A parked car full of explosives blew up in a commercial district of central Baghdad, killing at least 18 people and wounding dozens, police said.
Five members of an Awakening Council, groups composed of mostly Sunni Arabs who have turned against Al-Qaida in Iraq, were killed when unidentified gunmen attacked two checkpoints near Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad.
The image turns Minneapolis Police officer Patrick Reuben's stomach: someone cutting off his twin brother's finger and putting it in a package with other severed digits. Yet the grim news this week that captors had sent the fingers to U.S. officials in Baghdad has renewed a sense of hope for relatives of Paul Reuben and four other security workers who were kidnapped in Iraq more than a year ago. "It shows that they've been alive recently," Reuben said Thursday.
Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, said Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving political differences.
NEWS SERVICES
