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About 8 million immigrants living unlawfully in the United States would gain legal status under sweeping legislation moving toward a vote in the Senate, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, adding the bill would push federal deficits lower in each of the next two decades.

In an assessment that drew cheers from the White House and other backers of the bill, Congress’ scorekeeping agency said the legislation would boost the overall economy. The agency said deficits would fall by $197 billion across a decade, and by $700 billion in the following 10 years if the bill became law.

In a statement issued quickly after the report was released, the White House said it was “more proof that bipartisan commonsense immigration reform will be good for economic growth and deficit reduction.”

The estimates were released as the pace of activity increased at both ends of the Capitol on an issue that President Barack Obama has placed at the top of his domestic agenda.

Challenged by protesters chanting “shame, shame,” House Republicans advanced legislation to crack down on immigrants living illegally in the United States, at the same time the Senate lurched ahead on a dramatically different approach offering the hope of citizenship to the same millions.

Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said the bill moving through the House Judiciary Committee was part of a “step by step, increment by increment” approach to immigration, an issue that can pit Republican against Republican as much if not more than it divides the two political parties.

California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren predicted there would be “millions of American citizens taking to the street” in protest if Republicans pressed ahead with the bill. The measure permits state and local authorities to enforce federal immigration laws and requires mandatory detention for anyone in the country illegally who is convicted of drunk driving.

Despite the protests, approval by the committee was a foregone conclusion. The panel’s chairman, Rep. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., said future bills would require companies to make sure their employees are living in the United States legally, create a program for foreign farm workers who labor in the United States and enhance the ability of American firms to hire highly skilled workers from overseas.

Those steps and more are already rolled into one sweeping measure in the Senate, a bipartisan bill that Obama supports and that appears on track for a final Senate vote as early as July 4.

In its report and an accompanying three-page analysis, the CBO said the Senate measure would boost economic activity by 3.3 percent in 2023 and by 5.4 percent in 2033.

Not all the economic assessments were as favorable. CBO said average wages would decrease as a result of the bill for more than a decade before increasing afterwards. The bill will also “slightly raise the unemployment rate through 2020,” it said.

In a series of votes during the day, the Senate rejected a move by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., to require the installation of 350 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border before legalization can begin for anyone currently in the United States illegally.

Similarly, the Senate rejected a proposal by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., to prevent legalization until a biometric system is in place to track people entering or leaving the country through air, sea or land points of departure.

Those proposals were overshadowed by a larger debate over the types of border security requirements the legislation should contain payday loans for self employed. Republicans generally want to toughen the existing measure, particularly since the bill includes a 13-year path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally â(EURO)” a provision that sparks opposition from voters who could be influential in GOP primaries in next year’s mid-term elections.

Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told reporters that he and others want the government to demonstrate an ability to apprehend the vast majority of those attempting to enter the country illegally before anyone already present can take the first step toward possible citizenship.

Democrats have previously been unwilling to consider proposals along those lines, arguing they could postpone legalization for years if not longer. As drafted, the bill gives the government six months to develop a plan to achieve border security, but does not hold up legalization while it is being tested for effectiveness.

It was unclear what, if any, compromise is possible on that point. Agreement would greatly increase the bill’s chances for passage with a large bipartisan vote.

The measure was drafted by a bipartisan Gang of Eight and represents a series of political trade-offs among senators as well as outside groups like business and labor, growers and farm workers. In addition to border security and a path to citizenship, it includes an expanded number of visas for highly skilled workers prized by the technology industry and a new program for low-skilled workers. It also features a top-to-bottom overhaul of a decades-old system for parceling out visas to future legal immigrants, reducing the importance of family ties while emphasizing education, job skills and youth.

Broad in its scope, the bill calls for new judges, prosecutors and other officials to handle cases involving immigration law. At the same time, it would require the government to pay for legal representation, if necessary, for unaccompanied children caught up in such cases, as well as for adults determined to be legally incompetent because of a serious mental disability.

Any talk of compromise in the House appeared distant as Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, sought to reassure conservatives who have expressed fears he will allow legislation to come up this summer that they oppose and Democrats support.

