By now, cars were supposed to be running on fuel made from plant waste or algae or powered by hydrogen or cheap batteries that burned nothing at all. Electricity would be generated with solar panels and wind turbines. When the sun didn't shine or the wind didn't blow, power would flow out of batteries the size of tractor-trailers.

Fossil fuels? They were going to be expensive and scarce, relics of an earlier, dirtier age.

But in the race to conquer energy technology, Old Energy is winning.

Oil companies big and small have used technology to find a bounty of oil and natural gas so large that worries about running out have melted away. New imaging technologies let drillers find oil and gas trapped miles underground and undersea. Oil rigs "walk" from one drill site to the next. And engineers in Houston use remote-controlled equipment to drill for gas in Pennsylvania.

The result is an abundance that has put the United States on track to become the world's largest producer of oil and gas in a few years. Just Thursday, the U.S. reported that oil imports have fallen to a 17-year low.

The gushers aren't limited to Texas, North Dakota and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Overseas, enormous reserves have been found in East and West Africa, Australia, South America and the Mediterranean.

"Suddenly, out of nowhere, the world seems to be awash in hydrocarbons," says Michael Greenstone, an environmental economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The consequences are enormous. A looming energy crisis has turned into a boom. These additional fossil fuels are intensifying the threat to the earth's climate. And for renewable energy sources, the sunny forecast of last decade has turned overcast.

This is the story of how technological advances drove a revolution no one in the energy industry expected. One that is just beginning.

___

EXPLORING ENERGY FRONTIERS

The new century brought deep concerns the world's oil reserves were increasingly concentrated in the Middle East and beginning to run out. Energy prices rose to record highs. Climate scientists showed that reliance on fossil fuels was causing troubling changes to the environment.

"The general belief was that the end of the oil era was at hand," says Daniel Yergin, an energy historian and author of "The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World."

As a result, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and governments were pouring money into new companies developing alternative forms of energy that promised to supply the world's needs without polluting.

Even oil and gas companies got in the game. BP had adopted the slogan "beyond petroleum" in 2000 and threw millions into its solar division. Shell partnered with another company to fire up a plant to convert agricultural waste into ethanol.

So strong was the lure of alternative energy that veterans of the oil patch began fleeing for startups.

In 23 years at Shell, David Aldous helped develop projections that showed a booming world population and rising energy demand. He also saw how hard it was for big oil companies to find enough oil every year to replace all they sold. He left Shell to join Range Fuels, a company that promised to turn wood chips into ethanol, in 2008.

"I felt we needed faster innovation," he says.

___

THE RACE FOR NEW TECHNOLOGY

But while the national focus was on alternatives, the oil and gas industry was innovating too. New technology allowed drillers to do two crucial things: find more places where oil and gas is hidden and bring it to the surface economically.

Large oil companies such as Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP turned up huge discoveries offshore in ultra-deep water with the help of better sensors and faster computers that allowed them to see once-hidden oil deposits.

Onshore, small drillers learned how to pull oil and gas out of previously inaccessible underground rock formations.

For most of the oil age, drillers have looked for large underground pools of oil and gas that were easy to tap. These pools had grown over millions of years as oil and gas oozed out of what is known as source rock. Source rock is a wide, thin layer of sedimentary rock like frosting in the middle of a layer cake that is interspersed with oil and gas.

An engineer named George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy, spent years searching for a way to free natural gas from this source rock. He finally succeeded when he figured how to drill horizontally, into and then along a layer of source rock. That allowed him to access the gas throughout a layer of source rock with a single well. Then he used a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" to create tiny cracks in the rock that would allow natural gas to flow into and up the well.

The United States, which was facing a gas shortage five years ago, now has such enormous supplies it is looking to export the fuel in large volumes for the first time.

The common wisdom in the industry was that the process Mitchell had invented for natural gas wouldn't work for oil. Oil molecules are bigger and stickier than gas molecules, so petroleum engineers believed it would be impossible to get them to flow from source rock, even if the rock were cracked by fracking. But Mark Papa, the CEO of a small oil and gas company called EOG Resources, didn't accept that.

"The numbers were too intriguing, the prize was so big," he remembered.

He thought there could be as much as a billion barrels of oil within reach in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere if only he could squeeze it out.

