Word: rising
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...Welcome to Oil Shock 2005. The spot price of brent crude hit $68 last Thursday?up 44% in the past 12 months?before easing slightly the following day. With the price of oil on the rise, its effects in Asia, on producers and consumers alike, are everywhere to be seen. Last week Beijing continued its frantic push to secure foreign energy reserves when China National Petroleum, a state-owned oil company, trumped an Indian government-controlled firm with a winning $4.2 billion bid for PetroKazakhstan, a Canadian-owned firm with vast oil and gas reserves in the former Soviet republic...
Crude oil is the single most important raw material for the chemical industry. So when oil prices rise sharply?as they have over the past few months?chemical companies usually feel the pinch hardest. But when the big German chemical firm Degussa announced its earnings last month, the news was far from gloomy. Heinz-Joachim Wagner, Degussa's chief financial officer, calculated that the firm's raw-material costs had risen by more than a third over the past 18 months. Still, sales and earnings were up in the first half of this year and Wagner says he expects...
...Britain's Road Haulage Association, which is lobbying the government for a fuel-tax break for truckers. European motorists and airline passengers are also feeling the effect. Moreover, at least some economies are showing signs of incipient inflation. Consumer prices in the U.S. rose 0.5% in July, the biggest rise in three months, and the annual rate of inflation in Britain rose to 2.3% in July, from 2% in June...
...Perhaps an even more important factor is populist backing: leftism is on the rise again in Latin America for a reason, namely the burgeoning feeling around the region that a decade of U.S.-backed capitalist reforms has simply widened an already epic gap between rich and poor-and that the Bush Administration is indifferent to it. As Chavez uses his multi-billion-dollar oil revenues to fund the kind of social projects that Venezuela's legions of impoverished never saw from his kleptocratic predecessors-and to subsidize cheaper oil for his cash-strapped Latin neighbors-more people are willing...
...niche in romance literature with its own fan website: Sheikhs and Desert Love. Eerie, a contributor to 'Aqoul, a blog mostly about news from the Middle East, noting a significant increase in the number of romance novels featuring handsome desert nomads, provided a helpful graph documenting their rise. Yin Shui Si Yuan dismissed these romance novels as "incredibly ill-informed, orientalist, romantic fantasies involving oil sheikhs." Political Animal's Kevin Drum and Abu Aardvark's Marc Lynch have found the subject an amusing distraction from the August doldrums...