One official who attended the closed-door meeting quoted the Ohio Republican as saying he has no intention of allowing a bill to come up that would violate the principles of the GOP majority and split its ranks. The speaker also made clear that legislation must satisfy Republican concerns about border security, according to the official.

At roughly the same time, Goodlatte gaveled the Judiciary Committee to order, and more than a dozen protesters who had been seated in the hearing room stood up and began clapping and chanting, “Shame, shame, shame! More of the same!” They were ushered out but their cries could still be heard in the hallway and committee proceedings were briefly interrupted.

The bill was the first on immigration to move through the committee this year, but hardly the opening salvo from conservatives who hold sway in the House.

Two weeks ago, the House voted to overturn Obama’s 2012 election year announcement that he was suspending deportation of many immigrants who came to the country illegally as children.

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WASHINGTON • The modest pace of the U.S. economic recovery has a silver lining, as the expansion shows signs of lasting almost twice as long as average.

Four years into the upswing, the economy isn’t seeing many of the excesses that often presage the start of contractions. Inflation is slowing, not quickening. Household debt is shrinking, not expanding. The labor market is slack, not tight.

Pent-up demand also bodes well for the longevity of the recovery, which has averaged annual growth of about 2 percent since its start in June 2009. Confronted by elevated unemployment and a depressed housing market, Americans put off forming families, buying homes and acquiring cars. Now, with house prices rising and payrolls expanding more rapidly, their behavior is changing.

“The current expansion can continue another four to five years,” said Robert Gordon, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who’s a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research committee that determines when recessions begin and end.

That would make this upswing the second longest on record, behind only the 10-year period that spanned the 1990s. The average since the end of World War II is just shy of five years, at 58 months.

Reflecting the slow, steady pace of the recovery, payrolls rose 175,000 last month, in line with the average over the past year, Labor Department figures released on June 7 showed.

“If the economy keeps expanding for the next three to five years, earnings will go up and the stock market will go up,” said Allen Sinai, chief executive officer of Decision Economics Inc. in New York. He said the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index may rise as high as 1,750 later this year and could hit 2,000 in 2015.

Anticipating stronger sales in the years ahead, Ford will add capacity to build 200,000 more vehicles annually in North America on rising demand for F-Series pickups and Fusion sedans, the Dearborn, Mich.-based company said in a May 22 statement.

“The sales and marketing guys are obviously very confident, because they’ve asked for additional capacity and we’re providing it,” Jim Tetreault, vice president of North America manufacturing, said in a telephone interview.

Economic growth will speed up to 2.9 percent next year and 3.2 percent in 2015, from 1.9 percent this year, according to Goldman Sachs in New York.

“You could have quite a good growth environment for quite a long time,” chief economist Jan Hatzius said in a June 3 Bloomberg Television interview at Goldman Sachs’s Global Macro Conference in London.

HEADWINDS AHEAD

While the cyclical outlook looks bright, the United States will be hampered in the longer term by such structural headwinds as an aging population, a plateauing of educational achievement and increased inequality, Gordon said.

A shock also could knock the recovery off course, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Among the possibilities: a collapse of the stock market, a sudden spike in long-term interest rates or a military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran that drives up oil prices. While increased domestic energy output has made the U.S. less vulnerable to an oil run-up, the economy would nevertheless take a hit if one occurred, he said.

Policymakers would be hard-pressed to cope with the fallout of a sudden shift, Zandi added. Short-term interest rates controlled by the Federal Reserve already are near zero, and the nation’s budget deficit is still high by historical standards. The $642 billion shortfall that the Congressional Budget Office sees for 2013 compares with about a $200 billion annual average over the past half century.

Zandi remains upbeat, though: “There are no significant imbalances in the private economy,” he said. “Barring some unforeseen shock, I think we’re in pretty good shape.”

Past expansions often were cut short by the Fed tightening credit. As the economy ran up against capacity constraints and inflation started to rise, policy makers increased interest rates to contain the price pressures, hurting growth in the process. That’s what happened in 1957, 1960, 1980, 1981 and 1990, Gordon said.

It’s not happening now. This expansion can last because inflation remains low and the central bank continues to stimulate growth, he said. Consumer prices rose 1.1 percent in April from a year earlier, the smallest increase since 2010, according to Labor Department data.

