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A California Marine veteran and father of two was fatally shot and killed Friday morning while driving for Uber, according to police.

Aaron Orozco, 38, picked up two passengers early that morning and stopped at a Lynwood 7-Eleven for an unknown reason before he got into a physical altercation with the two passengers, police said.

One suspect shot Orozco in the upper torso, cops said.

The suspects then fled in Orozco's vehicle, and it was later located by local authorities a short distance away. Orozco was pronounced dead at the scene. He leaves behind his wife, Sandra Medina, a 9-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter.

US MILITARY INVESTIGATING DEATH OF CALIFORNIA MARINE FOUND DEAD IN BARRACKS: REPORT

"It just seems like Im in a nightmare. It doesnt seem real to me," Medinatold Fox 11."I havent even told my kids yet, they still think dad is going to come through the door."

Aaron Orozco, 38, was based out of Camp Pendleton and had previously completed three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. (KTTV)

Orozco had been based out of Camp Pendleton and had previously completed three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Medina told Fox 11 her husband had started working for Uber at night so he could care for their children while she was working as a nurse.

HUMANITARIAN VOLUNTEER, MARINE VET KILLED IN UKRAINE WHILE HELPING CIVILIANS

"We were married for 10 years, but weve been together since high school, high school sweethearts," Medina told FOX 11.

Orozco began working for Uber at night so he could care for his children while his wife was working as a nurse. (KTTV)

Orozco had been working for Uber for four years before the shooting, never having had issues in the past until the morning of March 24.

I LOST MY BROTHER AND MY FIANC IN THE IRAQ WAR. 20 YEARS LATER, HERE'S HOW I HOPE AMERICANS WILL HONOR THEM

"Our hearts are with Mr. Orozco Figueroas family as they cope with this unfathomable tragedy, and we have reached out to offer our condolences," Uber said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "We banned the riders account and are working with police on their investigation."

Orozco leaves behind his wife, Sandra Medina, a 9-year-old son, and a 3-year-old daughter. (KTTV)

Uber told Fox News Digital they have extended their condolences to the family and explained Orozco's family is eligible for survivor benefits, provided through Intact.

The company's Public Safety team composed of former law enforcement officers and paralegals is ready to assist with the investigation, which is still ongoing. Uber said they are working closely with detectives on the case and will continue to cooperate with the investigation.

A GoFundMe page set up in honor of Orozco and his family had already surpassed its $20,000 goal as of Sunday morning, with more than $36,000 donated. (KTTV)

A GoFundMe page set up in honor of Orozco and his family had already surpassed its $20,000 goal as of Sunday morning, with more than $36,000 donated.

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"I just hope that they find them because they created this chaos in my life and my family's life," Medina told ABC 7. "And, you know, now I don't have my husband with me. And, it has just changed my life around so much. So, I really hope that they do catch them."

Read this article:
Marine veteran who survived three tours in Iraq, Afghanistan killed driving an Uber in California - Fox News

LONDON, March 27 (Reuters) - Iraq's oil output and capacity may peak following growth of around 25% over the next five years, analysts said, falling short of 2027 targets and ending a long-standing ambition to rival the output of top OPEC producer Saudi Arabia.

Political infighting has cost Iraq the opportunity to invest in growing output more quickly. As the energy transition gathers pace, it means Baghdad may never be able to cash in the hundreds of billions of barrels it has in the ground, even with the efforts of the country's new energy minister to attract investment.

Since 2016, Iraq's output has stalled at around 4.5 million barrels per day (bpd).

Before then, capacity grew rapidly as the government opened up the sector in 2009 and international oil companies revamped the country's biggest oilfields.

Growth slowed in part because Iraq agreed to cap output under supply policy agreed with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies, a group known as OPEC+.

Iraq's Oil Minister Hayan Abdel-Ghani, who took office in October, plans to update Iraq's oil production strategies to meet local needs while complying with the OPEC+ agreement, oil ministry spokesman Asim Jihad told Reuters.

It is too early for the new government to talk about any significant increases in Iraq's oil production outside the OPEC+ agreement, Jihad said. Under the agreement, Iraq's production target is 4.43 million bpd until December.

As a result, Iraq has shifted focus to the refining and gas sectors and lowered capital expenditure in the oil sector, analysts at FGE consultancy and Rystad Energy told Reuters.

