March imports were weaker year-on-year but the busiest U.S. container port still managed to play up to the back of its baseball card. The Port of Los Angeles handled 752,520 twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs) in March, off 3% from the same month a year ago as geopolitics and economic uncertainty overshadowed the beginning of the months-long run-up to the peak shipping season. “Even with the seasonal slowdown tied to Lunar New Year, cargo flow in March was solid and our first quarter performance was consistent with our five-year trend,” said Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka, in a media briefing.

Turkey agrees to deal only with Iraq’s central government for all crude that the OPEC nation exports through a Turkish pipeline, the Iraqi prime minister said, days after Iraq’s self-governed Kurds, who ship their own oil via the same network, approved a referendum on independence. The comments suggest the Turks may be reviewing their policy of letting Iraq’s landlocked Kurds export oil independently through the Turkish-controlled pipeline. Crude was flowing normally through the network on Thursday. The Kurds export less than 600,000 barrels a day, according to a tweet by the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Natural Resources on Sept. 24. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim asserted his country’s support for “restricting oil exports to the federal authorities” in Iraq, he said in a phone call with his Iraqi counterpart, Haider Al-Abadi, according to an emailed statement on Thursday from Al-Abadi’s office in Baghdad. Click Read More below for more of the story.

American Dollar to Canadian Dollar = 0.776898; American Dollar to Chinese Yuan = 0.157605; American Dollar to Euro = 1.230861; American Dollar to Japanese Yen = 0.009490; American Dollar to Mexican Peso = 0.052712.