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The Obama administration tightened rules on hydraulic fracturing Friday, requiring the disclosure of chemicals used in the process when done on federal and American Indian lands.

The new rules will also require additional testing of oil and gas well construction and require the industry to have a management plan for the water used in the process.

"This proposed rule will strengthen the requirements for hydraulic fracturing performed on federal and Indian lands in order to build public confidence and protect the health of American communities, while ensuring continued access to the important resources that make up our energy economy," the Interior Department said in a statement.

The move is part of a broader administration effort to increase rules for the controversial practice. Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency tightened air pollution requirements for new oil and gas wells.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it is known, has unleashed a boom in energy production in the United States by allowing the production of oil and gas from shale rock. It has reduced the country’s oil imports, boosted natural gas production and provided thousands of jobs.

Most major oil companies are now involved in shale oil and gas production, including Exxon Mobil (, Fortune 500), Royal Dutch Shell (, Fortune 500) and BP ().

But the process has also raised fears of ground water contamination and is suspected of causing mild earthquakes.

Fracking involves injecting water, sand and some chemicals deep into the earth to crack shale rock, which allows oil and gas to more easily flow. Critics fear the chemicals are seeping into the groundwater.

Obama tightens oil and gas drilling regulations

About 20% of the nation’s natural gas production and 30% of its oil production is done on federal lands.

The oil and gas industry has long resisted disclosing what chemicals it uses in the fracking process, arguing they were trade secrets and that disclosure would harm their competitive advantage.

But environmentalists and public health officials lobbied for the disclosure, saying it was needed to monitor for pollution and effectively treat workers involved in accidents.

The ingredients used in fracking vary widely, and can include everything from sulfuric acid and benzene to instant coffee and paraffin wax.

While the industry initially resisted disclosing the formula, it has gradually been moving in that direction under intense public pressure. Many states now require disclosure, and many companies list at least some of the ingredients on a website called FracFocus.

Environmentalists were pleased with Friday’s announcement but said even more should be done.

They said the new rules only require chemical disclosure after the fracturing has been done. What’s needed, they say, is disclosure before the job so residents can do baseline testing of their water.

"We think the administration can and should have done more here to protect human health and the environment," said Amy Mall, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The government "should not propose rules that are weaker than what any state has on the books."

Most fracking regulations are controlled by the states, but environmentalists have argued that the federal government should play a greater role.

The industry maintains the state rules are sufficient, and having the federal government involved adds an unnecessary layer of regulation that is both costly and time consuming.

In reacting to the new rules Friday, the industry didn’t seem too concerned with the proposal itself, but was leery of a bigger federal presence.

"The states have proven time and again that they are the best place for responsible regulation of drilling operations," The American Petroleum Institute’s Erik Milito said in a statement. "While it appears constructive changes have been made, we are still reviewing the new proposal to see how the agency addressed the various concerns that we’ve raised."

The trend in fracking regulation has been moving toward an increased federal role. Many analysts say the increased regulation is both necessary to convince the public the process is safe and affordable for the industry.

The Obama administration is generally supportive of fracking, but with increased oversight.

There still exists two extremes in this fight, with some in the industry opposing any new rules and some critics arguing the process should be banned altogether.

–CNN’s Poppy Harlow contributed to this report 

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Warren Buffett says his eventual successor as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway will maintain the company’s culture and keep key managers of its subsidiaries happy.

Buffett says the successor Berkshire’s board has in mind won’t do anything to turn off the managers of the 80-odd companies Berkshire owns.

Many of the managers of Berkshire companies are independently wealthy themselves. They work only because they enjoy it, and Buffett largely lets them operate their companies independently instant credit report.

Buffett says that his successor will be better than he is in many ways.

Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger says that there is so much momentum within the company that it would be hard for Buffett’s successor to change the company.

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A moderate Islamist campaigning to be Egypt’s next president has won the support of some unlikely allies _ the country’s most conservative religious groups, including former militant jihadists.

Their backing reflects the growing mistrust by many Islamists of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, the would-be flagbearer for the religious vote. And it has made Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh a front-runner with an unusual coalition that includes secular liberals and even some Christians along with hard-line Islamists.

“He (Abolfotoh) will be a president for all Egyptians,” Wael Ghonim, an icon of the youthful revolutionaries behind the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year, wrote on his Twitter account Monday.

“He will bring us together, not divide us.”

Before he was thrown out last year, Abolfotoh was a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood _ now Egypt’s most powerful political force. He earned the reputation as a moderate reformer within the Islamic fundamentalist group.