In 2003, he had a "eureka!" moment while poring over pictures of rock. Sections of a 40-foot-long column of source rock had been run through a CT scanner, the same type used to peer into the human body.

He saw something in the source rock sections the rest of the industry didn't know was there: a network of passageways big enough for oil molecules to pass through. Papa believed the passageways could act like rural roads for the oil to travel through. Fracking could then create superhighways for the oil to gather and feed into a pipe and up to the surface.

EOG began drilling test wells, and in 2005, Papa got some results from one in North Dakota that made him realize oil could flow fast enough to pay off.

"It was kind of like holy cow," he says. "My first thought was we need to replicate this, make sure it's not a freak result."

It wasn't. EOG snapped up land in a similar formation in South Texas known as the Eagle Ford Shale for $400 an acre when his competition thought it would never produce much oil. That land now goes for $30,000 per acre.

Papa thought the Eagle Ford might hold 500,000 barrels of oil. The Department of Energy now predicts it holds 3.4 billion. Some even expect 10 billion, which would make it the biggest oil field in U.S. history.

___

SMART DRILLS, RIGS THAT CAN WALK

But even after drillers figured out how to find oil and gas deep offshore and in onshore source rock, they still needed to develop technology that would make it economical.

At the tip of every oil or gas drill is a rotating mouth of sharp teeth that chews through rock. In the past, these drill bits could only dig straight down. Now they are agile enough to find and follow narrow horizontal seams of rock.

The drilling-services company Baker Hughes has designed a bit that can change directions underground, without having to be drawn back up to the surface, reducing drilling time by as much as 40 percent.

Behind the drill bit, attached to a long line of steel known as the "drill string," is an array of sensors. The sensors bombard rock with subatomic particles and measure the gamma radiation that bounces back. They assess how easily electricity flows through the rock and underground fluids. They analyze the magnetism of the rock and how it vibrates both up and down and side to side while drilling.

"To the layman, it looks like dumb iron, but you'd be shocked about what's inside," says Art Soucy, president of global products and services at Baker Hughes.

All this information is sent to engineers via fiber-optic cables. They run the information through supercomputers as powerful as 30,000 laptops to create a picture of the earth thousands of feet below the surface.

The people analyzing this data and even directing the drill bits are often sitting hundreds of miles away. Shell's Pennsylvania drilling operations are directed from a center in Houston, where experienced drillers monitor the progress at several sites across the country from a single room.

And when the drilling is done, the rig itself can "walk" a hundred feet or so to another location and start drilling again. In the past, rigs had to be taken down and reassembled, which could take days. New rigs are built on sliding "shoes" that allow hydraulic lifts to shuffle the rig forward in short steps.

"It has made possible things that were unthinkable 10 years ago," says Claudi Santiago, managing director at First Reserve Corp., a private-equity firm that invests in energy companies.

Now, drillers are finding oil faster than the world is using it. At the end of 2001, the industry had enough "proved oil reserves" to satisfy world demand for 45 years, according to BP's annual statistical review, a closely watched study. By the end of 2011 that had grown to 51 years even though a decade's worth of oil had been used and daily demand had grown 14 percent. And "proved reserves" refers to oil that can be economically tapped using today's technology. Tomorrow's methods could yield even more.

This is good news for a global economy that remains dependent on fossil fuels, but it's terrifying to climate scientists.

"If we're willing to go down this road of squeezing whatever petroleum we can out of the earth, we can easily get carbon dioxide levels up to unfathomable levels and put in motion what would be dramatic or catastrophic changes in our climate system," says Michael E. Mann, a geophysicist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.

___

RENEWABLES PROGRESS, BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH

Renewable technologies have had their successes. The average cost of a solar power system has fallen by 31 percent in the last two years. Solar now generates six times more electricity in the U.S. than it did a decade ago, and wind produces 14 times more. Most major automakers offer some type of electric vehicle.

And this success has come despite the fact that renewable energy's major benefit that it doesn't pollute is given little or no value in the marketplace because most governments haven't adopted taxes or penalties for fossil fuel pollution.

But the outlook for wind, batteries and biofuels is as dim as it's been in a decade. Global greenhouse gas agreements have fizzled. Dazzling discoveries have been made in laboratories, and some of these may yet develop into transformative products, but alternative energy technologies haven't become cheaper or more useful than fossil fuels.

