U.S. Spent $27.3 Billion on Foreign Oil in June

Dallas – T. Boone Pickens today launched the first in a new series of
whiteboard video presentations, outlining the role natural gas can play in helping to
achieve President Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to cut all imports of oil from the
Middle East in 10 years. The video can be seen at
www.pickensplan.com/whiteboard2010.

“There are eight years left on the President’s campaign pledge to eliminate Middle East
oil in 10 years, and we want to help him and our nation get there,” said Pickens. “The
Pickens Plan is the only real plan that can make dramatic progress on

By VOA News

Crude oil prices fell Wednesday after a U.S. government report showed an increase in inventories, reflecting decreased demand.

The price of a barrel of oil for future delivery fell 35 cents [about one percent] to $38.68 a barrel during trading in

(inan.info)-By Mike O'Sullivan
Junction City, California

Firefighters in California are making progress against 30 major wildfires still burning around the state. Since the end of June, crews have contained more than 2,000 blazes in what officials have called the biggest fire episode in California's history. Mike O'Sullivan reports from Junction City, California, the effort is the first round in a battle that is expected in coming months.

The fires were started by lightning. By early July, they had spread throughout the state, and came six weeks ahead of California's usual fire season.

Firefighters have contained most of the blazes, which have scorched more than 400,000 hectares of wilderness areas, but stubborn fires still burn near Junction City, a town of 800 in the northern part of the state. Some neighborhoods remain evacuated.


Personnel and equipment arrived from

(inan.info)-By VOA News

The U.S. State Department's acting inspector general says he is investigating the department's possible role in lucrative oil deals between Iraq and Western oil companies.

U.S. policy has been to discourage any such deals because Iraq does not yet have a national oil law that would fairly distribute the revenue.

Acting Inspector General Harold Geisel writes in a letter to lawmakers that he has started a

(inan.info)-

People living near vulnerable creeks and rivers along Colorado's Front Range may soon get advance notice of potentially deadly floods, thanks to a new forecasting system being tested this summer by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

Known as the NCAR Front Range Flash Flood Prediction System, it combines detailed atmospheric conditions with information about stream flows to predict floods along specific streams and catchments.

"The goal is to provide improved guidance about the likelihood of a flash flood event many minutes out to an hour or two before the waters start rising," says NCAR scientist David Gochis, one of the developers of the new forecasting system. "We want to increase the lead time of a forecast, while decreasing the uncertainty about whether a flood will occur."

Funding to create the system came from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is NCAR's sponsor, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"This project is an excellent example of using basic research findings to improve forecasts important to saving lives," said Cliff Jacobs, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric Sciences.

The Front Range, because of its steep topography and intense summer storms, is unusually vulnerable to summertime flash floods. Such floods have claimed the lives of hundreds of people and accounted for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages throughout the region's history.

Flash floods are difficult to predict because they happen suddenly, often the result of heavy cloudbursts that may stall over a particular watershed.

Forecasters can give a few hours' notice that weather conditions might lead to flooding, and radars can detect heavy rain within minutes.

But whether a flood hits a specific river or creek also depends on soil, topographic, and hydrologic conditions that are characteristic to particular watersheds. Thus, emergency managers may not know that a flash flood is imminent until the waters begin to rise.

The goal of the NCAR system is to provide officials at least 30 minutes warning of

(inan.info)-By VOA News


World oil prices fell about $5 a barrel in Monday's trading as the dollar grew stronger compared to other currencies.

The dollar strengthened after President Bush told the G8 summit that Washington supports a "strong" dollar.

When the dollar strengthens, commodities like oil become more expensive and less attractive to investors.

The price of oil for future delivery fell as

(inan.info)-By VOA News

Firefighters in the western U.S. state of California are continuing to battle wildfires threatening more than 10,000 homes along the cost of the Pacific Ocean.

The state fire protection agency Saturday, said firefighters have contained many of

(inan.info)-By Mary Motta
Washington

In his weekly radio address, U.S. President George Bush once again urged Congress to lift its long-standing ban on offshore oil-and-gas drilling to increase U.S. energy production. Mr. Bush said Democrats in Congress are blocking his proposals, and, as a result, are partly to blame for high gasoline costs. VOA's Mary Motta has this report from Washington.

U.S. President George Bush focused on the price of gas in making his case for offshore drilling.

"The fundamental problem behind high gas prices is that the supply of oil has not kept up with the rising demand across the world. One obvious solution is for America to increase our

(inan.info)-By VOA News

Authorities in California say lightning strikes have sparked more than 400 fires in the northern part of the state, consuming thousands of hectares and forcing some residents to evacuate.

The office of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says the fires stretch more than 500 kilometers from south of San Francisco to the border of the neighboring state of Oregon. The governor has ordered the California National Guard to assist in fighting the blazes.

Meanwhile, much of California is bracing for a fifth straight day of record high temperatures. Forecasters say temperatures reached above 32 degrees Celsius on Saturday in San Jose, Los Angeles and the state capital of

(inan.info)-NSF-funded basic research may cause astronomers to re-examine the masses and ages of young stars and star formation theories
Photo of twin stars observed in the Orion Nebula, 1,500 light years from the Earth.

Twin stars observed in the Orion Nebula, 1,500 light years from the Earth.
Credit and Larger Version

View a video interview with astronomer Keivan Stassun.

Two stars, each with the same mass and in orbit around each other, are twins that one would expect to be identical. So astronomers were surprised when they discovered that twin stars in the Orion Nebula, a well-known stellar nursery 1,500 light years away, were not identical at all. In fact, these stars exhibited significant differences in brightness, surface temperature and possibly even size.

The study, which is published in the