Iraqis gather at the site of the massive bomb attack at the Ministry of Justice in Baghdad Photo: AP
...The car bombs, at least one of them a suicide bombing, according to police, blew up by the justice ministry and a Baghdad provincial office, sites separated by one broad city block. The attacks, the bloodiest in Iraq this year, hit the nerve center of Baghdad's national and local governments, shattering windows, sending debris flying and tearing down parts of buildings....
Kurdish initiative tests tide to change status quo in Turkey (click here)
...These sentences belong to Mahiye Aşar, from the eastern province of Van, which has suffered its share from the Kurdish conflict in Turkey that has cost the lives of about 40,000 people since 1984. She was talking about her daughter, who joined the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) 19 years ago.
“My son-in-law's family was revolutionary. They faced a lot of pressure in the 1990s. Their home was raided by security forces every day. My daughter's husband would be arrested and tortured. They could not take it anymore and they went up to the mountains. I have not seen my daughter since. She has a son raised by his grandparents,” Aşar told journalists....
The Kirkuk conundrum (click here)
Iraqi democracy is stuck in a constitutional hiatus over the Kurdish-dominated region that threatens to derail elections
Ranj Alaaldin
guardian.co.uk,
Saturday 24 October 2009 08.00 BST
Iraq has once again met what very low expectations remain of it. Despite a 15 October deadline, the Iraqi parliament is yet to agree on a new election law for the national elections due to be held in January, and this may, as a result, throw its political, legal and constitutional framework into disarray.
Disagreement among parliamentarians centres on whether to use an open- or closed-list voting system. Under the former, voters elect their own preferred candidates into parliament, while under the latter system, the electorate votes for a political entity, as opposed to an individual, and that entity then awards parliamentary seats to its own fixed list of candidates, submitted to the electoral commission prior to the elections....