But the bearded, 60-year-old former dissident eventually fell out with the group after publicly slamming it for not being transparent about its financing and irking his fellow Brothers by saying he would rather have a good Christian than a bad Muslim as president _ contradicting the movement’s line that majority Muslim Egypt should not be ruled by a Christian.

Now he is one of the few candidates with crossover appeal for both religious conservatives and liberals.

The endorsements and other key developments over recent days dramatically shifted the fortunes of Abolfotoh from a promising underdog to a real contender. The biggest change came when the election commission disqualified three strong candidates _ Hosni Mubarak’s former spy chief and vice president, Omar Suleiman, the Brotherhood’s first choice candidate Khairat el-Shater and ultraconservative lawyer-turned-preacher Hazem Salah Abu Ismail.

Abolfotoh’s newfound support comes from the ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis. They adhere to an interpretation of Islam partly inspired by Saudi Arabia’s puritanical Wahhabi doctrine and want to see Islamic law strictly applied in Egypt.

Their backing eats into the chances of Mohammed Morsi, the second choice candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which won just under half of all seats in parliamentary elections around the start of this year. Abolfotoh’s growing strength also provides Amr Moussa, Mubarak’s longtime foreign minister and a front-runner himself, with a formidable competitor for the land’s highest office.

“Our top priority was: Who has the biggest chance to win? And we found that Abolfotoh has that chance,” said Sheik Abdel-Akhar Hamad, a top leader of the Gamaa Islamiya, the jihadist group that endorsed Abolfotoh on Monday.

The group was partially motivated by its fear of the Brotherhood’s “desire to monopolize power,” Hamad said.

In many ways, the May 23-24 presidential election will answer the persistent question of whether the popular uprising that toppled Mubarak has actually transformed Egypt from autocratic rule to a functioning democracy or whether it just removed the head, Mubarak, but left the regime intact, as many of the liberal youth groups claim.

That someone like Abolfotoh has a realistic shot at being president also speaks to the stunningly swift empowerment of Islamists in post-Mubarak Egypt and their emergence as a the nation’s most powerful group after years of persecution. The candidate was imprisoned multiple times under the Mubarak regime, once for five years Payday Loan for Bad Credit.

Abolfotoh, according to an opinion poll conducted by the state-funded Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, has the support of 27 percent of voters, well behind Moussa who has 41 percent. The poll surveyed 1,200 participants in most of Egypt’s 28 provinces and has a 3 percent margin of error. It was conducted in mid-April.

The poll indicates Abolfotoh is likely to face Moussa in a June 16-17 runoff. The winner will be announced June 21, the last stop in a bumpy transitional process led by the generals who took over from Mubarak last year and promised to step down by July 1.

Official campaigning kicked off Monday.

Abolfotoh has been cagey about the state of his relations with the Brotherhood, leaving the exact nature of current ties to the group ambiguous.

That may be motivated in part by his hopes of wooing the votes of young Brotherhood members who are at odds with the group’s leaders over policy, particularly the reversal of initial insistence that they would not field a presidential candidate.

However, his views on core Islamic issues set him apart from the fundamentalist Brotherhood on questions such as the role of women and Christians in mainly Muslim Egypt and whether there is a need to implement Islamic Shariah laws, such as forcing women to respect a strict Islamic dress code in public.

“The greatest thing in Shariah is freedom and justice,” Abolfotoh told a television interviewer recently. “Some people think that you can force people to pray or punish them for not praying. Forcing people against their individual rights create a hypocrite person. When women wear hijab (Islamic headscarf) because they fear punishment, this is religious hypocrisy.”

Such moderate views raise the question of what Abolfotoh offered in return for the endorsements he received.

For example, the Gamaa Islamiya took part in the planning and execution of President Anwar Sadat’s 1981 assassination and fought a low intensity insurgency against Mubarak’s regime for the rest of the 1980s and most of the 1990s to create a purist Islamic state.

The Gamaa’s nod to Abolfotoh followed a more important endorsement over the weekend from a group that is just as radical _ the ultraconservative Dawa Salafiya and its political arm Al-Nour party, which leads a bloc that controls nearly 20 percent of parliament’s seats. Al-Nour, like the Gamaa, advocates the implementation of a strict interpretation of Shariah laws that many view as unfair to women, minority Christians and secularists.

“We felt that it is too much for the Muslim Brotherhood to have it all: parliament with its two chambers, the presidency and the Cabinet,” senior Gamaa official Assem Abdel-Maged said. “This is harmful to the whole Islamist movement.”

