Yahoo! News: Iraq

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• Reuters Sports Schedule at 0015 GMT on Tuesday, Nov 19
• THINGS TO BE THANKFUL FOR THIS THANKSGIVING
• Aides: US-Afghan deal offers concessions for each
• Syria rebel chieftain killed; Assad forces bomb besieged town
• The World Isn't Optimistic About Obama's "If You Like Your Plan" Fix
• Libyan army deploys in capital against militias
• Aid workers struggle to get polio vaccine to Syrians
• Renewed violence as Iraq executes 12 'terrorists'
• Seven Weeks Might Be Too Soon to Blame Obamacare for Killing Liberalism
• Special Report: The Pentagon's doctored ledgers conceal epic waste
• U.S.-Afghan security pact hits impasse as time runs out
• Insight: Tunisia Islamists seek jihad in Syria with one eye on home
• Despite diplomatic spats, U.S. arms firms trust in Mideast
• Obama health care woes become credibility fight
• Wedding murder exposes Kurdish divisions in Turkey
• Top Syrian rebel commander dies from wounds

Reuters Sports Schedule at 0015 GMT on Tuesday, Nov 19 Posted: 18 Nov 2013 04:15 PM PST Reuters sports schedule at 0015 GMT on Tuesday: - - - - NFL Patriots set for primetime clash with streaking Panthers Tom Brady and the AFC East-leading New England Patriots (7-2), fresh off a bye week, hit the road for a primetime clash with a Carolina Panthers (6-3) team that is one win away from its first six-game winning streak in eight years. ...

THINGS TO BE THANKFUL FOR THIS THANKSGIVING Posted: 18 Nov 2013 04:00 PM PST WASHINGTON -- Thanksgiving is my favorite national holiday, but it is a treacherous one because we are never quite sure what we should be thankful for. On the plus side, I dearly love Thanksgiving because it is such a truly AMERICAN holiday. I also like the Thanksgiving hymns, especially the lyrical one that sings about the joys of the harvests being brought in. I'm afraid I have made some egregious mistakes of etiquette myself while enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, one being to take a small plastic bag out of my purse to get a little dressing to take home -- hopefully, while nobody was watching.

Aides: US-Afghan deal offers concessions for each Posted: 18 Nov 2013 03:48 PM PST WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States will maintain exclusive legal jurisdiction over American soldiers and contractors in Afghanistan after 2014 as part of a draft U.S.-Afghan security pact, congressional aides said Monday, providing details of an agreement that entails key concessions for each side.

Syria rebel chieftain killed; Assad forces bomb besieged town Posted: 18 Nov 2013 02:40 PM PST By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Dominic Evans AMMAN/ARSAL, Lebanon (Reuters) - President Bashar al-Assad's forces fired rocket and artillery barrages on a besieged mountain town near Lebanon on Monday in a push to capture the strategic area following advances against rebels in Damascus and in the north of Syria. In a separate setback for the fighters, a prominent rebel leader died overnight in a Turkish hospital of wounds suffered in an air raid on Aleppo. ...

The World Isn't Optimistic About Obama's "If You Like Your Plan" Fix Posted: 18 Nov 2013 02:34 PM PST Last week President Obama apologized for, and tried to fix, the flawed rollout of Healthcare.gov. It didn't go well, and the foreign press noticed. While America has been less than kind in its coverage of Obama's "if you like you plan, you can keep it (for real)" speech, the foreign press has been impressed by the rare sight of a president admitting he screwed up. Still, that's not helping his approval ratings, and the foreign press has picked up on his record low numbers, his declining political clout, and the barely contained glee of Republicans and conservatives.

Libyan army deploys in capital against militias Posted: 18 Nov 2013 11:25 AM PST TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Libya's military swept into the capital Monday with dozens of pickup trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns in an operation to drive out militiamen, met by a warm welcome from Libyans seething with anger against the numerous armed groups running rampant in the country.

Aid workers struggle to get polio vaccine to Syrians Posted: 18 Nov 2013 10:59 AM PST Syria was declared polio free in 1999. But with at least 10 recent confirmed cases of the paralyzing virus, international health workers are worried about a regional outbreak of the virus, particularly given the constant flow of Syrians to neighboring countries. Before the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, the vaccination rate in Syria was above 90 percent, bolstered by a relatively strong public health system. Most unvaccinated children are under two years old, making them particularly vulnerable to polio, which is usually spread through fecal matter.

Renewed violence as Iraq executes 12 'terrorists' Posted: 18 Nov 2013 10:17 AM PST Attacks across Iraq killed eight people Monday as authorities announced they have executed a dozen men convicted of "terrorism" in the face of the country's worst bloodshed in five years. The violence was the latest in a months-long surge in unrest that has forced Iraq to appeal for international help in combatting a surge in militant attacks. It comes just months before Iraq's first general election in four years and amid fears the country is on the brink of falling back into all-out sectarian war. Monday's violence struck across Iraq, from the northern city of Mosul to the town of Hilla, south of Baghdad, as well as in and around the capital.