The Fed currently is buying $85 billion of assets each month in an effort to keep long-term interest rates down. It also has promised to keep short-term rates near zero as long as unemployment remains above 6.5 percent and the outlook for inflation doesn’t exceed 2.5 percent.

Joblessness was 7.6 percent in May, well above the 5 percent mark that prevailed at the start of the last recession in December 2007. High unemployment has held down wage increases, restraining inflation. Average hourly earnings for all employees rose 2 percent last month from a year earlier.

“The labor market is still very weak, with high unemployment and very low participation,” said Robert Hall, an economics professor at Stanford University in California and chairman of the NBER’s recession-dating committee. “We have a long way to go before any kind of excess will appear in that most important of all markets.”

PENT-UP DEMAND

There’s also scant sign the private sector is borrowing too much and becoming overextended, Zandi said. Household debt fell 1 percent in the first quarter to $11.2 trillion, “considerably below” the peak of $12.7 trillion set in 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said in a May 14 report.

“Many previous cycles have ended because of overbuilding — too much exuberance in both residential and nonresidential construction,” Gordon said. “This was a major cause of the 1929-33 Depression and also what happened in 2007-08.

”We certainly haven’t had overbuilding during 2008-13,” he added. ”Rather the contrary.” The U.S. is ”constructing fewer homes and cars than replacement needs.”

Joe Pimentel, general manager for Volmaz, a Decatur, Ga., repair shop that works on imported models, sees this first hand.

”Yesterday we had in a 1992 Volvo 940 that had 330,000 miles on it,” he said in an interview on May 29. ”We are seeing older and older cars coming in.”

Pimentel, 48, said he sometimes urges customers ”to go out and go get something else” rather than keep putting money into repairs. ”Older cars are not going to last forever. There is a law of diminishing returns. That is a conversation I probably have four or five times a week.”

It’s that sort of postponed buying that has Itay Michaeli, an analyst with Citigroup in New York, recommending that investors buy shares of Ford and General Motors.

”Consumers have really been deferring purchases,” he said. ”We are still very early in the U.S. auto-sales cycle.” He forecasts sales of cars and light-duty trucks will rise to 16.5 million in 2015 from 14.5 million last year.

The economy also may be fired up by a rush of household formation, unleashing pent-up demand for everything from homes to weddings, Maury Harris, chief economist at UBS Securities in New York, said. Younger adults have the most ability to spend after some delayed striking out on their own by living with parents or friends.

Housing starts could improve to 1.1 million units this year and 1.35 million in 2014, according to calculations by Harris and his fellow UBS economists, compared with 781,000 in 2012.

”There are a lot of positive things taking place,” said Joseph Carson, director of global economic research at New York- based AllianceBernstein LP, which has $453 billion in assets under management. ”We have another three to four years of economic growth at least.”

With assistance from Simon Kennedy in London and Craig Trudell in Southfield, Mich.

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J. Kyle Bass, whose Hayman Advisors LP made $500 million amid the U.S. subprime crisis, said the Bank of Japan will have to

FAIRFIELD, CONN.—Public safety officials in Connecticut say about 50 people have been hurt after two commuter trains collided outside New York City. Four of those injuries were deemed serious.

No fatalities were reported following Friday evening’s collision near Fairfield on the Metro-North Railroad.

The rail line referred to it in a news release as a “major derailment.”

A spokesman for public safety officials in nearby Bridgeport says about 250 people were on the two trains that collided after one derailed.

The railroad says a train that departed New York City’s Grand Central station en route to New Haven derailed. A westbound train on an adjacent track then struck the derailed train.

Some cars on the second train also derailed as a result of the collision.

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Cisco Systems led the Dow Jones industrial average slightly higher Thursday after the technology company reported higher sales. Mixed corporate earnings and economic reports kept the major stock indexes flipping between slight gains and losses.

Shortly after noon, the Dow was up 12 points at 15,288. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was up less than a point at 1,659.

The news on the economy Thursday wasn’t encouraging. Applications for unemployment benefits rose last week, and manufacturing slowed in the mid-Atlantic region. The manufacturing report from the Philadelphia branch of the Federal Reserve sent bond prices up in morning trading and turned stocks lower, but not for long.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of that this year,” said Scott King, an investment adviser at Unified Trust Co. in Lexington, Ky. “The news isn’t great, yet the market holds tight.”

