Lebanon hopes to sign a deal with Iraq in the next two months to buy crude oil below market prices, after Baghdad agreed to sell oil to Jordan at $22 a barrel, Bloomberg's Massoud A. Derhally reported. "We are hoping for a similar agreement,'' Lebanese Minister of Finance Mohamad Chatah, 57, said in an interview [...]

Barack Obama’s approach to Iraq is strikingly similar to that of the Bush administration and John McCain. In theory, the addition of Joe Biden to Obama’s ticket could change this, but over the last weeks and months there have been interesting moves by Biden to remove most traces of his "Iraq plans" from the public [...]

Iraq is now producing as much power as it did on the eve of the US-led invasion of 2003 but is still meeting barely 50 percent of peak demand, a senior electricity ministry official said. "2008 is the first year when production has reached the level prior to that of Saddam Hussein's fall," the ministry's [...]