker than it expected. The stock lost 2.2 percent.

PNC Financial Services Group Inc. fell 1.9 percent after saying it would buy the U.S. retail operations of Royal Bank of Canada for $3.45 billion. The deal will make PNC the fifth biggest U.S. bank with 2,870 branches. The deal follows Capital One Financial Corp.’s $9 billion purchase last week of ING’s U.S. online bank.

Greece has been at the center of Europe’s debt worries, but other countries are also facing troubles. Moody’s warned that it may cut Italy’s credit rating because of its mounting debt and sluggish growth prospects.

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ATHENS, GREECE

OTTAWA

A round of confidence-building corporate deals supported global stocks Tuesday, despite fresh tightening measures in China as inflation there jumped to a three-year high and another savage credit rating downgrade of Greece.

Over the past two months, the economic news flow has turned distinctly negative, particularly from the U.S., and many investors think the surge in share prices in the early part of the year may have been overdone.

Some relief came from corporate deals that prompted investors to look for potential takeover targets. In particular, news that Avis Budget has agreed to buy its European counterpart Avis Europe in a $1 billion deal has helped fuel hopes that further corporate activity will emerge in the days to come, especially now that many companies have shored up their cash positions following the recession.

“Companies with healthy balance sheets are clearly looking for sound investments,” said Will Hedden, sales trader at IG Index.

Though Avis Europe is not part of the FTSE 100 of leading British shares, its takeover helped buoy sentiment and the index was up 0.4 percent at 5,797. Germany’s DAX was 1.6 percent higher at 7,197 while the CAC-40 in France rose 1 percent to 3,846.

Wall Street was poised for a solid opening, too _ Dow futures were up 0.6 percent at 11,954, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 futures rose 0.8 percent to 1,276.

How the U.S. opens could well hinge on retail sales figures, which are released an hour before the bell. U.S. retail sales figures for May will provide an insight into the state of the U.S. economic recovery _ consumer spending accounts for around 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

Expectations are not rosy. The headline figure is expected to show a monthly 0.4 percent decline, which if true would represent the first decline since last June. However, when car sales are stripped out, U.S. retail sales are expected to rise by 0.3 percent.

In currency markets, investors continue to monitor developments surrounding the Greek debt crisis ahead of next week’s meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels, where a fresh Greek bailout is on the agenda.

An unscheduled meeting of the eurogroup ministers Tuesday has stoked speculation that they are preparing to work out a way for the private sector to increase its share in helping Greece, a move the European Central Bank has so far opposed. The meeting takes place just a day after Standard & Poor’s downgraded its rating on Greece’s debt to triple C, the lowest of any sovereign in the world.

Tuesday’s meeting takes place amid signs that policymakers in Europe have divergent views on how to deal with the Greek crisis, with the European Central Bank and the German government, in particular, at odds on getting Greece’s bondholders to share the burden of the bailout.

By late morning London time, the euro was 0.2 percent firmer at $1.4439.

Earlier in Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 index rose 1.1 percent to close at 9,547.79 while South Korea’s Kospi rose 1.4 percent to 2,076.83. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell less than 0.1 percent to 22,496.

In mainland China, shares advanced after the government announced that inflation in May was 5.5 percent. Though that was the highest in almost three years, it was not as high as some forecasts had suggested. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index gained 1.1 percent to 2,730.04, while the Shenzhen Composite Index of China gained 1.6 percent to 1,128.42.

Even though headline inflation did not rise as much as anticipated, China’s central bank increased the reserves banks are required to hold by a further 0.5 percentage point to a record 21.5 percent of deposits. The sixth increase this year is designed to help keep a lid on inflation.

There was some relief in the markets that China did not raise interest rates though that is expected to happen again soon.

“Although Chinese tightening is not generally welcomed by the markets, a gradual slowdown in the economy is a far better scenario than a hard-landing,” said Jane Foley, an analyst at Rabobank International.

Oil prices recouped some recent lost ground though fears over the pace of the global recovery remain.

Benchmark crude for July delivery was up 99 cents to $97.39 in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

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Pamela Sampson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

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Conrad Black is contesting the testimony of two prison workers who said he shirked tutoring responsibilities and used other inmates as servants during his time at a Florida prison, as his conduct behind bars comes under scrutiny ahead of his resentencing later this month.

