Insurgents launched roadside bomb blasts and rocket-propelled grenade attacks north of Baghdad early yesterday, at least nine people, including a policeman's four children.
The children, aged from six to 11 years, and their uncle died in the attack by a team of insurgents shortly after midnight on their home in Balad Ruz, 70km northeast of Baghdad, according to a spokesman from the Iraqi police Joint Coordination Center.
Their father, Abdul-Sattar Hussein, was unhurt in the attack, launched by insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades at their home and wounding his wife, said the spokesman who declined to be identified further due to fears of reprisal attacks.
Four policemen were killed and nine wounded in a pre-dawn roadside bomb blast that targeted their patrol in Baqubah, 60km northeast of Baghdad, the same center said.
Iraq's violence raged in tandem with continued kidnapping sagas as footage was aired of the abducted son of the secretary of Iraq's defense minister.
No word has also been heard of a female US journalist taken hostage in Baghdad on Jan. 7 and threatened with being killed.
Iraq's electoral commission was set yesterday to start receiving appeals by political parties contesting results from last month's election, with both winners and losers complaining they should have won more seats.
The ensuing weeks are also expected to witness lengthy and complex negotiations to form a national unity government to rule the country for the next four years -- a process that observers say could take at least two months.
A number of political parties, including the conservative Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, which took the lion's share of seats in the Dec. 15 vote, are complaining over calculations used to distribute 45 seats allocated to parties on the basis of their overall performance.
The parliament's other 230 seats were allocated on a constituency basis in the country's 18 provinces with some parties also complaining about the count.
There are fears that the momentum from the elections could be lost during a lengthy negotiation period, especially one marked by increased bloodshed.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the