The proposed withdrawal would reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 130,000 - the same as before the "surge" earlier this year aimed at reducing sectarian violence.

Congressional Democratic leaders criticized Mr. Bush's plan after a meeting with the president Tuesday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it was "an insult to the intelligence of the American people."

General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, testified before House and Senate committees earlier this week. General Petraeus says the troop increase has led to decreased violence in Iraq, but he and Crocker cautioned against a premature withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

Iraq's national security advisor, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, told reporters Wednesday that the number of U.S. troops could be reduced to 100,000 by the end of 2008. He says it would depend on the security threat within and outside the country, and the readiness level of Iraqi security forces.

Jackson DeMarco was represented by Studley's Royce Sharf, branch manager and executive vice president; Bruce Schuman, senior vice president, and Mike Props, managing director, all from Studley's Orange County office. Sharf and Props represented the firm on its original lease at the same location in 2002.

The law firm recently added 12 attorneys when it expanded its complex litigation practice, according to Sharf. "Maintaining the firm's ability to remain flexible and align its real estate occupancy needs with the business plan has been of paramount importance,” he adds.

The Studley brokers tell GlobeSt.com that Jackson DeMarco wanted to restructure its lease because the firm continues to grow and needed to lock down future expansion space. The deal allows the firm to grow in stages over the next couple years.

Terms of the new lease were not disclosed. Asking rates for space in the 2030 Main St. building, a 16-story tower of nearly 347,000 sf that was built in 1990, are $3.30 per sf per month.

The building's owner, the State Teachers Retirement Board of Ohio, was represented by CBRE's John Weiner in the new lease with Jackson DeMarco. The law firm also maintains an office in Westlake village.

"Microsoft continues to have a stranglehold over the two products ... that nearly all consumers use," Houck said during an antitrust compliance hearing in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "Very little has happened in five years ... in those markets."

The California group of states -- the larger of two groups of states that sued Microsoft for antitrust violations -- will ask for an extension of all the middleware portions of the antitrust judgement, except for a section that governs the royalties Microsoft can charge PC manufacturers for the Windows operating system. Most of the antitrust judgment was scheduled to expire in November.

Microsoft lawyer Rick Rule said the company would need time to respond to Houck's proposal. Microsoft first heard of the plan to ask for an extension on Friday, he said, and the California group plans to file a formal extension request with the court in mid-October.

Rule seemed to suggest Microsoft would fight the five-year extension. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly declined to impose a 10-year judgment in 2002, he said. "We think the picture of the computer industry is much rosier," Rule added. "We think it's clear that the decree has done its job."

Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said the company will respond in more detail after it has seen the extension request. "We're a bit surprised that a few states are now requesting an extension of the consent decree, since they indicated just last month that they're not too fond of it," Evans said.

In August 2006, Microsoft already agreed to an extension of the section of the judgment requiring it to make its communications protocols available to other software vendors. Microsoft's efforts to fix technical documentation for the protocols have run into several delays. Houck on Tuesday asked Kollar-Kotelly to extend the communications protocol section of the judgment until 2012.

The California group does not "have any confidence" Microsoft will continue to improve the communications protocol program without oversight, Houck said. An independent auditor's report just issued questions whether Microsoft has released all the protocols mandated in the judgment, he added.

The California group's extension proposal comes after the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York group of states filed briefs last month saying the antitrust judgment has done its job. "There have been a number of developments in the competitive landscape ... that suggest that the Final Judgments are accomplishing their stated goal of fostering competitive conditions among middleware products, unimpeded by anticompetitive exclusionary obstacles erected by Microsoft," said the report from the DOJ and New York group, which includes five states.

But Houck Tuesday disputed that assessment. At the time of the judgment, a handful of PC vendors were preinstalling a competing Web browser on PCs, he said. Today, no major ones are, he said.

Abe, 52, a nationalist who entered office as Japan's youngest postwar premier, did not announce a date for his departure from office.

Word of Abe's resignation comes after his scandal-scarred government lost control of the upper house of parliament to the resurgent opposition. The LDP still controls the more powerful lower house, which chooses the prime minister.

Abe's resignation marks a rapid fall from power for a prime minister who came into office a year ago with ambitious plans to repair frayed relations with Asian neighbors, revise the 1947 pacifist constitution, and bolster Japan's role in international diplomatic and military affairs.

The prime minister, whose grandfather was premier and whose father was a foreign minister, initially met with success in fence-mending trips last autumn to China and South Korea.

But a string of scandals starting late last year quickly eroded support for Abe. Four Cabinet minister were forced to resign over the past nine months, and one — his first agriculture minister — committed suicide over a money scandal.

Abe also was facing a battle in parliament over extension of the country's refueling mission in support of the U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan.

Abe had said he would quit if he failed to win parliamentary passage of legislation extending the Afghan mission, in which Japanese ships refuel coalition vessels in the Indian Ocean.

"I have pondered how Japan should continue its fight against terrorism," Abe said Wednesday. "I now believe we need change. So Japan must continue its fight against terrorism under a new prime minister."

The plenary session of the lower house was to be delayed, media reports said, but an official of the lower house said she could not confirm that.

Opposition lawmakers said it was about time Abe resigned.

"It is irresponsible for him (to quit) after he gave a policy speech and was to face parliament questioning. He should have quit right after the upper house elections," Mizuho Fukushima, head of the opposition Social Democratic Party, told NHK.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said that in 2004 the IRS received about 3.8 million miscellaneous income statements reporting some $150 billion in earnings that could not be computer-matched to a filed tax return because of missing or erroneous ID numbers.

The inspector general's office, which does oversight of the tax agency, looked at a sampling of these mismatched IDs and calculated that some 6,000 of these individuals had not filed 2004 tax returns despite having income statements indicating they earned more than $100,000. That translates into some $630 million in income, it said.

Much of the income involved compensation for nonemployees such as independent contractors reported on unusable miscellaneous income statements.

The office said that it looked at 620 income and wage statements with mismatched names and ID numbers reporting more than $60,000 in earnings. Using IRS automated data systems, it was able to manually match half of those to taxpayer accounts in IRS records.

It urged that Congress pass legislation, backed by the administration, that would require employers to verify the accuracy of ID numbers for the employees they hire. The office also recommended that the IRS do more to investigate high-dollar miscellaneous income and wage statements with mismatched names and IDs.

The IRS, in response, said it supported the legislation but concluded that the cost of manually tracking down mismatched names and IDs might exceed that of the benefits.

"The IRS's opposition to this recommendation is confounding," said Inspector General J. Russell George, adding that their audit showed that increased examination of statements would more than pay for itself in increased revenue.

The hearing will be before Judge Charles A. Porter, rather than Judge Gary Larson, who had accepted the plea. That could help Mr. Craig’s lawyers, who are arguing, in effect, that Judge Larson erred in accepting the plea.

It is not known whether Mr. Craig will appear, said Judy Smith, a spokeswoman for Billy Martin, a lawyer for Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig was arrested on June 11 by an airport police officer and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct.

In exchange, prosecutors dropped a gross misdemeanor charge of interference with privacy. Mr. Craig has since said his plea was a mistake. He filed a request on Monday to withdraw it.