NATIONAL BRIEFING
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ENERGY
Drilling Ban Called Unlikely
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said that he did not expect the new Congress to reimpose a blanket moratorium on offshore drilling along the Atlantic, Pacific and Florida coasts, but he said that he did expect an attempt to delineate areas where drilling would be allowed.
"I do not believe at this point in time that there are any proposals being made to reinstate the moratoria across the board," he said in a speech at the National Press Club.
The American Petroleum Institute called Hoyer's comment "the right approach. . . . Neither Congress nor the next administration should set unreasonable, arbitrary limits on leasing."
LEGAL
Google Book Settlement Approved
Google won preliminary court approval for a settlement of copyright lawsuits brought by publishers and authors, a deal that it said will enable it to make millions of books searchable and printable online.
U.S. District Judge John Sprizzo in New York tentatively approved the agreement and scheduled a hearing for June 11, when he will further consider its fairness. Under the settlement, announced Oct. 28, Google would pay $125 million to resolve claims over its book-scanning project.
The owner of the most popular Internet search engine said the agreement will expand its Google Book Search program to let online readers search for and buy copyrighted and out-of-print books in whole or page by page.
Google will also provide U.S. libraries with free access to the database.
Oppenheimer Accused of Fraud
Massachusetts' top securities regulator accused Oppenheimer & Co. of fraud over the investment bank's sales of auction-rate securities to customers who couldn't access their money after the market for the risky investments froze.
Secretary of State William Galvin's administrative complaint also alleges Oppenheimer executives and managers sold nearly $3 million of their own personal auction-rate securities holdings within two weeks before the market's collapse last February, without warning clients of growing risks amid a downturn in broader credit markets.
Oppenheimer & Co., a New York-based subsidiary of Oppenheimer Holdings, denied Galvin's allegations in a statement saying the company "intends to vigorously defend itself."
