News In Brief

BUT DON'T HAVE A COW OVER IT

He isn't even a real person, and the last thing you'd call him is eloquent. Still, the gluttonous, politically incorrect, animated TV cartoon character Homer Simpson has achieved a new distinction that many folks who make more major contributions to culture haven't. The Oxford English Dictionary, "the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium" (in its own words), has added Simpson's favorite expression, "doh," to its online edition.

In the US, only three states qualify today as "oil rich"

Each of the US's 10 largest oil fields is in Alaska, Texas, or California, according to a ranking by the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA). And that's although two of them - Midway-Sunset and Kern River, both in California - have been in production since the 1890s. But Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with its estimated reserves of up to 16 billion barrels, could rocket right to the top of the list if President Bush succeeds with his plan to drill there. The largest US fields, by size of recoverable resources (in billions of barrels), according to the EIA:

Prudhoe Bay, Alaska 13.0

East Texas 5.4

Wilmington, Calif. 2.8

Midway-Sunset, Calif. 2.7

Kuparuk River, Alaska 2.6

Wasson, Texas 2.1

Kern River, Calif. 2.1

Yates, Texas 2.0

Panhandle, Texas 1.5

Elk Hills, Calif. 1.4

- Associated Press

(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Monitor