Yasser Bourhami, an influential ultraconservative cleric from the Dawa Salafia, said Abolfotoh pledged to the group that, if elected, he would allow the Islamist bloc in parliament, the chamber’s largest, form the government and allow the Salafis a free rein to preach in mosques and religious schools.

“He (Abolfotoh) is the most accepted by the people. He is the most balanced,” he said in videotaped comments posted on social networks. “This is what we think is the best for this phase.”

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The housing market continued to struggle in March, despite low home prices and record low interest rates, an industry report revealed Thursday.

Sales of existing homes fell 2.6% compared with a month earlier, to an annualized rate of 4.48 million homes, the National Association of Realtors said.

Gus Faucher, a senior economist at PNC Financial, called the report disappointing.

"We were expecting an increase," he said. "We need a turnaround to help the economy recover."

The Realtors’ group’s chief economist, Lawrence Yun, opted to look on the bright side of the report — sales were up 5.2% year-over-year.

It’s safe to sell your home again

"We have seen nine consecutive months of year-over-year sales increases," he said. "Existing-home sales are moving up and down in a fairly narrow range that is well above the level of activity during the first half of last year."

The choppy market stands in contrast to the continuing gains made in affordability.

Factoring in price declines that have averaged about 34% nationally, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, and record low mortgage rates, homebuying is more affordable than ever.

"For buyers who can qualify for a mortgage, now is a very good time to become a homeowner," said Realtors’ president Moe Veissi.

According to Yun, better economic conditions will push sales higher as the year goes on.

"With job growth, low interest rates, bargain home prices and an improving economy, the pent-up demand is coming to market and we expect housing to be notably better this year," he said.

As the year goes on, buyers may find fewer properties to choose from.

The number of homes for sale dropped 1.3% in March to 2.37 million existing homes. That’s a 6.3-month supply at the current sales pace. Inventory declined 21.8% compared with March 2011 and is well below the record of 4.04 million in July 2007.

Ironically, the tighter supply may have cut into sales, with house hunters in some areas of the nation having trouble finding homes to suit their needs or tastes.

"We’re already seeing this in the Western states and in South Florida," said Yun.

If the tightness in inventory spreads, it could signal a rebirth for home builders, who would have to step up development to fill the gap. And putting construction workers back on the job would be a shot in the arm for the overall economy as well as the housing market.

"Conditions are in place for a turnaround," said Faucher. "We’re just waiting for more confidence among buyers. We expect that to happen over the next few months." 

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The outlook among U.S. homebuilders dimmed in April after six months of rising or steady confidence. The decline suggests the housing market remains weak despite modest gains.

The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo said Monday that its builder sentiment index fell this month to 25 from 28. Last month’s reading was the highest since June 2007. The index rose for five straight months between September and February.

Builders expressed weaker confidence in sales over the next six months. A separate gauge measuring that outlook rose for six straight months before falling this month, from 35 to 32.

The housing industry has a long way to go in its slow recovery. Any reading below 50 indicates negative sentiment about the housing market. The index hasn’t reached hit that level since April 2006, the peak of the housing boom.

“What we’re seeing is essentially a pause in what had been a fairly rapid build-up in builder confidence that started last September,” said David Crowe, chief economist with the homebuilders’ group. “This is partly because interest expressed by buyers in the past few months has yet to translate into expected sales activity.”

The spring buying season got an early start thanks to a mild January and February, which made up the best winter for sales of previously occupied homes in five years. Permits to build houses and apartments rose in February to their highest level since 2008.

Yet home prices continued to fall this winter. Builders keep slashing their prices to stay competitive. Last year was the worst for new-home sales on records dating back to 1963.

Builders are struggling to compete with foreclosures, which have forced down prices of previously occupied homes. And many people are finding it hard to qualify for loans or meet higher required down payments.

Low appraisals are scuttling some deals after contracts have been signed. As a result, some people who want to buy a new house are holding off because they can’t sell their home.

Those in a position to buy are benefiting from lower prices and the cheapest mortgage rates on record. The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage is hovering near record lows below 4 percent.

Builders have pointed to some regional pockets of strength. New Orleans, Pittsburgh and other smaller areas of Texas, in particular, have reported increased buying.

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In a year when political stalemate is expected to block any real progress on fiscal reforms, House Republicans will take a swing at tax reform in their fiscal year 2013 budget proposal due out on Tuesday morning.

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and his caucus will call for a reduction in individual tax rates and brackets. Instead of today’s six brackets, with rates from 10% to 35%, they are calling for just two — 10% and 25%. It’s not clear how much income would fall under each bracket. (Washington’s $5 trillion interest bill)

The Republican proposal, worked out with House Ways & Means head Dave Camp, would also eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax altogether.

