Tensions between Washington and Iran last year helped send oil to the then-record highs.

Oil prices jumped more than $2 to above $118 a barrel on Friday on supply disruptions in Nigeria and the North Sea and fresh tensions between the United States and Iran, Reuters reported.
US crude futures settled $2.46 higher at $118.52 a barrel, after hitting $119.55 in earlier activity, near the all-time peak of $119.90 reached on Tuesday.
London Brent crude gained $2 to settle at $116.34 a barrel, after hitting a record $117.56 earlier.
A cargo ship hired by the US military fired warning shots at boats suspected to be Iranian, the US Navy said on Friday, underscoring tension in the Persian Gulf as the Pentagon sharpened its warnings to Tehran. Iran denied there had been any confrontation between its forces and a US ship, Iranian media reported. The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Navy official said that no clash has taken place between Iranian boat and a US vessel in the Persian Gulf waters terming it as totally baseless.
Speaking to IRNA, the official said unlike what has been reported, no US vessel has opened fire at any Iranian boat in the Persian Gulf waters.
“Foreign forces are completely aware of our policy in the Persian Gulf region and know very well that any confrontation would face crushing response from Iranian courageous forces,“ he said.
“If such a confrontation takes place in the Persian Gulf waters, then no shooting vessel could survive to report what happened,“ he added.
The official said that releasing such “suspicious reports would only be a source of concern for the vessels currently moving through the waterway in full peace of mind and this is completely against Iran’s strategy to preserve security in the region.“
Tensions between Washington and the OPEC nations last year helped send oil to the then-record highs. Crude prices have surged more than five-fold since 2002 as supplies struggle to keep pace with rising demand in emerging economies, such as China.
Oil also found support on Friday from lost Nigerian production due to workers strike and rebel attacks and from disruptions caused by a planned refinery strike in Scotland. In the North Sea, BP said it had begun shutting down its UK Forties oil pipeline in preparation for a two-day strike at a major Scottish refinery this weekend.
The 700,000-barrel-a-day Forties pipeline carries about half of Britain’s North Sea oil production.
“You have everything coming together and that’s lifting us off again,“ said Tom Bentz, analyst for BNP Paribas Commodity Futures in New York.
A strike by Nigerian workers at Exxon Mobil Corp forced the company to shut down some 200,000 barrels per day of crude oil output, a senior union official said.
Nigerian rebels sabotaged a Royal Dutch Shell oil pipeline in the Niger Delta late on Thursday.
The company, which had already shut 169,000 bpd of Bonny Light crude oil output after a pipeline attack there a week ago, was assessing damage to the line. “Our candid advice to the oil majors is that they should not waste their time repairing any lines as we will continue to sabotage them,“ the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said in an emailed statement.

The top reason why employees in Asia quit is unhappiness with their pay, a study by a human resources firm said on Saturday, DPA reported.
It found 70 percent of the best employers see a large connection between improved performance and higher salaries. While Asian employers have “increased investment“ in compensation, they are not yet getting the “strategic and financial results,“ The Business Times quoted Hewitt Associates principal Nishchae Suri as saying.
In China, 71 percent of employees are unhappy with their pay, 51 percent are unsatisfied in Hong Kong, 44 percent in India, 73 percent in Japan and 42 percent in Singapore, the published survey said.
Dissatisfaction with compensation averages 54 percent for Asia as a whole amid the battle for talent. Pay must not only be fair, but seen to be fair in terms of the job and compared to the pay of other employees, Suri said.

Kuwaiti inflation surged to a fresh record of 9.5 percent year-on-year in January, spurred by strong housing and food costs in the only Persian Gulf Arab oil producer to have scrapped its currency peg to the ailing dollar, ArabianBusiness wrote.
Jumps of 16.1 percent in housing costs and 7.7 percent in food prices led the rise on the All Items Consumer Price Index of the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter, government data obtained by Reuters showed.
In May, Kuwait broke ranks with its Persian Gulf Arab neighbors which are preparing for monetary union by severing its link to the dollar, arguing that currency weakness was fuelling inflation by making some imports more expensive.
The dollar has tumbled to record lows versus the euro and a basket of major currencies this year. Kuwait, in response, has allowed its dinar to rise almost nine percent against the dollar, which comprises the largest weighting in its currency basket.
Dollar pegs have forced Persian Gulf Arab states to track US interest rate cuts to maintain the relative value of their currencies, even though their economies are booming due to a more than five-fold rise in oil prices in the last six years.

The Bush administration is accusing China, Russia and seven other nations of failing to protect American producers of movies, computer software and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy.
The administration on Friday placed the nine countries on a “priority watch list“ that will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions--if the administration decides to pursue complaints before the World Trade Organization, AP reported.
In addition to China and Russia, the other seven countries targeted were Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Pakistan, Thailand and Venezuela.
The administration named another 31 countries to a lower-level watch list, indicating it has concerns about copyright violations in those nations but they don’t warrant the highest level of scrutiny.

The unemployment rate in Spain, once an engine of European job creation, jumped the most in 15 years in the first quarter to a three-year high as the building market contracted. The jobless rate rose to 9.6 percent from 8.6 percent in the fourth quarter, the Madrid-based National Statistics Office said on its website, Bloomberg reported.
The last time the rate increased that much was in the first quarter of 1993, when Spain most recently slipped into recession. The number of unemployed rose 13 percent, or 246,000, to 2.1 million people, the report said. “This is brutal,“ said Jose Luis Martinez, a strategist at Citigroup Inc. in Madrid. “The fact that this can happen while the economy is still growing around 2.5 percent is really worrying.“
The global credit shortage is exacerbating the contraction in the Spanish real estate market following the construction boom that saw almost five million homes built in the past decade. Home sales fell by more than a quarter in the year to January as banks withheld credit from potential buyers. “Spain’s getting hit from all sides,“ Dominic Bryant, an economist at BNP Paribas SA in London, said. “This is still the early stages, and unemployment is picking up pretty quickly already.“