Solar, wind and geothermal sources together accounted for 4.8 percent of U.S. power generation last year. Ten percent of U.S. gasoline demand was satisfied with corn ethanol, but ethanol and other fuels made from non-food sources have yet to hit the market.

"In many cases, renewables aren't ready for primetime yet," says George Biltz, vice president for energy and climate change at Dow Chemical, which continues to work on a host of renewable technologies.

Likewise, electric cars have not enjoyed the success many expected. The battery alone in an electric car costs as much as a new gasoline-powered car, and electric vehicles are not selling nearly as fast as once projected. General Motors expected to sell 60,000 Chevy Volts globally last year, but sold just half that many. Sales of Nissan's all-electric Leaf grew 22 percent around the world last year to 26,000, short of Nissan's projected 50 percent growth.

The cost of wind and solar power has declined, but the price of electricity made with newly cheap fossil fuels has fallen too, making it harder for wind and solar to compete.

"Renewables are now under scrutiny. They haven't made the kinds of quantum leaps we have seen in the oil and gas industry," says First Reserve Corp.'s Santiago, who now shuns investments in alternatives.

David Aldous, the former Shell executive, learned that lesson while trying to turn wood chips into ethanol at Range Fuels. The system that fed the chips into a gasification chamber didn't work well, and the project failed.

"Things don't always scale from the petri dish to the demo plant and then to the commercial plant. It's just part of building up a new industry," Aldous says.

Range went out of business in 2011, and it was hardly alone. Dozens of biofuel, battery and solar companies failed even though federal and state governments supported alternatives with loans and grants, and mandated their use. Others are limping along.

Pacific Ethanol, which traded near $300 per share in 2006, now trades for 27 cents. Amyris, an advanced biofuels company, traded near $34 a share as recently as last year, but now trades at $2.65. The battery maker A123 was forced to file for bankruptcy protection last year, three years after going public. An index of clean energy companies that was first traded in March 2005 is down 70 percent since then. A similar index of traditional energy companies is up 73 percent over the same period.

___

THE NEXT 10 YEARS

This dark period for alternative energy could last for years. With government debt soaring and no more worries about running out of oil, many renewable subsidies are being scaled back.

"The world is completely different now," MIT's Greenstone says.

But there are still hundreds of companies, including fossil fuel giants, working on new renewable-energy projects. ExxonMobil is investing in Synthetic Genomics, a company started by the geneticist J. Craig Venter to try to create strains of algae that will produce fuels. BP and Shell continue to work on ways to turn plant waste into fuels.

California, meanwhile, set the nation's most ambitious renewable energy goals and is on track to meet them. One-fifth of the power delivered by the state's three biggest utilities now comes from renewables, not including large hydroelectric dams. By 2020, that portion will rise to one-third.

President Barack Obama in March proposed using $2 billion in federal oil and gas royalties to invest in clean energy technology research. Obama is also expected to promote renewables through pollution regulations, if not with new laws.

And for all the world's newfound oil, prices are still high because developing nations are consuming more.

"It's not time to write the epitaph yet," Aldous says. Eventually the global economy will fully recover, he says, and demand for energy of all kinds will increase.

"New sources of energy are going to be in vogue again," he says.

Experts didn't see the oil and gas boom coming five years ago. It's certainly possible the world will change direction again in the next five years.

But EOG's Papa says oil and gas companies will just invest in even more sophisticated technology. He estimates that current techniques pull only 6 percent of the oil trapped in source rock to the surface. Learning to double that would yield yet another enormous trove of hydrocarbons.

"Now we go into the next phase of technology," he says. "How are we going to get the rest of it out of the ground?"

____

Follow Jonathan Fahey on Twitter at http://twitter.com/JonathanFahey

Neighborhood/School Partnership

DPS has a shrinking student base, says the . In the last decade, two-thirds of students left, taking state per-student funding with them.seeks to boost enrollment and retention and improve services. A group of 600 people -- comprised of school staff, teachers, parents, students, clergy, civic leaders, community activists, and lawmakers -- spent five weeks putting together an operations reform plan. DPS Emergency Manager Roy Roberts spearheaded the strategic planning process, but input came from every sector. The purpose was to broaden DPS's service arm and turn schools into resource centers. The group identified 36 objectives in 12 major goal areas centering on five central themes.