For the oil sector, the country has repeatedly delayed a target to reach 7-8 million bpd capacity, from the current 5 million bpd. The previous government said last year it hoped to reach the higher levels by 2027.

Some energy industry consultancies forecast that Iraq may never reach them.

Capacity would peak and plateau at 6.3 million bpd by 2028 before declining, Iman Nasseri, managing director for the Middle East with FGE consultancy, said. Politics, security and the investment environment were all contributing to prevent Iraq from pushing output higher than that, he said.

"We think Iraq's current target looks hard, if not impossible to achieve," Nasseri said.

Rystad Energy expected production to be limited to 5.5 million bpd by 2027 as a result of midstream growth limitations and because projects that are crucial to boosting output are stuck.

Two decades after the war began, the current targets and the even lower forecasts are far off Iraq's post-war goal to take capacity to 12 million bpd.

The ambition was scaled back in 2012 after international oil companies operating in Iraq negotiated lower output targets for their fields because of low recovery factors, high natural decline rates and because Iraq was not investing enough in infrastructure, analysts said.

The major oil companies had also hoped Baghdad would improve the terms of technical service contracts (TSCs). That never happened, and companies such as ExxonMobil Corp (XOM.N) and Royal Dutch Shell Plc left.

Analysts and industry insiders say the problems are above the ground rather than in the geology below, which has significant unexplored capacity, and include repeated changes to government, political infighting and red tape.

Successive governments failed to sign off on Iraq's fifth licensing round in 2018. Six deals out of eleven oil and gas blocs on offer were eventually signed at the end of February, marking long-awaited reforms to the conditions of operating in the country.

The beneficiaries were not the international oil companies, but UAE firm Crescent Petroleum and two Chinese companies.

A source close to the Iraq energy industry who could not be named because they were not authorised to speak to the press said the contracts awarded pay royalties upfront and link revenues to oil prices.

Abdel-Ghani's decision to sign the deals four months after his appointment may show a new resolve in government to cut deals more attractive to international energy companies, the source said.

Still other issues remain.

A large-scale seawater treatment project needed to boost output at the southern oilfields through water injection, has been stalled for over a decade because of haggling over terms.

French oil major TotalEnergies is the latest to take on the project as part of a $27 billion deal to build four oil, gas and renewable projects over 25 years.

TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne said this month contractual disagreements were unresolved.

"Iraq is not the easiest place to invest with all risk," Pouyanne said.

The water project would boost output at the five Iraqi fields by 2 mln bpd of the 2.4 mln bpd growth needed to reach Iraq's 2027 targets, according to Rystad data and Reuters research.

But completion before 2027 is unlikely, Rystad's vice president of Middle East upstream research Aditya Saraswat said.

Iraq's oil minister this month revived seven investment opportunities in Iraq's refining sector.

Even if Abdel-Ghani manages to find companies interested in those projects, Iraq's refining potential only allows 500,000 bpd of crude output growth and this would take time, Saraswat said.

Meanwhile, Iraq's southern export capacity has stalled at around 3.2-3.3 mln bpd for the last year following delays to infrastructure upgrades at its Gulf ports, data from state-owned marketer SOMO showed.

Reporting by Rowena Edwards in London, Maha El Dahan in Dubai, and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Editing by Simon Webb and Barbara Lewis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Analysis: Iraq's ambition to match Saudi oil output is out of reach - Reuters

An international arbitration court has ruled against Turkey in a long-running dispute with the Iraqi government regarding crude oil exports from the autonomous Kurdistan region, two Turkish sources familiar with the issue, but not authorised to speak to the press, told Middle East Eye.

The Iraqi oil ministry in a separate statement on Saturday welcomed the favourable ruling from the International Court of Arbitration that had been issued on Thursday, saying that the judgement confirmed that Iraqi national oil company SOMO is the only entity authorised to manage oil export operations through the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

The ministry said that it would discuss mechanisms for exporting Iraqi oil through the Ceyhan port, both with the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, in a way that would guarantee the continuation of shipments.

Iraq sued Turkey nearly nine years ago due to an oil deal between Ankara and Erbil concerning exports through the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline. Iraq maintained for years that the Iraqi Kurdistan region doesn't have any authority to make energy exports without Baghdad's consent.

