A roadside bomb killed one police officer in Baghdad while a mortar round killed a man at the Interior Ministry yesterday as Iraq's prime minister held meetings aimed at finding new defense and interior ministers.
The roadside bomb in southern Baghdad killed one police officer and wounded four. In the Interior Ministry killing, police said a car loaded with mortar rounds and explosives suddenly exploded, scattering shells over a large area.
One landed in the Interior Ministry and killed one man, while another landed on a soccer field and injured three city workers, police Captain Mohammed Abdul-Ghani said. The car, which was empty, was thought to have been used by insurgents.
PHOTO: AP
Police found the bodies of three blindfolded and handcuffed men who had been tortured and shot in the head. The bodies were found in central and southern Baghdad, police Captain Jamil Hussein said.
A CBS reporter was listed in critical but stable condition one day after a car bomb attack killed her two man crew, a US soldier and an Iraqi contractor. She was flown to a US military hospital in Germany.
CBS cameraman Paul Douglas, 48, and soundman James Brolan, 42, both Britons, died while network correspondent Kimberly Dozier, 39, was critically wounded. US officials said she was first taken to the US military hospital in Balad, 80km north of Baghdad.
Dozens of journalists have been injured, killed or kidnapped in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The death of the US soldier came as the US marked Memorial Day. It brought to 2,467 the number of US military members who have died since the war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Iraq's parliament debated the deteriorating security situation in the capital and some of its outlying provinces, but failed to set up a commission to deal with the problem because of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's inability to appoint ministers of defense and interior.
Al-Maliki was expected to hold a series of meetings with political leader yesterday to find a way out of the impasse. More than a week after al-Maliki's unity government took office, Iraq's ethnic, sectarian and secular parties are struggling to agree on who should run the crucial interior and defense ministries, which control the various Iraqi security forces.
The Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry, which controls the police forces, has been promised to that community. Sunni Arabs are to get the defense ministry, overseeing the army.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS