Iraq Birth Defects
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Iraq Birth Defects - Video
Iraq will sell its Basrah Light crude to Asia at the biggest discount since January 2009 as it follows Saudi Arabia and Iran in cutting prices amid a slump in Brent futures to the lowest in almost four years.
Brent crude, the European benchmark, fell 2 percent in London today while West Texas Intermediate lost 1.4 percent in New York. Iraq, the second-biggest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, trimmed the price differentials for supplies to Asia and Europe for November, the countrys State Oil Marketing Co., known as SOMO, said yesterday.
The worlds two most-traded oil futures are collapsing as demand growth slows and output expands in the U.S., Russia and other nations. OPECs biggest producers are responding by cutting prices, sparking speculation they are ready to compete for market share. Iran last week said it will sell oil to Asia in November at the biggest discount in almost six years, matching cuts by Saudi Arabia.
OPEC is still giving no indication that it might take steps to shore up prices, Carsten Fritsch, an analyst at Commerzbank AG in Frankfurt, said in a report. OPEC countries appear to be more interested in defending their market shares at present than stabilizing prices.
Brent for November settlement slid $1.83 to $88.38 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange as of 11:57 a.m. London time. The contract closed at $90.05 on Oct. 9, the lowest since June 2012. Prices have decreased about 20 percent this year.
WTI for November delivery was at $84.61 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, down $1.21. The contract settled at $85.77 on Oct. 9, the lowest since December 2012. The U.S. benchmark crude was at a discount of $3.76 to Brent. It closed at $4.39 on Oct. 10.
Prices slumped after OPEC increased oil supply by the most in almost three years last month. While Societe Generale SA estimates the group needs to reduce output by about 1 million barrels a day, analysts were split last week on whether it will announce a cut at its next gathering in November.
Whats happening in the market is good for big Middle-East customers like us, said B. Ashok, the chairman of Indian Oil Corp., the countrys largest state-run refiner that counts Iraq as its biggest supplier. We have to wait and see where prices go in coming months. Usually, they tend to rise a bit in winter.
Venezuela will seek an extraordinary OPEC meeting to address falling prices, the nations foreign ministry said in a Twitter post on Oct. 10. Kuwaiti Oil Minister Ali Al-Omair said many countries considered the groups current output quota to be reasonable and fair and the country hasnt received an invitation to any emergency meeting, state news agency Kuna reported yesterday.
Although it looks like prices have touched their lowest level, theyll fall a bit more before they are hit by an actual move by OPEC, Will Yun, a commodities analyst at Hyundai Futures Co., said by phone in Seoul. Countries cutting their official selling prices is one of the factors thats been driving the prices down in the short term.
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Iraq Follows Saudi Price Cuts as Brent Oil Falls With WTI
BAGHDAD -- Militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on Monday captured a military training camp in western Iraq, inching closer to full control of the restive Anbar province, as a spate of deadly bombings shook Baghdad, hitting mostly Shiite neighborhoods and leaving at least 30 dead.
The attacks, which came as Iraqi Shiites marked a major holiday for their sect with families crowding the streets in celebration, raised new concerns that the Sunni militant group is making gains despite U.S.-led coalition airstrikes.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, on a visit to Iraq, warned that the airstrikes will not be enough to defeat the extremist group and stressed that the Iraqi security forces would have to do the "heavy work on the ground."
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Despite U.S. airstrikes and resistance from Iraqi military forces, ISIS terrorists continue to make headway through Iraq's Anbar province. If the...
But Iraqi troops, overstretched and overwhelmed by ISIS' summer blitz that seized large swaths of territory in western and northern Iraq, continued to come under pressure Monday in the western Anbar province, where militants seized an Iraqi military training camp.
The camp, near the town of Hit that fell to the insurgents earlier this month, was overrun in the morning hours after clashes with Iraqi soldiers who were forced to abandon the camp and withdraw from the area, two Anbar officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Town residents confirmed the camp's fall, speaking to the AP also on condition of anonymity, fearing for their own safety.
ISIS touted its conquest of the camp in a statement Monday. The statement could not immediately be verified but it was posted on militant websites commonly used by the group.
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Maj. Mike Lyons (Ret.), CBS News Military Analyst, discusses Turkeys agenda in the fight against Islamic State militants.
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ISIS captures Iraq army camp as bombs hit Baghdad
Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday said the unrest after a Missouri police officer fatally shot an unarmed black 18-year-old in August shows law enforcement must directly address tensions within communities.
