In a note for the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), the ministry has proposed raising gas price for state-run firms immediately and that for RIL from April 2014, sources privy to the development said.

ONGC  / OIL and RIL currently get $4.2 per million British thermal unit as the price of natural gas.

The ministry wants Rangarajan Committee recommendation of pricing domestically produced natural gas at an average of international hub prices and cost of imported LNG instead of present mechanism of market discovery be accepted with a minor modification.

 instead of Rangarajan panel’s suggestion of calculating gas price every month, the ministry has proposed notifying the gas price on a quarterly basis. The gas price based on average of April-June rates would come to $6.775 per mmBtu, much less than doubling of rates previously expected.

Sources said the hike in natural gas price by $1 would result Rs. 3,155 crore per annum hit on fertiliser plants for producing 23 million tons of urea this fiscal and Rs. 4,144 crore a year for 32 million tons of urea production from 2017-18.

The impact of every US dollar increase in gas price would be about Rs. 10,040 crore per annum on the power sector for 28,000 MW of electricity generating capacity.

Sources said ministry wants the pricing formula proposed by the panel to apply to all forms of natural gas -conventional, shale and coal-bed methane (CBM). Also, the price determined shall be applicable to all consuming sectors uniformly.

PayPal, the online payment operation owned by eBay Inc , will increase marketing spending to support its push into physical stores, President David Marcus said on Tuesday.

“You’ll start seeing us amping marketing up later this year,” Marcus said in an interview with Reuters.

PayPal is trying to become a common way of paying in physical stores, a much larger market than its online roots. The company expects to be in 2 million merchant locations by the end of 2013 and it is working on ways to persuade consumers to use PayPal rather than their usual credit and debit cards.

Customers would use PayPal via smartphone app. In addition, shoppers at the checkout counter can use PayPal by typing in a mobile phone number and a four-digit PIN that has to be set up online beforehand into the merchant’s system. They can also use a PayPal card that links to their account.

Japan’s central bank says the world`s third-biggest economy is “picking up” as demand recovers in other countries and remains resilient at home.

The Bank of Japan ended a policy meeting on Wednesday with no change to its strategy of doubling the monetary base for the sake of reaching a 2 percent inflation target and jolting the economy out of two decades of stagnation. That outcome was expected.

The central bank said in a statement, though, that there is a “high degree of uncertainty concerning Japan`s economy” and that prices show no signs yet of rebounding.

Japan`s economy grew 3.5 percent in the last quarter, but progress in increasing exports and boosting corporate investment and wages has lagged.

A US Senate panel on Tuesday approved legislation to give millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, setting up a spirited debate next month in the full Senate over the biggest changes in immigration policy in a generation.

President Barack Obama, who has made enactment of an immigration bill one of his top priorities for this year, praised the Senate Judiciary Committee’s action, saying the bill was consistent with the goals he has expressed.

“I encourage the full Senate to bring this bipartisan bill to the floor at the earliest possible opportunity and remain hopeful that the amendment process will lead to further improvements,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House.

By a vote of 13-5, the Senate panel approved the bill that would put 11 million illegal residents on a 13-year path to citizenship while further strengthening security along the southwestern border with Mexico, long a sieve for illegal crossings into the United States.

The vote followed the committee’s decision to embrace a Republican move to ease restrictions on high-tech US companies that want to hire more skilled workers from countries like India and China.

In a dramatic move before the vote, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, withdrew an amendment to give people the right to sponsor same-sex partners who are foreigners for permanent legal status.

Leahy’s colleagues on the committee – Republicans and Democrats – warned that the amendment would kill the legislation in Congress. Democrats generally favor providing equal treatment for heterosexual and homosexual couples, while many Republicans oppose doing so.