Word: crude
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...Judge Howell Melton went too far in responding to the complaint. Robyn Blumner, executive director of the Florida A.C.L.U., argues that Melton's sweeping order, which barred male workers from bringing sexually suggestive materials to work, would have applied as readily to a newspaper brassiere ad as to the crude posters that offended Robinson. Beyond that, she says, Melton's ruling that workers cannot even possess the pornographic calendars clearly violates their First Amendment rights. (One quirk of the case: by shipyard practice, employees could not bring newspapers or magazines to work -- but the pornography...
Across the South and West, drilling activity for crude oil is at its lowest point in 52 years. The rig count, the best gauge of life in the oil patch, hovered last week near an all-time low of 660. Production from existing fields has shrunk to its lowest since 1962. Scores of drillers, producers and support firms are laying off, folding up or going bankrupt. Warns Denise Bode, president of the International Petroleum Association of America: "The industry is nearing a state of economic collapse...
Unlike the bust of the mid-'80s, which was marked by nose-diving crude-oil prices, the immediate problem this time is natural gas. Often extracted from the same formations as oil, gas accounts for 24% of the nation's energy consumption, mainly in heavy industry. Producer prices at the wellhead have been in a free fall for months, plummeting last month to $1 per 1,000 cu. ft., down 23% from a year ago. At that price, producers say they can barely turn a profit, and many who can still afford to operate are shutting their supplies...
...price slide has been a roundhouse punch to the big energy states of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico, still struggling to climb back from the earlier debacle. Scores of wildcatters, who find most of the domestic crude and who went after gas when the market fell apart, have folded in the past 18 months...
That view seems to be at best a crude oversimplification. Although he was a top executive of Time Inc., Nicholas was basically a financial analyst, a numbers man. Levin too came out of Time Inc., though he rose through its newer cable-television enterprise rather than the publishing operation that was the core of the company for a half-century after its founding...