Holder also called for an expanded review of police techniques and tactics in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting to provide national direction to law enforcement.
Holder and former President Bill Clinton spoke at the start of a two-day meeting of mayors and police chiefs gathered to talk about lessons from the shooting of Brown by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson and the protests that followed. Holder told the group what happened in the St. Louis suburb put a national spotlight on the rift between police and citizens in many cities.
The events in Ferguson reminded us that we cannot and we must not allow tensions, which are present in so many neighborhoods across America, to go unresolved, Holder said at the meeting held by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
He said the Justice Departments broad review of police techniques, tactics and training should be expanded to provide strong, national direction on a scale not seen since President Lyndon Johnsons Commission on Law Enforcement nearly half a century ago.
Holder, who announced his resignation last month, visited Ferguson after the shooting to help ease tensions. The Justice Department is investigating whether Browns civil rights were violated.
When I traveled to Ferguson in the days after that incident, my pledge to the people of that community was that our nations Department of Justice would remain focused on the challenges they faced, and the deep-seated issues and difficult conversations that the shooting brought to the surface, long after national headlines had faded, he said.
The meeting on lessons from Ferguson was held at the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock and marked the 20th anniversary of Clinton establishing the Community Oriented Policing Services program. Clinton and Holder heralded the program, saying it was key to restoring trust between police and citizens.
We know that if we have a situation where the law enforcement community and the government generally is inclusive and represents all elements of the community and (is) connected, were more likely to make good decent decisions and less likely to make big bad mistakes, Clinton said.
Clinton also warned about the impact of departments using surplus military equipment under a program that is now the subject of a White House review. The program began during Clintons administration, but the former president said he didnt know about it.
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Bill Clinton, Eric Holder talk missteps of Ferguson ...
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WASHINGTON The continuing protests in St. Louis over the shooting death of a young black man offer a stark reminder that whoever replaces Eric Holder as attorney general will arrive at the Justice Department at a unique moment for the agency's civil rights and criminal justice work. While the department over the past 13 years has been preoccupied with terrorism and Wall Street's infractions, the next attorney general's tenure could well be shaped by confronting the legacy of racism in America.
Holder often spoke loudly on these issues, saying what President Barack Obama decided he could not, but his successor will have to wrestle with a complex array of issues. Racial tension over the police shooting of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Mo., awakened this summer national concern about the makeup of local police departments and the bias and behavior of officers.
States have recently passed an array of new voting laws, from mandates to obtain a voter ID to limits on early voting, that raise civil-rights red flags as well. In confronting these new regulations, the Justice Department now must respond without the power of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that was dismantled last year by the Supreme Court.
Seismic changes are also underway in how the Justice Department approaches sentencing guidelines and the war on drugs, which have long driven the unmatched rise of incarceration in America, and the parallel surge in costs particularly for minority communities. As a result of a shift in thinking about the goals of prison policy (and the effectiveness of the war on drugs), the federal prison population is now declining for the first time in three decades, a trend prison-reform groups are anxious to see continue.
For all of these reasons, criminal-justice and civil-rights advocates are counting on another vocal leader to replace Holder. They are looking for someone who will prioritize those roles of Justice Department's mission policing discrimination, protecting voting rights, redirecting prison policy which have been periodically neglected, deemed outdated, or unwise.
The intensity with which these issues remain in the news, however, will complicate the confirmation process for Obama's nominee. It's harder today than just a few years ago to dismiss the persistence of racial bias in the criminal justice system, a topic that may be easier to openly acknowledge post-Ferguson. But there remains far less (if any) political agreement on the racial impacts of new voting laws.
"If you say at your confirmation hearings 'we're going to spend a lot of time and effort on looking at these [state] statues that seem to restrict voting,' the Republicans are going to go crazy on that. Just crazy," says Richard Ugelow, a former longtime attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and now a member of the faculty at American University's Washington College of Law.
Part of the department's challenge in its civil-rights work is that broad public disagreement over whether discrimination still exists has widened as discrimination itself has taken on subtler forms. Government agencies no longer openly bar minority job applicants. But recruiting practices may still have the effect of excluding them. Landlords no longer advertise when blacks aren't welcome. But the housing options available to minorities are still constricted by the fewer possibilities shown to them by landlords and real estate agents.
Likewise, public schools are no longer segregated by policy. But housing patterns have the effect of making them so, exposing children to unequal education. And literal poll taxes no longer exist. But voter IDs have been likened to them even by federal judges.
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The many civil rights and criminal justice battles that await Eric Holder's successor