Affidavits by two employees filed with a U.S. federal court in Illinois suggest the former media baron wasn’t the model inmate his defence team has painted him to be in its petition to the court arguing that Black should not return to jail.

The scathing reports will be considered when Judge Amy St. Eve, who presided over Black’s original trial in 2007, hears arguments later this month on whether Black should return to jail on two remaining convictions.

But Black said Monday the officials’ testimony is at odds with evidence from other sources provided to the Probation Office and “will be rebutted at the appropriate time by appropriate people.”

“They are indicative of the deterioration of the government’s case …, ” he said in an email to The Canadian Press.

In one of the affidavits, a unit manager at the Coleman complex says Black demanded special treatment and gathered an entourage of inmates who acted like servants for him.

“Those inmates cooked for Black, cleaned for him, mopped his floor, ironed his clothes and other similar tasks. That is not at all frequent at Coleman,” Tammy Padgett said in the document.

She added that Black’s assigned case manager reported that he demanded to be called Lord Black the day he was released on bond last summer, awaiting the outcome of an appeal.

“Black told (her) words to the effect of ‘I believe I should be addressed as Lord Black from this point forward,’” she said.

In another document, Carrie De La Garza, an education specialist who supervised Black as a tutor, claimed he was a haughty and uninterested mentor.

“He projected the attitude that he was better than others in the class, both faculty and students. A lot of the inmates looked up to him, and there were some who saluted him each day in class,” she said in the sworn testimony.

De La Garza claimed Black was frequently late and often read or worked on writing what appeared to be a book while he was supposed to be teaching.

“In addition, Black elected to take a piano class, which caused him to miss parts of the GED (General Educational Development) classes. Of the three tutors assigned to my class during the time Black was an inmate at Coleman, Black put in the fewest hours,” she said.

De La Garza’s depiction of Black’s time as a tutor disputes his defence team’s claims, which argue in its court filings that his contributions to the community “were nothing short of extraordinary.”

“Few indeed could take credit for guiding more than 100 GED candidates to graduation, and Mr. Black’s work with his colleagues to more than double the number of graduates (including several who had been written off as hopeless causes) is truly commendable when one considers the very difficult circumstances he faced,” the defence filing said.

However, De La Garza refuted the claim with figures showing there had been no increase in the graduation rate of the prison’s students, instead saying there has been a decline to 81 in 2010 from 87 in 2007.

Black’s lawyer, Miguel Estrada, earlier filed documents in advance of Black’s resentencing that tout his contributions to the community during his 2.5 years at Coleman, and his continuing support of those students since his release last summer.

“Mr. Black stared into the darkest and most devastating period of his life and found the power to improve the lives and opportunities of those whom he encountered,” the filing said.

“He did so quietly, humbly, and with no effort to draw attention or praise to his accomplishments.”

Black, who had been serving a 6.5-year sentence in the U.S. federal prison, has been freed since last summer after the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the “honest services” laws used to convict Black of defrauding Hollinger International investors.

An appeals court subsequently reversed two convictions, but upheld two others — on fraud and obstruction of justice. He is scheduled to be resentenced on those charges June 24.

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal of those convictions last week, meaning Black won’t be cleared of the charges, but could remain free if the judge decides to allow him time served on the counts.

The U.S. Attorney believes Black’s original sentence of 6.5 years should be reimposed.

Black’s empire once included the National Post, Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Telegraph of London and other papers across the United States and Canada.

The Canadian-born businessman was freed on bail from a Florida prison last year while he appealed his conviction for defrauding investors. He had served 29 months of a 78-month sentence for the original four convictions.

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Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency arrested one of the West African nation’s top politicians Sunday night on suspicion of defrauding the oil-rich country, an official said.

Officers arrested outgoing House of Representatives speaker Dimeji Bankole at his home in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja after the lawmaker resisted arrest for more than four hours, said Femi Babafemi, a spokesman for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

Babafemi gave no additional details about the allegations facing Bankole, other than to say that he would be held “in custody to enable him to have sufficient time to answer questions on the numerous fraud allegations against him.” The lawmaker apparently refused several requests by officials to be interviewed.

“An intelligence report … showed that the former speaker was planning to leave Abuja for Lagos on Sunday evening and thereafter flee the country through an illegal route,” a statement from Babafemi read.

It was not immediately clear if Bankole had a lawyer. His spokesman could not be reached for comment early Monday morning.

