Currently 26 billion barrels a year, world consumption of oil is rising at a rate of 2 percent annually.

At the annual stockholders meeting, investors heard a presentation on the numerous challenges facing the company, including among them the threat from a rival's multibillion-dollar patent-infringement suit and the declining sales for the company's powerful microprocessor chip.

In California today, Hispanics under the age of eighteen account for more than 43 percent, compared with a decade ago, when it was about 35 percent.

So dogged were Frances Perkins' investigations of the garment industry, and her lobbying for wage and hour reform was persistent, Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt recruited Perkins to work within the government, rather than as a social worker.

The state has proposed new rules that would set minimum staffing levels for nurses, rules intended to ensure that at least one nurse is assigned for every four patients put through triage in a hospital emergency room.

Building on civilizations that preceded them in coastal Peru, the Mochica developed their own elaborate society, based on cultivating such crops like corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and shellfish, and exploiting other wild and domestic resources.

Minivans carry as many as seven passengers, and compared with sport utility vehicles, most cost less, get better gas mileage, and make it easy for passengers to get in and out, and have a smoother, more car-like ride.

Fossils of a whale that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have been recovered by paleontologists.

Humans have been damaging the environment for centuries by overcutting trees and farming too intensively, and though some protective measures, like the establishment of national forests and wildlife sanctuaries, having been taken decades ago, great increases in population and in the intensity of industrialization are causing a worldwide ecological crisis.

In 1914 a total of 469,000 cars and trucks were produced in the United States, but in 1929 almost twice the numbers of trucks alone came off the assembly lines.