Although originally intended to ensure that the very wealthy pay taxes, the AMT was never structured to keep pace with inflation.

So on paper the AMT is scheduled to bring in trillions of dollars in revenue over the coming years because it would capture more and more taxpayers who are not wealthy. But every year Congress passes costly "patches" to protect the middle class from having to pay the AMT, and adds the cost of those patches to the deficit.

Quiz: What the rich really pay in taxes

It was not immediately clear whether the House GOP plans to replace that forecasted revenue, but it seems unlikely since it is proposing to keep revenues as a share of the economy on par with the 40-year average of 18.1% of the economy’s GDP.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, revenues as a share of GDP have hit 60-year lows, coming in at around 15%. And going forward, independent budget experts have said the country may need to bring in more revenue than the historical average to meet entitlement benefit promises and adequately fund programs without slashing too deeply in any one area of the budget.

On the corporate tax side, the House GOP would lower the top tax rate to 25% from 35% and switch the United States to territorial system of taxation, meaning that U.S. multinational companies would only owe tax on foreign-made profits to the government of the country in which the profits were made.

Ryan’s new manifesto on health care

Currently, a U.S. company owes U.S. taxes on foreign profits once the money is brought home, and they can subtract from their Washington tax bill taxes they have already paid to the country where the profits were made. Some estimate that U.S. companies may be parking as much as $1 trillion abroad.

The House GOP proposal on corporate taxes differs from President Obama’s. He would lower the corporate tax rate to 28% and impose a minimum tax on foreign-made profits the year they were made to discourage companies from parking money abroad.

And as they have at every turn, House Republicans will reject outright most of Obama’s tax proposals for individuals, particularly those on the wealthy, including his proposed Buffett Rule to ensure millionaires pay at least 30% of their income in federal tax.

The emphasis on tax reform in advance of the formal release of the House Republican budget may indicate the GOP’s desire to turn the conversation away from their anticipated and polarizing proposals to reform Medicare and to cap discretionary spending at levels lower than the top cap agreed to by both parties last summer.

Democrats have expressed opposition to both prospects.

House Republicans are expected to propose a spending level that is about $20 billion less than that specified by the Budget Control Act, the deal that ended the bitter fight over the debt ceiling in August. If that’s the case, that could set off a battle with the Democratic-controlled Senate on federal spending just weeks before the November election.

Meanwhile, the most conservative factions in the House have been pushing for the GOP to propose spending levels lower than those likely to be proposed on Tuesday. 

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At the start of each workday, Sanjiv Das reads the comments from CitiMortgage customers to employees who are trying to answer a question or fix a problem through one of the company’s websites.

A website CitiMortgage launched in December allows customers facing foreclosure or having difficulty making mortgage payments to post questions or comments to the company’s support team.

“There’s instantaneous feedback on what’s working and not working,” Das, CitiMortgage’s president and CEO, said in an interview. “Sometimes it’s painful.”

Painful certainly describes the condition of U.S. residential housing market and mortgage industry since Das was named to lead CitiMortgage in July 2008.

Based in O’Fallon, Mo., CitiMortgage is the mortgage lending subsidiary of Citigroup Inc., parent of the nation’s third-largest bank.

The subsidiary also has been buffeted by accusations of wrongdoing and increased regulatory oversight.

Despite the troubles, Das says CitiMortgage remains an important piece of Citigroup.

“Now it’s all about execution,” he said about moving CitiMortgage forward. “The team is in place. The structures are in place, and the strategy is in place.”

And righting the ship has meant more local jobs.

Das came from Morgan Stanley, where he was a managing director of its Institutional Securities Group. Das previously worked for Citi for eight years in the 1990s, overseeing product development and marketing, among other duties.

He returned to Citi to lead its mortgage business on the eve of the financial collapse of 2008.

“We knew we were in the eye of the storm,” Das said. “We didn’t know how big the storm would be.”

As the economy soured, Citigroup, its parent company, lost a combined $40 billion in 2008 and 2009. The credit crisis prompted Citigroup to accept $45 billion through the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, which it has since repaid.

The housing market has yet to recover, and Citigroup executives expect mortgage delinquencies to rise slightly this year.

While CitiMortgage’s parent reported a $11.3 billion profit last year, challenges remain.

On Tuesday, Citigroup received disappointing news in the Federal Reserve’s annual stress test results for 19 major U.S. banks.

The Fed wouldn’t allow Citigroup to increase payouts to investors. It said this would cause the bank to fail the test, which evaluated whether the financial institution has enough capital to withstand another crisis.