Bankole conceded defeat to an opposition party candidate in Nigeria’s April elections, one of a number of prominent politicians who lost their seats in the country’s National Assembly.

Many pointed to Bankole’s defeat as a sign that Nigeria’s elections, typically marred by fraud and thuggery, had improved over the nation’s 12 years as a democracy. However, ballot-box stuffing and violence dominated later polls, with more than 800 people dying in religious rioting after the presidential election personal loans for bad credit.

Nigeria, one of the top crude oil suppliers to the U.S., has a long history of corruption, with one officials once estimating the country has lost more than $380 billion to graft since gaining its independence from Britain in 1960. Corruption trickles down from corrupt politicians in Abuja to the lowest police officer shaking down bribes from motorists at one of the country’s many traffic checkpoint.

Bankole’s detention is the highest profile case in many months for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, founded by former President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2003. While critics say Obasanjo used the agency to go after his opponents, officers did make major arrests under then-chief Nuhu Ribadu.

After late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s administration forced Ribadu out of office in 2008, the agency largely fell quiet. A U.S. diplomatic cable released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks shows diplomats have questioned new leader Farida Waziri’s preparedness and willingness to take on the country’s powerful political elite. Waziri has been slow to prosecute many of the high-ranking politicians once under heavy scrutiny _ even after Yar’Adua’s May 2010 death.

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The Obama administration declined to brand China a currency manipulator while saying the world’s fastest-growing economy is making “insufficient” progress on letting the yuan rise.

The U.S. “believes that progress thus far is insufficient and that more rapid progress is needed,” the Treasury Department said yesterday in a report to Congress on foreign- exchange markets. The yuan’s real exchange rate remains “substantially undervalued” and the department “will continue to closely monitor the pace” of appreciation.

The report, originally due in April, follows Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s push for a stronger yuan. Lawmakers including Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, say the exchange rate gives China an unfair advantage in the global marketplace. In talks this month between the world’s two largest economies, China agreed on the upward direction of the currency, while differing with the U.S. on the pace.

“We have differences on the degree of appreciation,” Deputy Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said May 10 in Washington. China’s economy will expand 9.6 percent in 2011 and 9.5 percent next year, according to International Monetary Fund projections released last month.

The Treasury Department backed away from the “nuclear option” of calling China a currency manipulator, said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York. The Group of 20 nations are “going to have something to say on the global imbalances later this year, so it is better to decide these matters in a world forum rather than for the U.S. to take unilateral action.”

Congressional Criticism

Rupkey said in e-mailed comments that the “late afternoon release before Memorial Day weekend appears well-timed in order to miss congressional criticism. Nice timing, as a war of words helps no one.” The report was released at 4 p.m. yesterday.

The Treasury said “no major trading partner” of the U.S. met the legal standard of improperly manipulating its currency. “Exchange-rate flexibility must play an important role in rebalancing China’s economy towards domestic demand-led growth,” the department said.

China has allowed the yuan to appreciate by 5.1 percent against the dollar from June 2010 through the end of April 2011, or at a rate of about 6 percent per year in nominal terms, the Treasury said. Since inflation in China is higher than it is in the U.S., the yuan has been rising against the dollar at an annual rate of about 9 percent on a real, inflation-adjusted basis.

Yuan’s Increase

By acknowledging the yuan’s increase since last year while criticizing the “limited progress,” the U.S. “once again takes a calibrated approach to Chinese currency policy,” Eswar Prasad, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former IMF official, said in an e-mail.

The yuan completed its second consecutive weekly gain on speculation that policy makers will tolerate appreciation to tame inflation. The People’s Bank of China set the currency’s reference rate 0.04 percent stronger at 6.4898 per dollar yesterday, the highest level since July 2005.

The yuan strengthened 0.02 percent this week to 6.4917 per dollar as of the 4:30 p.m. close in Shanghai, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trade System. It was little changed yesterday and touched 6.4858 on May 26, the strongest level since 1993. The yuan isn’t allowed to move more than 0.5 percent either side of the central bank’s daily fixing.

Hampers Progress

“China’s consistent, large reserve accumulation prolongs a substantial undervaluation and hampers progress toward global rebalancing,” the Treasury said. “It is in China’s interest to allow the nominal exchange rate to appreciate more rapidly, both against the dollar and against the currencies of its other major trading partners.”

