Week In The News: Iraq Shakes, SCOTUS Rules, US Advances In World Cup

Iraq still slides. IRS scandal. The Supreme Court. America and the World Cup. NPR's Deborah Amos, the New York Times' Josh Barro and On Point's own Jack Beatty work through the week's headlines.

Iraq still crumbles this week.  No bottom yet to the crisis.  And President Obama now asking for half a billion dollars in aid to “moderate” rebels in next-door Syria.  Maybe too late.  Chaos.  In Washington, a gusher of Supreme Court decisions.  On cell phone searches.  On abortion protest.  On recess appointments.  John Boehner says he’ll sue the President for overreach.  That’s new.  And the IRS still hasn’t found its e-mails.  The Tea Party takes a loss in Mississippi.  The US takes a World Cup loss – and still wins!  This hour On Point:  our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.
-- Tom Ashbrook

Deborah Amos, NPR Middle East correspondent. Author of "Eclipse of the Sunnis" and "Lines in the Sand." (@deborahamos)

Josh Barro, domestic correspondent for the New York Times' the Upshot politics and policy site. (@jbarro)

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst.

NPR: At Iraq's Largest Oil Refinery, Siege Nears A Complicated Conclusion — "For more than a week, ISIS militants and local Sunnis have surrounded the Baiji oil refinery. While they racked up swift victories all the way to Iraq's western border, the strategy at Baiji was different. A truce allowed some 300 workers to leave the plant a few days after the evacuation of a German technical staff."

New York Times: Why Government Pension Funds Became Addicted to Risk -- "The volatility of stock returns is why pension funds invested in bonds in the first place. And it’s most likely a driver of the recent rush toward alternative investments, which went from 11 percent of pension portfolios in 2006 to 23 percent in 2012, according to Pew; nearly the entire shift has come at the expense of stocks."

Washington Post: Supreme Court rebukes Obama on recess appointments — "While the court was unanimous that Obama’s actions were unlawful, it was badly split on other questions the case raised and narrowly favored an expansive view of the chief executive’s power. Breyer and the court’s liberals, joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, read the Constitution to give wide authority to the president to make recess appointments when the Senate was in recess — 10 days is the minimum, they decided. "