Start Earlier; Work Longer

The biggest pieces are: free preschool for 4-year-olds; improved services for children 0-3; and extended school operation to 12 hours a day, seven days a week (following the "Community Schools Model"). As a community-schools enterprise, DPS will consolidate child services currently provided across multiple agencies within schools. The parent/neighborhood component will provide life skills and parenting classes and job training programs. Support staff and social workers will be placed at schools. Schools will facilitate parent involvement via incentives, transportation, and events.

Work Harder

DPS will expand academic opportunities, job-specific training, course offerings, and contact opportunities in high-demand content areas. The initiative looks to beef up art and music programs and career academy opportunities. Improvements will be made in safety and security. The group will consider whether to extend school to a year-round schedule. Training and reward programs will be established for staff.

Work Smarter

Using a customer service model, schools will upgrade personnel, human resources, procurement, and finance software. Technology and teacher professional development will be improved. Customer satisfaction surveys will be circulated.

Join Together

Schools will move toward autonomy using a self-directed approach. They'll develop marketing and branding plans to promote individual schools.

Expect More

The whole community is affected here. Some school buildings will be consolidated to cut costs, though fewer than expected. Only four of the slated 28 will be closed. Schools will seek business partnerships, volunteers, grant money, and pro-bono services. The Detroit Free Press says JPMorgan Chase has donated $1.5 million for schools in Southwest Detroit. Roberts hopes to announce other donations soon. Students will have higher attendance, performance, and disciplinary expectations.

A teacher and Michigan native, Marilisa Sachteleben writes about schools and education in her state's most pivotal city of Detroit.

(Logo: )

Prior to joining the Aluminum Association, Gill served as the Director of Economics with the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) where he was responsible for the economic and statistical analysis of industry conditions for electrical equipment manufacturers. He previously held the role of Senior Analyst at the American Petroleum Institute.

"Tim brings a relevant skill set and deep experience to the Association's statistics and data program," said Tim Calvin of Norandal USAand Chairman of the Aluminum Association's Statistical and Market Research Committee. "I was pleased to be part of the process selecting Tim and look forward to working closely with him."

Gill currently serves as chair of the Industry Survey Committee for the National Association for Business Economics. He has participated in outlook surveys conducted by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Zillow and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

"I'm confident Tim will be a tremendous asset to the Aluminum Association," said Heidi Brock, President of the Aluminum Association. "He has a deep understanding of economic and statistical analysis for industry trade associations, which is critical to keeping our members and the public informed of trends in the aluminum sector. I'm excited to bring him on board."

Gill has a B.A. in Economics from John Carroll University and a M.A. in Economics from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

The Aluminum Association, based in Arlington, Virginia, works globally to aggressively promote aluminum as the most sustainable and recyclable automotive, packaging and construction material in today's market. The Association represents U.S. and foreign-based primary producers of aluminum, aluminum recyclers and producers of fabricated products, as well as industry suppliers. Member companies operate approximately 180 plants in the United States, with many conducting business worldwide. For more information visit , on Twitteror .

CONTACT: Matt Meenan, 703.358.2977,

SOURCE The Aluminum Association

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Mobile gaming has been taking off the past few years.vision is to bring that same experience to bigger screens, said BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma. The all-you-can-eat pricing model for GamePop lets users enjoy a much broader range of games, just as you can watch more movies with Netflix versus the pay-as-you-go model Blockbuster employed.

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GamePop can be controlled with either a dedicated controller or a smartphone, and the $6.99 subscription price is all-you-can-eat, so any and all games available for the console can be played on-demand. BlueStacks isnt sharing many specifics yet regarding launch titles, but it already has content agreements in place with a number oftop mobile game developers including Glu Mobile, Halfbrick, and OutFit7 to make many well-known games available for GamePop from day one.

BlueStacks has credibility in the microconsole space that others just dont have, said Shainiel Deo, CEO of Halfbrick. Weve been a featured partner insince early on and theyve delivered on every promise in terms of distribution. GamePop is a great incremental channel for us.

BlueStacks GamePop is expected to launch later this year with hundreds of games available right out of the gate. A promotional video showcasing the GamePop follows below, and the console can be preordered beginning immediately on the GamePop website.

