— President Barack Obama plans to visit Oklahoma next week, staying overnight in Oklahoma City on Wednesday and traveling the next day to the oil storage hub in Cushing, where he will talk about the administration's record on energy.

It will be Obama's first trip to Oklahoma during his presidency and comes at a time when he is battling Republicans over high gas prices and his rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline.

In recent speeches, Obama has been pointing out that he strongly supports the segment of the Keystone XL pipeline connecting Cushing to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.

TransCanada has announced that it will proceed with construction of that segment to relieve a bottleneck in Cushing that has been unable to move because of a lack of pipeline capacity.