Iraq

The oil headline scanning algos have completely lost it. While in the past it used to be just oil "production freeze" headlines that sent crude surging, now any old headline will do. Case in point, the price action since noon today.

Just around 12:37pm Eastern, Bloomberg blasted the following machine-readable headlines:

• IRAQ DEP. MIN. SEES CRUDE PRICE RISING ON INCREASE IN DEMAND
• IRAQ SEES RENEWED TALKS ABOUT OUTPUT FREEZE AT OPEC MEETING

Which as we promptly noted, pushed oil instantly from $46 some 20 cents higher.

U.S. officials have confirmed that a soldier lost his life fighting Islamic State militants in northern Iraq. This is the second casualty that the U.S. army has suffered in a week. Last week a Navy Seal was killed when ISIs attacked Kurdish forces in northern Iraq. It seems that the latest casualty was also a result of that attack. Fars News reports: “The soldier died as a result of an injury,” a brief statement issued by the US-led coalition forces said, without revealing further information on the incident, Alaraby news website reported.

It’s been almost a decade and a half since 9/11, but the foreign-policy establishment still cannot admit that continuous American intervention in the Middle East has been a failure.

Submitted by Soren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

• A 20-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq confessed to raping a 10-year-old boy at a public swimming pool in Vienna. The Iraqi said the rape was a "sexual emergency" resulting from "excess sexual energy."

• Those who dare to link spiraling crime to Muslim mass migration are being silenced by the guardians of Austrian multiculturalism.

Authored by AP's Lolita Baldor, via Military.com,

No one disputes that U.S. military forces are fighting in combat in Iraq and Syria -- except maybe President Barack Obama and some members of his administration.