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NEW YORK - Oil prices ended lower Thursday, pulling back from the previous day’s rally, as disappointing data on the U.S. economy signaled further cutbacks in energy demand for the world’s thirstiest consumer.
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In another sign Americans are driving less, U.S. filling stations hungry for business continued to ratchet down retail gas prices, with a gallon of regular falling on average 1.7 cents to $3.909, according auto club AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express.

Light, sweet crude for September delivery fell $2.69 to settle at $124.08 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, a day after the contract soared more than $4 in the biggest one-day jump in two weeks.

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CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama seized on a record oil company profit to argue that rival John McCain offers only tax breaks for Big Oil and “short-term gimmicks” to consumers struggling with soaring gasoline prices.
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The Illinois senator quickly incorporated news of Exxon Mobil’s nearly $12 billion quarterly profit into his remarks at a town hall meeting here.

“No U.S. corporation ever made that much in a quarter,” Obama said. “But while Big Oil is making record profits, you are paying record prices at the pump and our economy is leaving working people behind.”

McCain’s response, Obama said, is to propose a corporate tax plan that would give “$4 billion each year to the oil companies, including $1.2 billion for Exxon Mobil alone” and a gas tax holiday that Obama said would only “pad oil company profits and save you — at best — half a tank of gas” over an entire summer.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday held out the prospect of further troop reductions in Iraq later this year as he hailed a new “degree of durability” in security gains there.
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Seizing on the latest signs of progress on the ground, Bush delivered perhaps his most upbeat assessment since the early stages of the unpopular 5-year-old war, now a central issue in the U.S. election campaign to pick his successor.

“This has been a month of encouraging news from Iraq,” Bush said in a hastily arranged White House appearance. “Violence is down to its lowest level since the spring of 2004, and we’re now in our third consecutive month with reduced violence levels holding steady.

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HOUSTON - Exxon Mobil Corp. reported second-quarter earnings of $11.68 billion Thursday, the biggest profit from operations ever by any U.S. corporation, but the results were well short of Wall Street expectations and its shares slumped 3 percent.
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The world’s largest publicly traded oil company said net income for the April-June period came to $2.22 a share, up from $10.26 billion, or $1.83 a share, a year ago.

Revenue rose 40 percent to $138.1 billion from $98.4 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

Excluding an after-tax charge of $290 million related to an Exxon Valdez court settlement, earnings amounted to $11.97 billion, or $2.27 per share.

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A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations.

Many researchers want to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, saying a “clean-slate” approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet’s birth in 1969.

On behalf of the government, BBN Technologies Inc. is overseeing the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, a network on which researchers will be able to test new ideas without damaging the current Internet.

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Full Story At msnbc.com

Questions and answers about the Hope for Homeowners Act of 2008, signed into law by President Bush Wednesday to try to steer as many as 400,000 struggling homeowners away from foreclosure:

Q: What exactly will the legislation do?

A: It will allow those who qualify to cancel their old mortgage loans and replace them with 30-year fixed-rate loans for up to 90 percent of the home’s current value. The FHA will insure a total of $300 billion of the loans over a three-year period.

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WASHINGTON - After upsetting some conservatives by signaling an openness to higher payroll taxes for Social Security, Republican John McCain gave the simplest of answers when asked if he would raise taxes as president.

“No,” McCain said sternly when the question was put to him by a young girl at a meeting Tuesday in Sparks, Nevada.

Despite previous vows not to raise taxes of any kind, McCain had caught some Republicans by surprise by suggesting the opposite.

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Full Story At Bloomberg.com

July 30 (Bloomberg) — Wyeth and Elan Corp. shares plummeted after their experimental Alzheimer’s treatment showed no benefit in the majority of patients and was linked to a brain-swelling side effect in a test.

Wyeth fell the most in almost six years in New York trading, and Elan, Ireland’s largest drugmaker, dropped the most in three years.

Bapineuzumab is the first treatment shown to help patients by removing spaghetti-like clumps of protein that accumulate in their brains. To get that result, Elan and Wyeth had to exclude 65 percent of patients in the 234-person study who had a gene called ApoE4, the companies reported yesterday at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease in Chicago. Of remaining patients, 47 received the drug and 32 took a placebo.

Both groups tested with the drug reported serious side effects, among them the brain-swelling condition called vasogenic edema. Patients receiving higher doses didn’t record stronger benefits, researchers said. A drug that works usually has greater effects when the dose is increased, said Michael Krensavage, founder of Krensavage Asset Management in New York.

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