Although economic factors become part of the credit for lower prices, analysts said the decision to pump more oil to market is important, too.

The International Energy Agency announced last week that 60 million barrels of oil would be introduced in the market, with half coming from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The other half will come from other nations. The decision came after international OPEC could not come to agreements earlier this month to increase production quotas.

Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey, told CNN prices will probably fall another 50 to 20 cents a gallon in the coming weeks. Lundberg cited the demand for gasoline down because of underemployment or unemployment.

Smoke Portrait traces the development of an unlikely friendship between a young Belgian teenager, Marten Kuypers, and Glen Phayre, a young English woman in her twenties. Glen has left England to live with her aunt, who runs a tea plantation in Ceylon and fills her days with good works, among them the task of writing letters to a Belgian prisoner. But the letters go astray, and are received instead by Marten, eager to discover the wide world outside his small village, and desperately missing his older brother Krelis, who has vanished and is presumed dead. Marten decides to reply to Glen in the guise of the grown-up prisoner she is expecting to hear from, and as their correspondence evolves, they both assume identities that, while false in many respects, remain true to their own selves in other ways. Gradually they come to depend on each other, and their pen friendship proves to be crucial when events in their real lives take on a darker, more threatening significance in the shadow of the impending world war. back then, so I was delighted to hear that the book had been sold to Alma Books and I was naturally very keen to see if the novel had lived up to is early promise....