Barrels

Gasoline prices are keeping up their record-setting ways. California drivers paid an average of $4.358 for a gallon of regular gasoline, up 6.6 cents from a week earlier, the Energy Department said Monday. That's a fresh record high for this time of year and is 48.4 cents above the year-earlier price. Nationally, the average rose 7.2 cents to $3.793, also a record for this week, according to Energy Department statistics. A year earlier, the average U.S. price was 27.3 cents lower.

Retail gasoline prices fell in California and across much of the nation over the last week, while crude oil recovered a little of the previous weeks' losses. The average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline in California fell 3.1 cents to $4.336 a gallon, according to the Energy Department's weekly survey of fuel prices, released Monday. That followed two weeks of increases totaling 28.1 cents a gallon. Last year at this time, a gallon of regular gasoline in California was 12.1 cents cheaper.

After years of gaining ground, the Silver Bullet has finally caught the King. Coors Light outsold Budweiser last year to become the nation's second-most-popular brew after Bud Light, according to estimates by an industry trade publication. Beer Marketer's Insights reported this week that Anheuser-Busch InBev sold 17.7 million barrels of its flagship lager in the U.S., less than the 18.2 million barrels that beer drinkers bought of Coors Light. It marks the first time in nearly two decades that Anheuser-Busch hasn't claimed the two top spots on sales charts.

If Sardar Biglari wants to control Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc., he'll first have to get past the Southern-style restaurant chain's new "poison pill" defense. Board members of the Tennessee-based company approved a shareholder rights plan to try to obstruct investor Biglari's hostile takeover efforts. The strategy would prevent Biglari, who recently raised his stake in Cracker Barrel to more than 16%, from accumulating 20% without offering shareholders a premium. To do so would water down the value of his shares.

The number keeps changing, and the news keeps getting worse: Now the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico could be flowing at 60,000 barrels a day. Hours before President Obama took to the airwaves to speak to Americans about the gulf oil spill, the government group whose task it is to assess the flow rate from BP's undersea well came up with a revised estimate of 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day. A previous revision from the federal Flow...

A half-mile stretch of La Palma Avenue in Anaheim was blocked off for three hours Friday morning and 20 people were evacuated from nearby businesses after a flammable liquid began leaking from one of 16 allegedly stolen barrels on a truck. Alvin Kenneth Smiley, 32, of Los Angeles and two 17-year-old males whose names were not released were arrested at La Palma Avenue and Grove Street, less than a half-mile from the Multiwire West Co.

Among the many reasons given for the recent surge in gas prices is China's soaring demand for petroleum. Because the Chinese are running around the world buying up every available barrel of oil, the argument goes, we Americans have to pay that much more to outbid them for the leftover pools of crude. And the fact that the Chinese yuan has been growing stronger while the American dollar is shrinking in value has only exacerbated the problem. Unquestionably, there's some truth to this.

They lie in the shadow of Interstate 5 and a stone's throw from the trolley line--1,300 drums of toxic waste oil and acid sludge left over from the reprocessing of used crankcase oil at Nelco Refinery Corp. First, the company said it had invented a machine to turn the wastes into fertilizer. Then it said the machine caught fire. Now Nelco says it wants to reprocess the stuff in Mexico, but it says the earthquake there has gummed up the paper work.

What is a barrel of oil worth? Generally, the answer depends on a number of factors, including the mood of the commodities markets, the grade of the oil and demand at the gas pump. The basic assumption, however, is that the oil has a value because it eventually will be available for use. But in a historic move, Ecuador is asking the world to put a dollar figure on oil that will not be used — oil it intends to protect from excavation. On Tuesday, Ecuador and the United Nations Development Programme began soliciting donations for a trust fund that would remunerate the country if it forgoes drilling in a pristine portion of its Amazon rain forest for 10 years.

Skip Stokes, decked out in buckskin britches and a floppy hat, dresses like Daniel Boone and shoots like Annie Oakley. Next to Stokes is a burly, bearded man wearing a coonskin cap and a string of grizzly bear claws around his neck. Both men look like they either just stepped out of a "Jeremiah Johnson" movie or got lost on their way to a Davy Crockett look-alike contest.

The U.S. is relying more on Canada and Saudi Arabia for its crude oil needs as imports and production in other supplier nations recede to some of their lowest levels in years, according to a report released by the Energy Department. The top five foreign suppliers of crude have remained unchanged, but there have been important developments in some of those countries. The U.S. is importing less oil than it has since 1999 because of a combination of factors such as lower demand since the global recession and increased domestic production in states such as Texas and North Dakota.

