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• The urgent race for such visas -- highly desired by Microsoft, Apple, Google and other leading technology companies -- coincides with congressional plans to increase the number available to tech-savvy foreigners.
• The race to secure one of the 85,000 so-called H-1B visas available for the 2014 budget year started Monday and requests will be accepted through at least Friday. If petitions outpace the availability in the first week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services -- for the first time since 2008 -- will use a lottery to pick which companies get visas to award to prospective employees.
• "It will be a frenzy, because the cap ... is nowhere near high enough to meet demand," said Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the Software Alliance, a trade group for technology companies.
• Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Christopher Bentley said the agency won't know for certain whether a lottery is necessary until next week.
• ___

• NEW YORK (AP) -- Jim Riches pulled his son's mangled body out of the rubble at the World Trade Center, but the phone calls still filtered in years afterward. The city kept finding more pieces of his son.
• "They'll call you and they'll tell you, 'We found a shin bone,'" Riches said. "Or: 'We found an arm bone.' We held them all together and then we put them in the cemetery."
• Those are the phone calls both dreaded and hoped for among the families of Sept. 11 victims. And as investigators began sifting through newly uncovered debris from the World Trade Center on Monday for the first time in three years, those anxieties were renewed more than a decade after the attacks. But there was also hope that more victims might yet be identified after tens of millions have been spent on the painstaking identification process.
• "We would like to see the other 40 percent of the families who have never recovered anything to at least someday have a piece of their loved one," Riches said. "That they can go to a cemetery and pray."
• About 60 truckloads of debris that could contain tiny fragments of bone or tissue were unearthed by construction crews that have been working on the new World Trade Center in recent years. That material is now being transported to a park built on top of the former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where investigators will attempt to identify any possible remains during the next 10 weeks, the city said.

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