Michel T Halbouty

A recent explosion in demand for oil in the Asia-Pacific region further depletes the area's dwindling oil reserves and increases its dependence on oil from the Middle East. By the year 2000, the Middle East is expected to be supplying nearly all the region's oil.

A recent explosion in demand for oil in the Asia-Pacific region further depletes the area's dwindling oil reserves and increases its dependence on oil from the Middle East. By the year 2000, the Middle East is expected to be supplying nearly all the region's oil.

Some friendships between men are forged on the playing fields of youth; others on the battlefields of war. The longstanding bond between President-elect George Bush and Robert A. Mosbacher, the wealthy Texas oilman he named Tuesday to become his commerce secretary, was tempered in the crucible of personal tragedy. Shortly before Bush's 1970 Texas campaign in which he just failed to win a Senate seat, Mosbacher's first wife died of leukemia.

In a year when the governor admitted lying, taxes went up more than ever before, killer tornadoes struck from west to east and the only records set were ignoble ones like most bank failures and most football teams on probation, the hopes of Texas might be found in a muddy, weedy field here. This northern Dallas suburb is where J. C. Penney, the giant retailer, says it is going to move its headquarters--from New York, no less.

The idea of giving workers virtually full paychecks even after they are laid off from their jobs was denounced as radical--even "communist"--when the late United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther proposed it more than 30 years ago. A basic goal of corporations was, and usually still is, to "maximize profits." And that goal hardly could be realized, Reuther's critics said, if a company continued to pay workers who no longer were working.

Throughout the oil industry, drilling funds have dried up, seismic crews are being dismantled and geologists have been laid off as the search for more oil and gas--once a top national priority--slows to a crawl. Industry executives now say that the real drop in exploration as a result of this winter's collapse of oil prices could be twice as severe as is suggested by the 20% to 30% spending cuts announced by major oil companies in recent weeks.

BACKGROUND OF A BATTLE In the two months since a Houston jury returned an $11.1-billion verdict against Texaco in a lawsuit brought by Pennzoil, many have wondered just what the panel heard during 17 weeks of trial to persuade it that Texaco's alleged interference in Pennzoil's planned takeover of Getty Oil warranted such damages.