After years of gaining ground, the Silver Bullet has finally caught the King. Coors Light outsold Budweiser last year to become the nation's second-most-popular brew after Bud Light, according to estimates by an industry trade publication. Beer Marketer's Insights reported this week that Anheuser-Busch InBev sold 17.7 million barrels of its flagship lager in the U.S., less than the 18.2 million barrels that beer drinkers bought of Coors Light. It marks the first time in nearly two decades that Anheuser-Busch hasn't claimed the two top spots on sales charts.

Retail gasoline prices jumped higher over the last week in California and most of the nation, adding to what was already a record start for a new year. The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in California rose 7.2 cents to $3.707, shattering the old record for this time of year: $3.332 a gallon, set last year, according to the Energy Department's weekly survey of filling stations. The U.S. average rose 8.3 cents to $3.382. That easily surpassed the old record for this time of year: $3.089 a gallon, also set last year.

U.S. fuel demand in November dropped, pulled lower by a decline in gasoline consumption, the American Petroleum Institute said. Total deliveries of petroleum products, a measure of demand, declined 1.1% to 18.8 million barrels a day last month from a year earlier, the industry-funded group said today in a report. Year-to-date consumption has averaged 19 million barrels a day, down 0.7% from the same period in 2010. Gasoline demand dropped 1.8% to 8.65 million barrels a day last month compared with the same month in 2010.

Teachers, doctors, court reporters, border-control agents, ambulance drivers and other public-sector workers walked off the job across Britain on Wednesday in a massive protest against the government's plans to overhaul their pensions. Unions estimated that as many as 2 million state employees went on strike, which would make it the biggest mass industrial action this nation has seen in at least a generation. The government insisted that the number was much smaller, with Prime Minister David Cameron describing the one-day job action as "a damp squib.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the Republican candidate who may have the most to gain if Herman Cain tumbles in the polls, did not rush to his rival's defense Monday night during a radio interview - instead stating that scrutiny of Cain's record was to be expected given his frontrunner status in national polls. Perry spoke to Fox New host Bill O'Reilly hours after Illinois native Sharon Bialek appeared with attorney Gloria Allred to accuse Cain of making unwanted sexual advances as she sought his help for a job in 1997.    "Any time that you rise to the top of the polls, any time that you appear that you are going to be an individual of substance that those on the left are concerned about, you're going to get whacked," Perry told O'Reilly when asked whether the scrutiny of Herman Cain served as a cautionary tale.

If the people of the Chukotka peninsula ever wanted a symbol for their land, the choice would be obvious. Forget the reindeer. Forget the walrus and the frozen tundra. It would have to be the rusty fuel drum. Across the Bering Sea from Alaska, the huge peninsula is a spectacularly scenic region with icy peaks, vast treeless plains and a big litter problem. Strewn across the landscape like so many empty beer cans are nearly 2 million discarded, 3-foot-tall metal barrels.

A video released by BP this week has underscored questions about the rate at which oil is spewing from a broken pipe on the Gulf of Mexico seabed. BP and government officials have pegged the leak resulting from the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster at 5,000 barrels a day, or about 200,000 gallons. But a scientist who analyzed the video of the gushing pipe said Thursday the oil flow appeared to be much greater. "I spent a couple of hours this afternoon analyzing the video, and the number I get is 70,000 barrels a day coming out of that pipe," said Steve Wereley, a Purdue University mechanical engineering professor.

Did you ever notice that Andy Rooney was the TV equivalent of the cracker-barrel philosopher? The longtime "60 Minutes" essayist, who is stepping down at the age of 92, was a sophisticated former war correspondent, but in his brief commentaries he increasingly played the role of the curmudgeon whose crankiness concealed homespun wisdom. That put him in the company of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, but there also was a little Jerry Seinfeld in him. Or the other way around: Seinfeld's observational humor was part of the Rooney repertoire first.

So far there have been no dead bodies, no safes stuffed with soggy cash, no rusty stolen cars. The only things exposed by the receding water at Echo Park Lake have been shopping carts, 55-gallon steel barrels, a parking-enforcement "boot" and lots of skateboards. But who knows what is still hidden in the muck at the bottom of the 13-acre lake, soon to be dredged and outfitted with a leak-proof clay liner? Officials say that leaks once required them to replenish the lake with valuable drinking water.