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BBC news 2014-08-12

BBC News with Julie Candler.

The Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki has angrily denounced moves by the country's president to oust him, warning that it had no value but it had violated the constitution. He told security forces to remain steadfast in their positions, saying they were in a holy war. Earlier, the president asked deputy speaker of parliament Haider al-Abadi to replace Mr. Maliki as Prime Minister. Jim Muir reports.

Flanked by loyalist members of his State of Law coalition, Nouri al-Maliki condemned Mr. al-Abadi's nomination as a breach of the constitution which was null and worthless. We are in a dangerous constitutional war, he told his supporters, but we will stand against this violation, correct this mistake and defeat it. The US, the UN and others have welcomed Mr. al-Abadi's appointment, hoping it will help provide and united platform for confronting the Islamic State. But the fear is that Mr. Maliki may try to use the security forces to defend his position, creating further divisions and disarray.

The United States' Defense Department says its airstrikes in northern Iraq have had a limited impact on the advance of the Islamic State militants.  At a news conference, a senior Pentagon official Lieutenant General Williams Mayville Jr. said the strikes had temporarily disrupted the Islamic State's advance towards Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region of authority in northern Iraq, but he said they were unlikely to substantially weaken the militants.

What I expect the ISIL to do is to look for other things to do to pick up and move elsewhere, so I in no way want to suggest that we have effectively contained or that we're somehow breaking the momentum of the threat posed by ISIL.

The Ukrainian authorities say an agreement has been reached for an international aid mission to the eastern city of Luhansk which is held by armed separatists. Fighting there between the rebels and government forces has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in recent months. Here is David Stern.

According to Ukraine's presidential administration, the aid will be delivered to Ukraine's eastern Luhansk region and would be under the auspices of Ukraine, the Red Cross, Russia, Germany and the European Union. Russia's President Vladimir Putin issued a brief statement after a telephone conversation today with the European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso. In it, he confirmed Moscow working with the Red Cross officials would send an aid convoy to Ukraine. However, a statement from Mr. Barroso made no mention of any aid convoy.

The government of Liberia has called for an experimental drug to be tried out there to combat the deadly outbreak of Ebola. The country's information minister told the BBC they were aware of the risks associated with the largely untested drug ZMapp, but the alternative was to allow many more people to die.

World News from the BBC.

Wives of Nigerian soldiers have protested outside the main barracks of the northeastern city of Maiduguri, saying their husbands are not sufficiently equipped to fight Boko Haram militants. The Nigerian army has suffered heavy casualties in the last few days in the clashes with the Islamists near the town of Gwoza. Reports suggest the soldiers were ambushed as they retreated. The senator from Borno State told the BBC that hundreds of corpses of civilians were still lying on the streets of Gwoza after Boko Haram seized it last week.

The US Federal Agency FBI says it has launched an investigation into possible civil rights violations following the killing of an unarmed black teenager by police in Missouri. From Washington, Aleem Maqbool reports.

In suburban St. Louis, car windows were smashed, stores vandalized and looted and at least one building was burnt down. It had started as a peaceful protest against the killing of a black teenager, Michael Brown, shot multiple times by police. They say he had been involved in a scuffle with the officers but he had been unarmed and the community reacted with outrage.

The Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has signed into law a new set of regulations that allow foreign companies to drill for oil and gas and to produce electricity. Mr. Pena Nieto said the new energy law will attract billions of dollars needed to boost the country's declining oil output. Opposition legislators and protesters accused the government of stripping Mexico of its oil wealth.

Venezuela says it's deployed 17,000 troops along its border with Colombia which will be closed tonight for the first time in an attempt to stop large-scale smuggling of petrol and food. The Venezuelan general in charge of the operation said the border will be closed every night for the next 30 days. He said that up to 40% of heavily subsidized goods and millions of liters of petrol produced in Venezuela are smuggled to Colombia where they're sold at much higher prices.

BBC News.