Cisco jumped 13 percent, or $2.68, to $23.87. Cisco turned in quarterly results late Wednesday that beat analysts’ expectations, with the help of better revenue from the U.S. and emerging markets.

The networking equipment company sells its routers, switches, software and services to corporate customers and government agencies around the world. As a result, Cisco’s performance is often considered a gauge of how the technology industry is doing.

The Nasdaq rose 8 points to 3,479, a gain of 0.2 percent.

Wal-Mart fell 2 percent, the biggest drop among the 30 Dow stocks. The world’s largest retailer turned in weaker sales and a dim forecast for profits. The company blamed bad weather and delayed tax refunds for earnings and sales that fell short of what analysts had expected. Wal-Mart’s stock lost $1.68 to $78 business card.11.

Companies have reported record quarterly profits this earnings season. Seven of every 10 in the S&P 500 have trumped analysts’ earnings estimates, according to S&P Capital IQ. Earnings have climbed 5 percent over the year before.

But revenue has looked weak: six out of every 10 companies in the S&P 500 have missed forecasts, and revenue has edged up just 1 percent. Without higher sales, companies are getting more of their profits from laying off staff and other cost-cutting moves.

If the market is going to keep climbing this year, King said, sales will have to start rising. Analysts are looking for that to happen as economic growth gains strength later this year.

“It’s hard to see how companies can squeeze more earnings growth out of cost savings,” King said. “At some point, the economic numbers and revenue have to pick up.”

The Philadelphia branch of the Federal Reserve reported that manufacturers in the region said business conditions have slumped this month. Orders for manufactured goods and shipments have been weak.

In Washington, the Labor Department reported that the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits rose last week to 360,000. That suggests companies are laying more people off, just one week after applications for benefits hit a five-year low.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note sank to 1.88 percent from 1.94 percent late Wednesday. It’s a sign that traders are shifting money into low-risk investments like U.S. government debt.

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European stocks fell for the first time in five days and U.S. equity-index futures dropped before a report that may show American retail sales slipped. Oil declined while the yen swung between gains and losses after sliding beyond 102 per dollar for the first time since October 2008.

The Stoxx Europe 600 Index slipped 0.5 percent at 6:05 a.m. in New York. Standard & Poor

OMAHA, Neb. • Billionaire Warren Buffett is known for being reluctant to invest in technology companies, but he now has a Twitter account.

Buffett unveiled his @WarrenBuffett online handle on Thursday during a speech.

Buffett has always resisted investing in technology companies because he says he can’t predict the future of those businesses the same way he can insurance or manufacturing.

Buffett says even though he may not understand Twitter well, he knows it can’t be all bad because one of the company’s co-founders is from Nebraska.

Buffett’s first tweet said simply “Warren is in the house.” By midday he had more than 32,000 followers.

Buffett doesn’t have a computer in his office, but he uses one at home for research, writing and playing bridge online.

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The dollar was 0.4 percent from a two- week low against the yen on speculation the Federal Reserve will affirm its bond-buying program to cap borrowing costs when it announces its policy decision today.

The U.S. currency also traded near the least in almost two weeks versus the euro before a report that economists said will show America

GILLETTE, Wyo. • While mine workers converge on St. Louis for a pivotal bankruptcy court hearing involving Patriot Coal, the St. Louis company that helped give birth to Patriot is holding its annual shareholders meeting more than 1,000 miles away.

Peabody Energy is holding its annual shareholders meeting in Wyoming to highlight the importance of the coal-rich Powder River Basin.

One of the world’s largest coal producers, Peabody owns three mines in the basin, including the North Antelope Rochelle mine Internet Payday loans.

One group critical of the company, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, claims the company is trying to avoid hearing concerns in its hometown.

Company spokeswoman Beth Sutton says the company periodically holds board meetings, like the one it is holding Monday, in places where it has operations.

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The Galaxy S4’s design is virtually unchanged from the Galaxy S III. And when I say virtually unchanged, I mean that you have to be pretty obsessive to notice the differences. Aside from a slightly more rectangular body and a more substantial, metal-esque band wrapping around the sides, there’s little to separate Samsung’s successor from its predecessor.