Facebook closed at $28.31 on Friday, 60 percent higher than last summer's low-point, but well below its initial public offering price of $38 last May. However, the company is probably worth no more than $25 a share, Barron's said, reiterating a stance it took in February.

Facebook trades for 75 times its 2013 earnings estimate using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), while Googletrades for less than 20 times its 2013 earnings, the article said.

While a sharp rise in mobile ad revenue helped Facebook increase its overall revenues by 38 percent in the quarter versus a year earlier, that mobile ad revenue came at the expense of desktop ad revenue, which was flat, Barron's said.

The paper warned that desktop ad revenue may start to drop, meaning investors are assigning a "hefty" market value to Facebook of $71 billion, based largely on just $1.5 billion in mobile ad revenues. Expenses were up 60 percent in the quarter, it added.

Google has been investing in a range of products, from YouTube, self-driving cars, interactive eye wear, maps and Android software. "Facebook seems more focused on barraging subscribers with ads to meet Street profit expectations," Barron's said.

(Reporting by John McCrank in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

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Jones is correct that a string of rulings in SEP cases have left litigants with little to show for their efforts, Elmer-DeWitt writes.Indeed, such lawsuits often backfire. Just last week a preliminary European Union ruling found Googles Motorola division guilty of abusing of its standards-essential patents when it sued Microsoft over the use of a popular video compression standard.Butis the exception that proves the rule.

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He notes that Apple sued Samsung for unlawfully utilizing several of its innovations in various Android devices while Samsung retaliated by suing Apple using SEPs alone. The jury threw out all of Samsungs claims as a result, but .

This article was

Bopara, 27, has not played a one-day international since September and Bresnan, 28, missed this year's tour of New Zealand due to an elbow injury.

Batsman Kevin Pietersen was ruled out with a knee problem. Spinner Samit Patel and fast bowler Jade Dernbach were omitted from the 15-man squad.

Alastair Cook will captain the team in three one-day internationals against New Zealand starting on May 31 after the two-match test series between the teams.

The hosts' first game in the Champions Trophy is against Australia on June 8.

England squad: Alastair Cook (captain), James Anderson, Jonny Bairstow, Ian Bell, Ravi Bopara, Tim Bresnan, Stuart Broad, Jos Buttler, Steve Finn, Eoin Morgan, Joe Root, Graeme Swann, James Tredwell, Jonathan Trott, Chris Woakes. (Reporting by Ed Osmond, editing by Amlan Chakraborty)

An opera bouffe that's usually airy and sometimes saccharine, "La Perichole" devolved into a series of sophomoric sight gags, overshadowing fine vocal work by mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand as Perichole and tenor Philippe Talbot as Piquillo, the pair of young street singers.

Seen Tuesday night in the second performance of a run of four, this was City Opera's second staging this season at New York City Center, its home from 1944-65. Alden seemed to be inspired by Monty Python's visit to City Center in 1976. Don Andre de Ribeira, the Viceroy of Peru sung by bass Kevin Burdette, pranced about the stage in the manner of John Cleese as the Minister of Silly Walks. He was costumed by Gabriel Berry as a superhero, a cowboy in black and white, a Gatsby-like charmer and Fidel Castro.

All this was distracting, given that "Perichole" can be charming, with a love story, mistaken identity and a happy ending.

Offenbach and librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy set the opening scene in the main square of Lima, outside The Three Cousins tavern. Alden's version is more like a Malibu, Calif., barbecue, where the cousins grill hot dogs and serve the franks to a crowd in modern casual attire, with paper party hats on heads and holding margaritas. Pinatas dangled overhead.

Paul Steinberg's set around them is a gold, black and white mosaic, which transforms into the viceroy's palace for the second act with the addition of a long, aqua sofa in front of a row of cacti.

Performing the 1874 three-act version, with cuts and changes to the spoken dialogue, conductor Emmanuel Plasson led an idiomatic musical performance with verve and grace. But the score was overwhelmed by the hamminess. "Ah, quel diner (Ah, what a lunch)" should be Perichole's comic tipsy aria; here she was a stumbling drunk.

Alden has done some stunning work at City Opera his Magritte-influenced staging of "Cosi fan tutte" was among the most fascinating productions of 2012, even though it was bleak and at times fought Mozart's music. But here he misfires. Don Andre making the sounds of a French police siren in a microphone was not funny. Shining 31 flashlights into the audience's eyes was not entertaining.