China purchases foreign currencies to suppress the value of the yuan. It accumulated $3.04 trillion of foreign-currency reserves as of March, an increase of 24 percent over a year earlier. Its reserves are the world’s largest, accounting for 31 percent of the total.

The Treasury “continues to make the right call on China’s currency policy,” Erin Ennis, vice president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said in a statement yesterday. The council thinks the Obama administration “approach of employing multilateral and bilateral engagement with China is the most useful way to make progress on the exchange-rate issue.”

Stronger Yuan

The council’s members as of April 21 included Apple Inc. (AAPL); Chevron Corp. (CVX); Citigroup Inc. (C); JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM); and Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, according to the group’s website.

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The first thing Silvia Huelves was told when she started studying architecture was that she should take up Chinese or Japanese _ she was not going to build anything in Spain any time soon.

It wasn’t criticism of her skills but a reflection on the state of the country, where the jobless rate among 16-24-year-olds is a staggering 45 percent and a construction sector slump caused nearly two years of recession.

Now the young people are protesting, roughing it out in improvised camps in the hearts of Spain’s main cities to bring attention to their plight. While they’re angry about lots of things, bleak job prospects and having to live with Mom and Dad well into adulthood are high on the list.

Huelves, a 19-year-old with a big smile, said her professors make no secret of the dire state of things.

“You go in and the first thing they say is ‘forget about it, you are never going to build buildings,’” she said. “They say architecture is really cool and well-rounded and useful for a lot of things, but you are not going to build buildings.”

Construction is no doubt the hardest hit sector in Spain’s battered economy as it tries to recover from a burst real estate bubble. But in almost any line of work Spain’s young people face a dark outlook. The jobless rate in the under-25 age bracket makes the national unemployment rate of 21.3 percent seem mild by comparison. Widen the bracket to the age of 29 and the rate is still a stunning 35 percent.

To voice their discontent, young people have been coordinating over the past two weeks via social media like Twitter and Facebook to set up huge camps in city centers. The camp in Madrid features makeshift clinics and libraries with grungy sofas as well as stands with donated apples and bananas, juice and baguette sandwiches.

“More than anything, this is about being fed up. We are absolutely fed up,” said Maria Martinez, 32, sitting in a lounge chair under blue sheeting protecting the Madrid camp from a blazing midday sun.

Martinez considers herself relatively lucky because she has been jobless for only about two months and has worked since age 17, mainly in factories and offices. But it was always for low wages, sometimes with no benefits and always getting part of her pay under the table.

Martinez rattled off other gripes _ conservative politicians who watched Spain’s real estate market heat up and took credit as GDP rose nicely, banks that helped and profited by providing streams of easy credit, and the current Socialist government that presided over the bubble’s loud pop in 2008, with its disastrous impact on the country.

“I am the first one to acknowledge we have reacted late and we have been asleep for a long time,” Martinez said.

Another jobless protester, Pablo Luna, 27, has a degree in history, just finished a Masters in journalism and says he has zero prospects for work. He said it is virtually unheard of for people to complete their studies and go right into work in their field.

“Of the people I know, no one has done it,” said Luna, an articulate man with a thick, dark, wild pony tail and the rich voice of a radio announcer. “I should be out looking for a job. But my heart tells me I should be here now.”

Much of the problem lies with rigid rules governing Spain’s labor market, in particular the high cost of laying off established, older and less productive workers under legislation that goes back 30 years, said Gayle Allard, a labor market expert at IE Business School in Madrid.

With employers wary of giving new hires open-ended contracts with full benefits, younger workers often end up with temporary ones, sometimes lasting just a few months. In the good days, companies would roll those contracts over, but since recession hit many have just let them run out.

This makes the Spanish jobless rate highly vulnerable to swings in the economy, as nearly a third of all workers have temporary contracts. The jobless rate has more than doubled in about three years, with young people who often earn just euro1,000 ($1,400) a month taking a particularly hard hit.

In the 27 countries of the European Union, as of March of this year the jobless rate for under-25’s averaged about 21 percent, less than half of Spain’s, according to the statistical agency Eurostat. Even the rate in bailed-out Greece is lower, at 36 percent.

Last year the Spanish government passed labor market reforms designed to make it cheaper and easier for businesses to lay off workers and more expensive to use temporary contracts. The idea was to encourage hiring and make employment more stable.

But Allard says the changes are timid and that today’s young Spaniards _ even with foreign language and computer skills _ are still effectively shut out of the labor market.