Other clouds facing the company include allegations of misdeeds related to its mortgage business and foreclosure practices dating back several years.

Last month, Citigroup agreed to pay $158 million to settle a civil fraud lawsuit against CitiMortgage for what the U.S. attorney’s office in New York called “reckless” mortgage practices over several years.

The U.S. attorney’s office alleged CitiMortgage pressured its quality control staff to reduce or downgrade findings of defects in government-backed loans, which led to losses. As part of the settlement, CitiMortgage admitted that it failed to comply fully with government requirements on FHA loans.

Also last month, CitiMortgage was one of five of the country’s largest mortgage servicers that agreed to a $25 billion settlement related to allegations of deceptive foreclosure practices lodged by the federal government and the attorneys general of 49 states.

The other banks included in the settlement are Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and Ally Financial Inc.

The mortgage servicers, including CitiMortgage, “were engaged in widespread questionable foreclosure practices involving the use of foreclosure ‘mills’ and a practice known as ‘robosigning’ of sworn documents in thousands of foreclosures throughout the United States,” according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

While declining to comment on specific allegations, Das said CitiMortgage is working hard to comply with the new regulations it must follow stemming from the consent orders it signed with the government.

“Regulatory pressures have been top-of-mind,” he said. “It’s caused us to build out (our operations) to make sure foreclosure and loss mitigation is now very, very robust in terms of dealing with operational controls.”

What that means for O’Fallon’s headquarters and a CitiMortgage office in Dallas is new employees added over the last year to handle the extra oversight, Das said.

As mortgages and refinancings dropped in early 2011, CitiMortgage laid off 400 employees in four states, including dozens locally, to pare costs. Now, with the added staff to meet the new regulatory requirements, CitiMortgage’s workforce is 3,800 employees locally, which includes some contract employees, and 2,800 employees in Dallas.

The O’Fallon facility focuses on the front end of the mortgage business, including processing mortgage refinancings. Refinancings make up the majority of its current business.

Das’ office is in New York, but he said CitiMortgage’s headquarters remains firmly planted in the St. Louis region.

“It’s anchored in O’Fallon,” Das said. “We have a great tradition of being in Missouri. We have employees with long tenures here.”

A CitiMortgage initiative launched last summer included creating a support team of several hundred CitiMortgage employees — split between here and Dallas — that provides a single point of contact for customers.

If a homeowner has a question about a mortgage refinancing, each time they call Citi, the same representative who took their call in the past answers the phone, said Mark Danahy, CitiMortgage’s managing director based in O’Fallon.

Danahy was hired last July from PHH Mortgage, one of the largest U.S. originators of residential mortgages, as part of Das’ reorganization of top senior management at CitiMortgage.

“We have significantly transformed our connectivity with customers,” Das said. “Customers can literally speak to us online. On blogs, we’re answering customers’ questions.”

Das is now looking ahead at what’s next for CitiMortgage. He said he sees growth opportunities internationally where Citi’s credit card and other bank customers are already located. CitiMortgage’s international business has grown to equal its business in North America.

“With the rapid economic growth in Asia and Latin America … we can offer a full package of consumer services from credit cards to home loans,” he said. “The team is in place, the structures are in place, and the strategy is in place.”

Tom Lewandowski, a financial services equity analyst at Edward Jones, which has a “buy” stock rating on Citigroup, said Citi’s global reach should provide opportunities for CitiMortgage to grow outside of the U.S.

“If you look at Citi and its peers, you won’t find a more global business,” Lewandowski said. “I think growing in emerging markets is a good strategy in the long term.”

But some analysts aren’t convinced CitiMortgage has yet turned the corner.

“The settlement does not protect the banks from other enforcement actions, including securitization-related litigation or claims by borrowers,” Morningstar analyst Jim Sinegal wrote in a research note last month about the $25 billion settlement. “We do not expect these risks to subside anytime soon, creating headline risk for all of the major banks, and potentially significant financial risk for the most vulnerable institutions.”

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Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda reiterated yesterday the need to trim the scale of government to win public support for doubling the nation

Germany was left to dig deeper to combat the euro-area debt crisis after the Group of 20 nations told Europe to come up with more financial firepower before they consider lending outside support.

The decision by G-20 officials to rebuff European calls for assistance in their crisis-fighting effort pending an increase in its own financial backstop puts the onus on Germany, already the biggest national contributor to bailouts, to overcome its resistance to doing more.

With a parliamentary vote on a second Greek aid package looming in Berlin today, Chancellor Angela Merkel