One source familiar with the lawsuit told MEE that Iraqi authorities demanded $33bn from Turkey for the damage, but couldn't get that amount. The source added that Turkey was ordered to pay Iraq $1.4bn to cover the 2014-2018 period.

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A second source said that Turkey was comfortable with the ruling since the penalty was much lower than initially expected. The source added that bilateral negotiations to resolve the issue between Turkey and Iraq were underway and would continue next week.

"Turkey will make sound legal arguments and eventually will only pay half of $1.4bn," the source predicted.

Iraqi local media reported that Turkey halted the pumping of Iraqi crude oil through Ceyhan on Saturday morning. Iraq had been pumping 370,000 barrels of KRG crude and 75,000 barrels of federal crude through the pipeline per day before it was halted, according to sources talking to Reuters.

An industry insider said Ankara was making around $1bn as a transit country thanks to Iraqi shipments.

Iraq's federal court also ruled last year that the law regulating the oil industry in Iraqi Kurdistan was unconstitutional, and demanded that Kurdish authorities hand over their crude supplies.

Over one million barrels per day, roughly one percent of global supplies,passed through the Ceyhan terminal in January, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Read more from the original source:
Turkey ordered to pay $1.4bn to Iraq in Kurdistan oil arbitration case - Middle East Eye

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Originally posted here:
Iraq wins landmark case against Turkey over Kurdish oil exports - Financial Times

The final vote to end two Iraq war authorisations clears a key procedural hurdle, as the Senate decides to limit debate.

The United States Senate has backed a measure expected to clear the way for a vote to repeal two authorisations for war in Iraq.

On Monday, the chamber voted 65 to 28 to limit debate over whether to end two Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) one from 1991 that coincided with the Gulf War and a second from 2002, approved in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion.

That support exceeded the 60-vote minimum needed to advance the legislation. The final vote to repeal is expected later this week.

Mondays vote takes place as the US marks the 20th anniversary of the 2003 Iraq War. All 28 votes against Mondays measure came from Republican Senators.

Typically, under the US Constitution, Congress wields the exclusive power to declare war. But with the two Iraq war authorisations, Congress granted open-ended authority to the presidency to exercise force in the region.

That, some argue, has allowed the presidency to gain too much power over military action. It has also spurred criticism that these zombie authorisations have fuelled forever wars that are no longer justified.

In the minutes before Mondays vote, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey called the measure a means of exercising the chambers most solemn duty: to decide when and under what circumstances to send Americans into harms way.

It is a recognition that Congress not only has the power to declare war but also should have the responsibility to end wars, Menendez said in his speech, urging his fellow Senators to approve Mondays measure.

Menendez also blasted the war authorisations as obsolete and outdated. He argued that US President Joe Biden has sufficient authority to defend against threats without them, pointing to recent military air raidsin Syria.

If were going to debate whether to provide the president additional authorities, then we should have that debate separately. But it should not be under the cloak of keeping old authorisations on the book, authorisations that are not needed to meet any current threat, Menendez said.

But several of his Republican colleagues in the Senate took to the floor to argue in favour of retaining the Iraq war authorisations, on the basis that a repeal might limit the USs ability to take action in the Middle East.

Texas Senator John Cornyn, for instance, asserted that while the political situation in Iraq has changed, the threats to US interests remained. He also cited Iraqi security as a motivation.

American forces are no longer there to counter threats from Iraq. We are now there to counter threats to Iraq. That includes threats from Iran, the number-one state sponsor of international terrorism, Cornyn said in his speech.

Despite the fact that Iraq is now our partner, that doesnt mean its time to abandon our security interests in the region. America still has very real adversaries in the Middle East who would do us and our allies harm if they go the chance.

South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, meanwhile, delivered a fiery speech saying that repealing the war authorisations would embolden US adversaries.

Heres what youre doing. Youre sending the signal by doing this that were leaving. Were withdrawing. That we dont have the will as a nation to see this thing through. Theres nothing good that comes from this, he said, ending his speech by calling the prospect of a repeal one of the most ill-conceived ideas after 9/11.

On Twitter after the vote, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that the chamber would vote on the final passage of the repeal later this week.

Americans want to see an end to endless wars in the Middle East, he wrote.

Go here to read the rest:
US Senate votes to advance repeal of Iraq War authorisation - Al Jazeera English