The most notable improvements to the phone’s hardware guts come in its processor, display and camera. None are revolutionary, but they all match or one-up the Android status quo.

The 5-inch, Super AMOLED display is one of the best Samsung has ever put on a phone, with a 1080p display and a pixel density of 441 per inch — more than enough to eliminate any trace of pixelation. The screen could stand to be a bit brighter, but that’s a minor quibble.

Even with a bigger screen and a beefier battery, the Galaxy S4 managed to get ever-so-slightly thinner, slimmer, and lighter than the Galaxy S III. It also got a power boost.

Smartphone makers have spent the past few years flinging extra cores at everything, so yet another quad-core processor — this time in the form of , Fortune 500) Snapdragon 600 — doesn’t sound all that exciting, especially compared to the “octo-core” Samsung Exynos 5 Octa that international markets are getting. (Geek caveat: Those extra four cores in the Exynos 5 are meant for low-power scenarios, so they don’t provide the massive boost over Snapdragon that you might expect.)

Still, the fact that the Galaxy S4 is more than three times faster than the Galaxy S III when run through the same benchmarking tests is nothing to scoff at.

In using the phone regularly for a week, I rarely came across a moment when it suffered from significant stuttering, lag or overheating. The one noticeable exception was when I played “Real Racing 3,” a graphically intense game that got choppy when too many cars were onscreen. That’s not really Samsung’s fault — Android is notorious for its game lag.

The Galaxy S4’s camera is also improved, though we’re at the point of diminishing returns. On paper, the leap from 8 megapixels to 13 megapixels sounds substantial, but we learned years ago that the megapixel arms race is only part of the story when it comes to camera quality. The Galaxy S4’s best new photo trick is a camera sensor that’s back-illuminated, which means it can capture more light and produce brighter, more-detailed images without the use of a flash.

The camera works well in most normal situations. Its new user interface, pulled from Samsung’s point-and-shoot Galaxy Camera, is nicely laid out and easy to use. The image processing time between hitting the shutter button and having a saved photo isn’t blazing, but also isn’t a nuisance one hour payday loan. A few of the software advances, like being able to erase unwanted objects from an image’s background or create time-lapse action shots, are neat and well-implemented.

Of course, these improvements — especially to the camera and screen — require more power, and Samsung obliged by packing in a bigger battery. With the screen’s brightness ranging between 50% and 75%, 4G turned on, and a few apps and services running in the background (Facebook, Gmail, Google Talk, etc. — the usual suspects), I was still able to get through a full day with moderate use. With heavier usage, I found myself having to recharge after 6 to 8 hours. On the whole, I didn’t notice any huge leap in battery life over the S3, but it certainly wasn’t worse, either.

The features Samsung wants buyers to focus on, though, aren’t the Galaxy S4’s internal guts, which are more or less identical to other top smartphones right now. It’s the software upgrades baked into Samsung’s custom “TouchWiz” interface. The phone’s flashier tricks include pausing video when you look away from the screen, letting you answer the phone by waving in front of it, and activating tilt-based scrolling when eye contact is detected. Samsung also pinched a few features from its Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet, like allowing two apps to simultaneously run side-by-side, and the Airview feature, which detects when your finger is hovering over — but not quite touching — the screen. The gesture can activate a secondary action or menu.

Those are neat tricks, but they’re more like a sword-juggling circus act than the revolutionary breakthrough Samsung would like them to be. They’re interesting, novel and sometimes impressive, but they’re not significant or lasting advances. None are meaningfully better than our existing methods of smartphone interaction.

So, is the Samsung Galaxy S4 one of the best Android phones available? Yes. There are few other phones, period, that are as powerful and capable. But, in line with what we’ve seen from the past few iPhone generations, the improvements here aren’t as pronounced and exciting as in past years. This isn’t a phone that’s going to convert an iPhone user, and current Galaxy S III owners aren’t going to miss out on a whole lot as far as features go.

If you’re ready for an upgrade, and are in the market for an Android phone, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be one of top two or three phones you consider. It’s not the standout, though, that Samsung needs to remain the preeminent leader of the Android field. Hear that, HTC?

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