More convincing was the use of video: When Piquillo is imprisoned in the third act, he sees Perichole fending off the viceroy in a palace bedroom with a bat.

Lenormand and Talbot, both French, added precise diction and sweet voices. The three cousins, Lauren Worsham, Naomi O'Connell and Carin Gilfry, were seductive. Philip Littell, librettist for Andre Previn's "A Streetcar Named Desire," was a twitching, falling bartender in the first two acts an Alden addition who transformed into The Old Prisoner in the third.

There are additional performances Thursday and Saturday. After leaving Lincoln Center and presenting a pair of four-production, 16-performance seasons, City Opera is expanding to 23 performances of four stagings in 2013-14. Mark-Anthony Turnage's "Anna Nicole" will receive its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sept. 17.

Johann Christian Bach's "Endimione" follows at El Museo del Barrio starting Feb. 8, and Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle" at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse begins Feb. 28 in a production that first appeared at the English National Opera in 2009. The season ends with Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro)" in an Alden staging at City Center starting April 19.

___

Online:

http://www.nycopera.com/

Last time around, in 2007, angry calls overwhelmed the Senate switchboard and lawmakers endured raging town hall meetings and threats from incensed constituents. The legislation ultimately collapsed on the Senate floor.

"I've been through this battle, and it's ugly," said former Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., who supported the bill. "My phones were jammed for three weeks and I got three death threats, one of which I turned over to the FBI. So it's rough business."

Supporters of the immigration bill brought forward last month by a group of four Republican and four Democratic senators have been cautiously optimistic about their prospects because of factors including public support for giving citizenship to immigrants, a large and diverse coalition in support of the bill, and a growing sentiment among Republican leaders that immigration must be dealt with if they are to regain the backing of Hispanic voters.

Backers have been working hard to build alliances and strategies aimed at avoiding the mistakes of 2007, when critics largely defined the bill and some supporters ended up turning against it.

Opponents acknowledge that supporters started out better organized and mobilized than last time around, and they also anticipate that outside groups pushing the legislation including efforts headed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will outspend them. Supporters include large and influential groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AFL-CIO and the Catholic Church, while opponents include lesser-known think tanks or advocacy organizations such as NumbersUSA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies. Both sides have already begun running ads.

But critics also have important grass-roots influence, including from talk radio hosts who were instrumental in defeating the bill in 2007, and opponents argue that as the public absorbs the content of the legislation, the tide will turn against it. They say that there are already signs that it's happening. Although conservative commentators on Fox News Channel and elsewhere have been more muted so far than in 2007, some talk radio hosts including Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh have begun to voice deep unease about the bill despite the efforts of its conservative standard bearer, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., to sell the legislation to them and other conservative opinion leaders.

"The supporters promoted the bill aggressively before anybody saw the language, and certain Republicans and conservative voices sort of held their fire, but that's beginning to change," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who was a leading voice in the Senate against the bill in 2007 and is reprising that role this time around, making floor speeches, issuing press releases and holding briefing calls with reporters to argue that the bill would unlock a much larger volume of immigration into the U.S. than advertised, to the detriment of U.S. workers and jobs.

"It's going to be like that mackerel in the sunshine the longer it's out there the worse it smells," Sessions said.

The bill would aim to boost border security, fix legal immigration and worker programs, require all employers to check their workers' legal status and offer eventual citizenship to the estimated 11 million immigrants already living in the country illegally.

Joyce Kaufman, a host on a Florida radio station, WFTL, said that opposition to the bill was soft at first but grows daily.

"Yes, we believe this is amnesty," Kaufman said. "Citizen activists are outraged."

Lott said that supporters of the legislation still haven't come up with an argument as concise and effective as that one word "amnesty" from opponents. He said he's spoken with Rubio, among others, to make clear that supporters of the bill need to hone their arguments.

"Last time our explanation was three paragraphs. Theirs was a word," Lott said. When that happens, he said, "You're dead."

The Democratic-led Senate, where the Judiciary Committee takes up the bill on Thursday, is already going to be a tough challenge. But if the bill does pass the Senate, opponents are betting it gets stopped in the Republican-led House. A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has been promising for months to release their own bill mirroring elements of the Senate legislation but taking a tougher tack. So far they haven't delivered.