Seven Weeks Might Be Too Soon to Blame Obamacare for Killing Liberalism Posted: 18 Nov 2013 09:49 AM PST Did you know that Obamacare faltering rollout is why "liberalism" as an American political philosophy is at risk? According to some commentators, it is — because its failure would mean that Americans lose faith in government. The National Review's Jonah Goldberg gleefully celebrated his schadenfreude at Obamacare's stumbles: "If you can't take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the unprecedentedly spectacular beclowning of the president, his administration, its enablers, and, to no small degree, liberalism itself, then you need to ask yourself why you're following politics in the first place." On Monday, Politico's Todd Purdum reached the same conclusion on liberal politics via a less emotional road: [T]he fiasco of the launch of Obama's sweeping health care overhaul has put the reputation of Big Government progressivism at risk for at least this generation.

Special Report: The Pentagon's doctored ledgers conceal epic waste Posted: 18 Nov 2013 06:49 AM PST By Scot J. Paltrow LETTERKENNY ARMY DEPOT, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense's accounts. Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon's main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy's books with the U.S. Treasury's - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take "unsubstantiated change actions" - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called "plugs," to make the Navy's totals match the Treasury's. Jeff Yokel, who spent 17 years in senior positions in DFAS's Cleveland office before retiring in 2009, says supervisors were required to approve every "plug" - thousands a month.

U.S.-Afghan security pact hits impasse as time runs out Posted: 18 Nov 2013 06:09 AM PST By Dylan Welch and Hamid Shalizi KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai has rejected a provision of a U.S.-Afghan security pact, putting the entire deal in jeopardy just days before the country's elite gather to debate it, a senior Afghan official and a Western diplomat said. The question of whether foreign troops will be able to search Afghan homes after NATO's combat mission ends next year has long been a sticking point of an agreement setting out the terms under which remaining U.S. forces will operate there. But in a series of meetings over the weekend the enter-and-search issue emerged as the biggest roadblock facing the security pact as Karzai dug his heels in, the Afghan official, who has been close to the talks, told Reuters. Without an accord on the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA), Washington says it could pull out all of its troops at the end of 2014, leaving Afghanistan's fledgling security forces on their own to fight the Taliban-led insurgency.

Insight: Tunisia Islamists seek jihad in Syria with one eye on home Posted: 18 Nov 2013 04:55 AM PST By Patrick Markey and Tarek Amara ZARGHOUAN, Tunisia (Reuters) - Aymen Saadi's brief call to jihad began with dreams of fighting for an Islamic state in Syria and ended with a botched suicide bombing attempt in a crowd of foreign tourists in Tunisia. Guards tackled the Tunisian teenager before he detonated his bomb at a presidential mausoleum last month south of Tunis. Saadi's mission may have failed, and the beach bomber killed only himself, but Tunisia's first suicide attack in a decade was shock enough for the small North African nation; Tunisia's interior's ministry says its initial investigation indicates Al Qaeda-linked group Ansar al-Sharia carried out the attempted twin bombing.

Despite diplomatic spats, U.S. arms firms trust in Mideast Posted: 18 Nov 2013 03:07 AM PST By Peter Apps and Andrea Shalal-Esa LONDON/DUBAI (Reuters) - For U.S. arms firms flocking to the Dubai Airshow this week, the Middle East has never been more important - the second fastest growing market after Asia as western defense spending shrinks. But they face an awkward reality: an apparently ever-growing gap between Washington and its closest regional allies. Lockheed founded an international division earlier this year, and Northrop last month named a former senior U.S. Air Force official as its new chief executive for the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Most of the companies sent chief executives or other senior executives to the Dubai Airshow, with many also visiting other countries in the region on the same trip.

Obama health care woes become credibility fight Posted: 18 Nov 2013 01:18 AM PST WASHINGTON (AP) — Throughout President Barack Obama's first four years in office, he prided himself on his ability to bounce back when much of Washington thought his presidency was in peril.

Wedding murder exposes Kurdish divisions in Turkey Posted: 17 Nov 2013 10:12 PM PST By Daren Butler DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - When gunmen stormed a wedding and shot dead a guest in southeastern Turkey, they stirred fears of a new outbreak of bloodshed in a region increasingly destabilized by Syria's civil war. The killing in the city of Batman highlighted divisions between Kurds which echo the faultlines of the conflict in Syria, complicating Ankara's efforts to draw a line under a three-decade Kurdish insurgency on its own soil. Turkey's peace process with the armed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), aimed at ending a conflict that has cost more than 40,000 lives, was already fragile. But the emergence of a Kurdish Sunni Islamist party, Huda-Par, has reopened old wounds in the southeast, poorer than the rest of Turkey and scarred by the wider Kurdish-Turkish fight.

Top Syrian rebel commander dies from wounds Posted: 17 Nov 2013 07:33 PM PST A prominent Syrian rebel leader has died from wounds suffered in an air raid on the city of Aleppo, in a blow to the armed opposition to President Bashar al-Assad, activists said on Monday. Abdelqader Saleh, head of the Islamist al-Tawhid Brigades, which is backed by Qatar, died in a Turkish hospital where he had been taken. Saleh had been wounded on Thursday when Assad's forces raided a Tawhid meeting and killed another commander on the spot, opposition sources said. "We declare the martyrdom of Abdelqader Saleh," a statement by Tawhid said.

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