Senator John Warner (R-VA) — elected in 1978 — recently expressed interest in the idea of a national speed limit to conserve gasoline. Warner, who is not running for re-election this year, wrote to U.S. Secretary of Energy Sam Bodman, asking "at what speed is the typical vehicle traveling on America's highways today most fuel efficient?"

"The price of oil needs to stabilise. The price according to our interpretation should be lower and stabilize at around 100 dollars per barrel," the head of the OPEC member state told a joint news conference with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

Relations at the top of Russia’s third-largest oil-and-gas group had disintegrated into all-out civil war. The breakdown between its owners, BP and four Russian billionaires, was so severe that managing the day-to-day operations had become virtually impossible. So Dudley rang BP’s headquarters in London last Thursday to tell Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, that he was leaving Russia. Dudley said he could retain operational control of TNK-BP, but others are doubtful.

"Food prices are going to escalate. They need to," Lloyd Evans, an Annapolis Valley farmer and the president of Horticulture Nova Scotia, said in a recent interview on his nearly 200-hectare farm in Wilmot, near Middleton.

Although a dozen Senate Republicans support the measure, most voted with GOP leaders who would rather spend the time trumpeting their call to expand offshore oil drilling before Congress takes six weeks off for vacation and the presidential nominating conventions.

Or maybe not. On July 14, during a meeting in Moscow little reported in the foreign press, Interfax reported that Saudi Arabian Secretary-General Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz and Russia's VTS (Military-Technical Cooperation) agency head Mikhail Dmitriev, in the presence of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, signed "an agreement about military-technical collaboration."

Instead, a number of Russian oil giants signed promising contracts with Venezuela. They would replace their American counterparts, previously ousted by Hugo Chavez.

A devastating blow to the much-hyped revival of atomic power has been delivered by an unlikely source---the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC says the "standardized" designs on which the entire premise of returning nuclear power to center stage is based have massive holes in them, and may not be ready for approval for years to come.

Commentators whom I respect are saying, with conviction, that there's no way the U.S. is going to attack Iran. Alexander Cockburn, Jim Lobe and Tom Engelhardt, for example, say no. Others whom I equally respect predict the opposite. Gordon Prather, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter and Justin Raimondo say yes, it's going to happen. Those proffering the comforting message that further insanity is not on the immediate horizon argue that the U.S. is overextended in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the military brass opposes an attack, and that the Condoleezza Rice faction of "realists" in the State Department is heading off Vice President Cheney and the neocons. They point to the presence of Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns at the recent six-nations talks with Iran, and talk of opening a U.S. interests section in Iran. They note the furious denunciations of Rice in the Weekly Standard, presumed to articulate Cheney's views, and suggest that the rage results from a sense of political defeat.

The state's 250,000 industries will now get power only five days a week and malls and government offices have been told to reduce energy consumption.

Our only means of creating real wealth -- the machinery, knowledge and expertise to manufacture goods -- was shipped overseas after Americans facilitated their own fleecing by electing politicians who hated government "regulation" of business. Corporate outsourcing and looting of America began under Ronald Reagan as a deliberate, organized process financed by wealthy business interests, cloaked in "family values" and legitimized by right-wing "think tanks."

Chrysler LLC's financial arm, Chrysler Financial, will stop offering vehicle lease options in the U.S. in order to focus more on financing vehicle purchases, according to multiple media reports Friday. Leases will no longer be an option Aug. 1. The automaker is expected to brief dealers in a conference call late Friday.

Schroder had been following the peak oil theory -- that production of oil will peak, then decline -- for several years before starting the common-interests Facebook group this January.