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The Exxon Mobil Corporation and Kenneth Salazar, the interior secretary, agreed to settle a lawsuit in which Exxon, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, challenged the government's decision to cancel offshore leases that may yield ''billions of barrels of oil,'' according to a court filing. The accord ''will allow Exxon Mobil to develop this very large, but technically challenging, resource as quickly as possible using a phased approach,'' Patrick McGinn, a spokesman for Exxon, said in an e-mail. Exxon sued on Aug. 12 over a ruling by the department that canceled Gulf of Mexico leases for the so-called Julia unit. The company and the government entered into a settlement agreement on Dec. 30, according to a filing Friday in United States District Court in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Exxon said in its complaint that it sought a suspension for its Julia leases in 2008 because of drilling complexity. It cited federal regulations that allow oil oil producers to suspend production in their fields, partly ''to facilitate proper development of a lease.'' The Interior Department denied the request in 2009, stating that the company''had not demonstrated a commitment to production'' according to court papers. Unsuccessful appeals followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AS we all move forward with our New Year's resolutions, it's a good time to remember the promises our politicians have been making about the American mortgage market. The Obama administration, at a conference last August on the future of housing finance, pledged to have, come January, a plan for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants that are now wards of the government. Congressional Republicans, in their recent position paper, made an even bolder resolution: to build a mortgage market that ''does not rely on government guarantees'' and ''does not make private investors and creditors wealthy while saddling taxpayers with losses.'' This latter promise is pleasing populist rhetoric. The problem is, it may be neither politically nor practically feasible. Even if we forget about the gigantic near-term problem -- namely, that the federal government is in the housing market mainly because most banks simply won't issue mortgages that can't be guaranteed by Fannie, Freddie or the Federal Housing Administration -- there's the fact that federal involvement in housing has been a constant since the 1930s. A market without government support would almost certainly involve the demise (for most of middle-class America) of that populist favorite, the low-cost 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The federal government has quietly increased its support of the student loan market to such a degree that the real question may be whether there is a role left for private lenders at all. The Education Department agreed in the waning days of the Bush administration to expand its commitment to buy student loans to keep the market working, much as the government has agreed to buy up all manner of loans, from mortgages to commercial paper, to unfreeze various credit markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

They were still wearing Stetsons and spurs, not the tight cycling shorts you see these days, when a writer dispatched by the federal government during the Great Depression reached the end of the road here in the North Cascades. Winthrop -- population 365, altitude 1,765 feet, the town at the ''end of hard surfacing'' -- was soon committed to paper, as were thousands of other rural outposts and urban areas across the country in the 1930s and '40s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]