Meanwhile, to the dismay of immigration advocates, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee has announced plans to move forward with individual, single-issue immigration bills, rejecting the comprehensive approach in the Senate that's backed by President Barack Obama, who's made immigration legislation a top second-term priority. The legislation was also a priority in 2007 for then-President George W. Bush, but he was unsuccessful in persuading Republican lawmakers to get behind the bill, and Democrats who at the time controlled Congress were divided, too.

In the 2007 debate, a turning point came when the conservative Heritage Foundation released a report saying that the legislation would cost taxpayers $2.6 trillion, including benefits to immigrants and other expenditures. Although the analysis was disputed it carried weight with GOP lawmakers. Now under the leadership of former Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., another lead opponent of the legislation in 2007, Heritage was releasing an updated version of that report on Monday claiming that the new bill costs a whopping $6.3 trillion. That's mostly from more than $9 trillion in government benefits Heritage says would go to newly legalized immigrants over their lifetimes, only partly counterbalanced by $3 trillion they would pay in taxes.

In a sign of how supporters of the bill are working hard not to repeat mistakes from the past, conservative groups that support the legislation sought in advance to pre-empt the Heritage report, with the Cato Institute deriding it ahead of time as "fatally flawed," and Cato and others arguing that immigration reform would boost the economy by growing the labor market. Nonetheless officials with Heritage argue their report could have the same impact this time around as in 2007.

"There's been a lot of posturing, a lot of talk. We haven't really gotten to the heart of the debate yet," said Dan Holler, communications director for Heritage Action for America, the Heritage Foundation's activist arm. "We have the right policy, the numbers are going to be there, and the debate is going to shift. And no amount of ads will be able to shift it back."

___

Follow Erica Werner on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ericawerner

The company hasn't said what it plans to reveal during the event at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, but speculation has centered on a mobile phone made by HTC Corp. According to media reports, the phone would deeply integrate Facebook into the Android operating system, aiding Facebook in its aim to evolve from its Web-based roots into a "mobile-first" company.

"What Facebook wants is to put itself at the front of the Android user experience for as many Facebook users as possible and make Facebook more elemental to their customers' experience," said Forrester analyst Charles Golvin.

The move could help to attract more mobile advertisers. Though mobile ads were a big concern for Facebook's investors even before the company's initial public offering last May, some of the worry has subsided as the company muscles its way into the market.

Last year, Facebook began showing ads to its mobile audience by shoehorning corporate-sponsored content into users' news feeds, which also include updates from friends and brands they follow. Facebook now faces the challenge of showing people mobile ads without annoying or alienating them.

The mobile advertising market is growing quickly, thanks in large part to Facebook and Twitter, which also entered the space in 2012. Research firm eMarketer expects U.S. mobile ad spending to grow 77 percent this year to $7.29 billion, from $4.11 billion last year.

EMarketer said Wednesday that it expects Facebook Inc. to reap $965 million in U.S. mobile ad revenue in 2013. That's about 2.5 times the $391 million in 2012, the first year that Facebook started showing mobile ads.

Clark Fredricksen, vice president at eMarketer, said it's "tough to speculate" how much effect Thursday's announcement would have on ad revenue.

At the same time, he says "there are some clear reasons why a deeper integration with mobile operating systems and handsets make sense for Facebook. At the end of the day, the more deeply Facebook can engage consumers, no matter what device or operating system or handset," the better.

Such deeper integration could mean Facebook is no longer a stand-alone mobile app but part of the operating system's building blocks. For example, if users who want to take a photo would use Facebook's camera app. If they want to chat, they'd use Facebook's chat service. The invitation to the event, "come see our new home on Android," suggests that Facebook will be prominently featured on a phone's home screen.

Facebook's rival, Google Inc., makes the Android software that Facebook and HTC would be using under the widely speculated scenario. Google makes the software available on an open-source basis, meaning others including rivals are free to adapt it to their needs. Amazon.com Inc. does just that in modifying Android to run its Kindle tablet computers.

Facebook is No. 2 behind Google Inc. when it comes to mobile ads, and it isn't expected to surpass the online search leader any time soon. Google dominates the mobile search market with 93 percent of U.S. mobile search advertising dollars, according to eMarketer. Online music service Pandora Inc. is in third place when it comes to mobile ad dollars, followed by Twitter.