The effects go beyond protests and rallies to shape the structure of the country’s society.

Spain has one of Europe’s lowest birth rates _ 1.4 children per woman of childbearing age _ in part because it takes so long for young people to get out of their parents’ house, establish a career and start families.

Until that happens, life for many young Spaniards is a sort of limbo.

“They cannot become productive. They cannot use their skills. They cannot save. They cannot invest in housing. They are not accumulating wealth that they can leave off in the future,” said Allard, an American who has lived in Spain for 25 years.

“These kids are paying our pensions and they are not going to have been able to save anything. It is really scary,” Allard said.

Arcadi Oliveres, an applied economist at Autonomous University in Barcelona, said that compared with other European countries Spain offers comparatively little vocational training as an early alternative to going to jam-packed universities.

The result is that Spain churns out legions of university-trained scientists _ who end up unemployed and eventually work in vocational jobs anyway, Oliveres said.

“Unlike a structure that is pyramid-shaped in other countries, here there is a real inflation of university graduates,” Oliveres said. “As a labor market model it is a bit anomalous.”

At the medical school in Madrid Complutense University, 21-year-old Maria Perez is two weeks away from graduating with a degree in podology and she is far from thrilled. Of her immediate circle of 20 friends and close acquaintances, she says three have jobs.

“There is not a lot of reason to celebrate because you know you are going to keep living with your parents and end up working in a grocery store,” she said.

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Facing continued public unhappiness over gas prices, President Barack Obama is directing his administration to ramp up U.S. oil production by extending existing leases in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska’s coast and holding more frequent lease sales in a federal petroleum reserve in Alaska.

Obama said Saturday that the measures “make good sense” and will help reduce U.S. consumption of imported oil in the long term. But he acknowledged anew that they won’t help to immediately bring down gasoline prices topping $4 a gallon in many parts of the country.

His announcement followed passage in the Republican-controlled House of three bills _ including two this week _ that would expand and speed up offshore oil and gas drilling. Republicans say the bills are aimed at easing gasoline costs, but they also acknowledge that won’t be immediate.

The White House had announced its opposition to all three bills, which are unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, saying the measures would undercut safety reviews and open environmentally sensitive areas to new drilling.

But Obama is adopting some of the bills’ provisions.

Answering the call of Republicans and Democrats from Gulf Coast states, Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address that he would extend all Gulf leases that were affected by a temporary moratorium on drilling imposed after last year’s BP oil spill. That would give companies additional time to begin drilling.

The administration had been granting extensions case by case, but senior administration officials said the Interior Department would institute a blanket one-year extension.

New safety requirements put in place since the BP spill also have delayed drilling in Alaska, so Obama said he would extend lease terms there for a year as well. An oil lease typically runs 10 years.

Lease sales in the western and central Gulf of Mexico that were postponed last year will be held by the middle of next year, the same time period required by the House. A sale off the Virginia coast still would not happen until 2017 at the earliest online cash advance. But Obama said he would speed up environmental reviews so that seismic studies to determine how much oil and gas lies off the Atlantic Coast can begin.

To further expedite drilling off the Alaskan coast, where such plans by Shell Oil Co. have been delayed by an air pollution permit, Obama said he would create an interagency task force to coordinate the necessary approvals. He also will hold annual lease sales in the vast National Petroleum Reserve on Alaska’s North Slope. Officials said the most recent sale was last year, but that they had not been held on any set schedule.

Republicans dismayed by the lack of progress in Shell’s drilling have drafted legislation to exempt drilling off Alaska from air pollution laws.

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings of Washington, sponsor of the legislation, said it was “ironic” that Obama “is now taking baby steps in our direction” after the White House and congressional Democrats criticized the bills.

“The president is finally admitting what Republicans have known all along, that increasing the supply of American energy will help lower prices and create jobs,” Hastings said.

Obama also called on Democrats and Republicans to vote to eliminate billions in taxpayer subsidies to oil and gas companies.

In the weekly Republican message, Alabama Rep. Martha Roby said it’s time for Washington to get serious about the challenges facing the country, including straightening out its finances and tackling the gas price issue. She praised the House for passing measures to expand domestic energy production “because when we’re talking about energy, we’re talking about jobs.”

“The greatest threat to our economy, job creation, and the future of our children is to do nothing,” Roby said. “We have to act. It is what we were sent to Washington to do.”

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