IEA said: "We are in an era of higher oil prices.”  

"So if we look at 100 dollars per barrel of oil we have to do so with an understanding that prices are unlikely to return to levels seen in the early part of this decade."

Average regular gasoline prices touched an all-time high of $3.227 per gallon, up 27 cents in a month and surpassing the previous peak hit in May 2007, AAA said in its daily survey of more than 85,000 self-serve filling stations. 

The travel group said it expected pump prices to rise further in the coming months, breaking above $4 a gallon in some areas by summer, when road travel typically peaks.

The mortgage foreclosure crisis has caused a drop in cities' revenues, a spike in crime, more homelessness and an increase in vacant properties, a survey of elected local officials out today shows.  

About two-thirds of 211 officials surveyed by the National League of Cities reported an increase in foreclosures in their cities in the past year, according to the online and e-mail questionnaire. A third of them reported a drop in revenues and an increase in abandoned and vacant properties and urban blight. 

"There's a reduction in revenues at the same time that more services are needed," says Cynthia McCollum, president of the National League of Cities and councilwoman in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville. "Because of foreclosures, people are stealing, crime is on the rise and we don't have more money for cops on the street."

Senate Republicans . . .  blocked efforts to give bankruptcy courts more power to stave off home foreclosures, a move the chamber's Democratic leader called "a big mistake." 

President Bush says the bill would have done more to bail out lenders and speculators than to help homeowners. 

 "The people on Wall Street are high-fiving. They just won again," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said after the vote. 

"The big banks just won again. The mortgage bankers won again. Oh, there are a few losers out there, like millions of consumers -- millions of people who are going into foreclosure or are about to go into foreclosure. They lost." 

The banking industry and President Bush opposed the bill, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduce a filer's mortgage debt to the home's current market value.  

Bush's GOP allies filibustered the measure Thursday afternoon, invoking Senate rules to require 60 votes to cut off debate and bring it to the floor; Democrats came 12 votes short of that mark.

President Bush is to veto legislation Saturday meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics and will argue that the agency needs to use tougher methods than the U.S. military to wrest information from terrorism suspects, administration officials said. 

Bush's decision to veto an intelligence authorization bill that contains the waterboarding provision is the subject of his weekly presidential radio address, to be broadcast Saturday, the White House said. 

"The bill would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror: the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Friday.

 Rudolph W. Giuliani’s statement on Wednesday that he was uncertain whether waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique, was torture drew a sharp rebuke yesterday from Senator John McCain, who said that his failure to call it torture reflected his inexperience.

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“All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today,” Mr. McCain, who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, said in a telephone interview.

Of presidential candidates like Mr. Giuliani, who say that they are unsure whether waterboarding is torture, Mr. McCain said: “They should know what it is. It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.”

The relentless upward march in oil prices, which have more than doubled since their Jan. 16, 2007, low point last year, reached yet another new record yesterday, closing at $105.47 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

One key issue: the value of the dollar. Crude oil is priced in dollars. So when the dollar is falling in value against other currencies, the price of crude oil usually rises. Why? Because European and Japanese importers can still buy oil for the same price in their own currencies even if the dollar price rises. Oil exporting countries also like higher dollar-denominated oil prices when the dollar goes down so that their revenues cover the same amount of goods purchased in countries other than the United States.

[T]he unemployment rate dropped by 0.1%. How can it drop if we lost jobs? Basically, because the unemployment rate is estimated from a survey called the household survey. They literally call hundreds of thousands of homes and ask if anyone is working or looking for work. If you are not looking for work, then you are not counted as unemployed. This month the household survey showed a drop of 255,000 jobs (quite the difference from the headline survey); but an even larger number of people, 450,000, are not looking for a job, presumably because they do not expect to find one. So, even though fewer people are working, the data shows the unemployment rate falling. Go figure.