Barely a day goes by it seems when someone from Stephen Harper's government is not touting the benefits of the Alberta tar sands.

When in the late 1990s it was recognized that world oil production was likely to start declining early in the twenty-first century, petroleum geologists and other industry observers started talking and writing about the economic damage this event would cause. Serious economic consequences were a virtual certainty because, since the beginning of the industrial age, economic growth had required increasing quantities of fossil fuels.

ACLU tells agency police can't forbid taking pictures

Christopher Fussell likes to take pictures of trains and buses. The 29-year-old Oregonian has shot photos and video of transit systems all over the United States.

It wasn't until he came to Baltimore, he said Tuesday, that he was detained for committing photography.

Spain's construction crisis squashed Emilio Blanco's third-division football career. The 26-year-old athlete once earned €2,000 a month playing for city-run teams in southern Spain – all sponsored by construction companies. But in 2008, when the country's housing bubble burst, Mr Blanco's livelihood dried up, too. After working for months without pay, he returned to his parents' home and joined the ranks of Spain's 4.9 million unemployed.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker does not like wasteful spending. He made that much clear upon his election last fall by returningmore than $800 million in federal funding for a high-speed rail line through the state (some of which he later asked for back).

MINSK, Belarus (AP) — A sharp devaluation of the Belarusian ruble has spread panic across the country, with people rushing on Wednesday to buy dollars, euros, toasters and canned goods — anything that will not lose its value as quickly as the national currency. Belarusians swept store shelves and queued for entire days at currency exchange offices in a desperate attempt to protect their savings from the country's sinking fortunes.

How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Côte d’Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity.

Unembeddable 1:53 youtube from Post Carbon Institute, featuring Tom Whipple

WAFRA, Kuwait—The Arabian Peninsula has fueled the global economy with oil for five decades. How long it can continue to do so hinges on projects like one unfolding here in the desert sands along the Saudi Arabia-Kuwait border.

Saudi Arabia became the world's top oil producer by tapping its vast reserves of easy-to-drill, high-quality light oil. But as demand for energy grows and fields of "easy oil" around the world start to dry up, the Saudis are turning to a much tougher source: the billions of barrels of heavy oil trapped beneath the desert.

When the political history of the last 30 years is written, scholars will no doubt describe a rightward revolution that jolted this country out of its embrace of New Deal, big-government progressivism and into a love affair with small-government conservatism. But this change, significant as it is, has been undergirded by a less apparent but no less monumental revolution that has transformed the nation's values, ideals and aspirations. Over those same 30 years, we have become a different country morally from what we were.

Controlling overall inflation is a goal of monetary policy. Measures of overall, or headline, inflation attempt to include changes in the prices paid for a wide variety of goods—that is, what households actually have to pay for their daily purchases. This is a sensible notion of precisely what the central bank can and should control over the medium term.

Let’s just put aside the issue of Batman being trained by ninjas in the films, or the question of whether in the comics Batman operates with sort-of-superpowers when interacting in stories alongside Superman and other such characters.

Of the 251,287 WikiLeaks documents McClatchy obtained, 23,927 of them — nearly one in 10 — reference oil. Gazprom alone is mentioned in 1,789.

In the cables, U.S. diplomats can be found plotting ways to prevent state entities such as Gazprom from taking control of key petroleum facilities, pressing oil companies to adjust their policies to match U.S. foreign policy goals, helping U.S.-based oil companies arrange deals on favorable terms and pressing foreign governments to assist companies that are willing to do the U.S.'s bidding.