Iraq’s parliament session delayed after Sunni candidate rejected

Leila Fadel, Knight… Iraq’s parliament session delayed after Sunni candidate rejected

Leila Fadel, Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The speaker of Iraq’s parliament late Sunday postponed a scheduled session of the parliament on Monday because four months after they were elected, Iraqi lawmakers still haven’t been able to form a new government.

Parliament speaker Adnan Pachachi, who last week said that a new government must meet to “keep the credibility of the Iraqi democratic experience,” delayed the meeting for “a few days” after Iraq’s most powerful Shiite Muslim political alliance rejected a Sunni nominee for parliament speaker.

Iraqis called the state-run television channel, Iraqia, on Sunday to voice their rage about the delay, calling it a “lack of leadership.”

Iraq’s leaders also remain deadlocked over a new prime minister. Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has rejected demands that he step down. While the United Iraqi Alliance has indicated that it would allow Jaafari’s Dawa party to nominate someone else, the leading Shiite alliance hasn’t rescinded its nomination of Jaafari.

Members of the Alliance met late into the night on Sunday to debate whether to submit another candidate for prime minister or continue to back Jaafari, officials said. If another nominee isn’t presented for the speaker’s post, the political stalemate seems certain to continue.

Kurdish and Sunni parties strongly oppose Jaafari, but he’s backed by anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The Bush administration has blamed Jaafari’s refusal to step aside for contributing to the escalating violence between Sunnis and Shiites.

Russia seen playing role in tight oil market, higher prices

Kevin G. Hall, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – For most of the past decade, Russia, the world’s second largest oil producer and exporter, provided the extra supply needed to meet the world’s growing thirst for oil. Now its production is flat and the world oil market is drum tight.

The timing of Russia’s failure to expand oil production couldn’t be worse, and experts differ on why it no longer can be counted upon as a swing producer.

Some say President Vladimir Putin is deliberately keeping production flat to keep prices high and expand Russian influence. Others think it’s more the result of inefficient, state-run oil operations. Either way, Russia’s failure to boost production as anticipated is contributing to today’s sky-high fuel prices.

Andrei Illarionov, until Dec. 27 a top economic adviser to Putin, thinks his former boss is deliberately refraining from pumping more oil.

“It looks like it’s true,” Illarionov said.

Once called the second most powerful man in Russia, Illarionov fell out with Putin over Russia’s 2004 seizure of private oil companies, especially Yukos, then Russia’s largest private oil company.

“Americans, as well as other consumers, are paying the price for destruction by Russian authorities of the Yukos oil company,” Illarionov said in an interview with Knight Ridder. “The destruction of Yukos…means less oil on the market. It means supply is less and demand is there still. It means higher prices.”

Some provisions of immigration measure seen as unworkable

Frank James, Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON – The sweeping immigration bill the Senate will tackle upon its return to Washington next week has been hailed as a compromise that marries tough border enforcement with humane treatment of illegal immigrants.

Yet it contains provisions that immigration experts and even many lawmakers say are highly unrealistic, and that were inserted largely to placate tough-on-immigration senators and win enough support for passage.

Roughly 12 million illegal immigrants would have to pass background checks before receiving immigration papers under the bill. But a government bureaucracy already struggling with its workload would perform the checks, and experts say these new demands would overwhelm the system.

In addition, undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for two to five years, no matter where they live, would have to travel back to a port-of-entry on the U.S. border, such as El Paso, Texas, and go back across the border to apply for guest worker status. Upon performing this so-called touchback, these several million immigrants could immediately return to their U.S. homes.

To experts who have followed the immigration debate, these examples demonstrate that lawmakers have tossed practical considerations aside to craft a compromise that could pass the Senate. The result is a bill that seems as much an exercise in legislative expediency as an attempt to reform the nation’s broken immigration system.