Car bombs, shootings kill 23 across Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - At least 23 people were killed in Iraq on Monday in a series of car bombs in Shi'ite Muslim areas and militant attacks, medics and police sources said, taking the week's death toll to nearly 200 as sectarian violence intensifies.

Clashes have increased as the civil war in Syria puts strain on fragile relations between Sunnis and Shi'ites. The tensions are at their highest in Iraq since U.S. troops pulled out more than a year ago.

The latest bout of blood-letting began when security forces raided a Sunni protest camp near Kirkuk last week triggering clashes that quickly spread to other Sunni areas including the western province of Anbar, which borders Syria and Jordan.

Iraq decided on Monday to close a border crossing with Jordan for two days starting on Tuesday due to "organizational issues", the interior minister said without giving any details.

It is the second time this year that authorities have ordered the closure of the Traibil border post in Anbar where Sunnis have been protesting against Iraq's Shi'ite-led government since December.

The demonstrations had eased in the past month, but this week's army raid on a protest camp in Hawija, near Kirkuk, 170 km north of Baghdad, angered Sunnis and appears to have given insurgents more momentum.

Early on Monday, at least nine people were killed and 40 wounded in two car bomb explosions in Amara, 300 km (185 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

The first of two blasts in Amara, ripped through a market where people were meeting to eat breakfast, and the second hit an area where day laborers were gathering to look for work.

Another car bomb was detonated in a market in Diwaniya, 150 km south of Baghdad, killing two people, police said.

"I was preparing to go to work when a big explosion shook my house and broke the glass in all the windows," said witness Widy Jasim. "I ran outside, the explosion was near my house and bodies were everywhere".

A bomb in a parked car went off near a busy market in Kerbala, killing at least three people. A further six people were killed in an explosion near a Shi'ite worship site in Mahmudiya, about 30 km south of Baghdad.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but car and suicide bombings are trademarks of the Islamic State of Iraq, the Iraqi wing of Sunni Islamist al Qaeda which seeks to provoke sectarian conflict.

Violence is still well below its height in 2006-07, but provisional figures from rights group Iraq Body Count indicate about 1,494 people have been killed so far in 2013.

In Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, gunmen clashed with the army early on Monday, killing two soldiers and wounding three others, military sources said.

A sniper shot dead a soldier and wounded another while they were on patrol in Madaen in eastern Baghdad, police said.

The speaker of parliament Osama al-Nujaifi, himself a Sunni, proposed an initiative to avoid "the ghost of civil war and sectarian strife", calling on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his Shi'ite-led government to resign, dissolve parliament and prepare for an early parliamentary election.

Iraqi politics are deeply divided along sectarian lines, with Maliki's government mired in crisis over how to share power among Shi'ite Muslims, the largest group, Sunnis and ethnic Kurds who run their own autonomous region in the north.

(Reporting by Aref Mohammed in Basra, Kareem Raheem and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad and Emad al-Khuzaie in Diywaniya; Additional reporting by Ali al-Rubaie in Hilla and Ziad al-Sanjary in Mosul; Writing by Suadad al-Salhy; Editing by Jon Hemming)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/car-bombs-shootings-kill-23-across-iraq-143130081.html

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From the Editor's Desk: So many awesome people, so little time

I'd say this behind-the-scenes picture just about sums up our week in New York City. Take a bunch of characters from Mobile Nations, toss them into a room with John P and Cali Lewis of GeekBeat.TV, and good things will happen. OK, a lot of craziness will happen, too. But also good things. 

While we haven't explicitly said what we were up to at #tm13 -- and don't worry, we'll take care of that fairly soon -- it also shouldn't be all that hard to figure out. It's been a few years since the last Smartphone Experts Round Robin (in fact, that was my first week on the job here in late 2009 after fleeing the newspaper business), and a follow-up was long overdue.

But a lot has changed since I first met the likes of Dieter Bohn, Kevin Michaluk, Rene Ritchie, Casey Chan, Matt Miller and Mickey Papillon and others for a week of smartphone nerdery in Orlando. (Lord, we looked so young.) Some of us have moved on to do other things. (I'm still proud to call each one of them a friend, though.) There's more parity among the platforms. Palm and webOS are no more. Nokia has ceded and switched (nearly exclusively) to Windows Phone. Microsoft's mobile OS has grown from awkward and clunky to attractive and graceful, if still underappreciated. Same could be same for Android, maybe. And BlackBerry is just beginning its second life. 

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/ICb-wSkhW2M/story01.htm

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Will pre-election violence impact Pakistan's elections?

At least eight people were killed and 40 more injured in a suicide bombing on a busy road in the Pakistani city of Peshawar Monday morning. The attack capped off a weekend of election-related violence as the country prepares to go to the polls May 11.

The bomber missed his ostensible target, a local commissioner, instead crashing his motorcycle into a passenger bus, Pakistan?s News International reports. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the bombing, but the Pakistani Taliban have carried out a range of similar attacks against secular political parties over the past several weeks.

Indeed, the explosion came just a day after two Taliban attacks targeting political candidates in northwestern Pakistan killed at least eight and injured dozens more. The Taliban and other groups have been responsible for at least 77 deaths in 44 election-related attacks since the beginning of April, Human Rights Watch told The New York Times.

RECOMMENDED: Pakistan elections: Who's running?

"We are not in favor of democracy. Democracy is for Jews and Christians," Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud said in a recent propaganda video, according to CNN. He implored Pakistanis not to participate in the upcoming elections.

"We want the implementation of Sharia [law], and for that jihad is necessary,? he said.

The May elections will be the first in the country?s checkered political history when one democratically elected government will make way for another, and the uptick in militant violence leading to the historic vote has rattled both domestic and international observers.

But they remain divided on whether or not the spate of attacks will have a significant affect on the election?s outcome at the national level, particularly since neither of the two parties leading in polling over the past three months are among those targeted by the attacks.

As one analyst writing in the Pakistani daily Dawn argues, the violence, though significant, is too sporadic and narrowly targeted to create the kind of chaos necessarily to significantly sway the election?s results.

As for violence making elections impossible, the quantum would have to jump multifold and that too in key urban towns to spread the kind of fear that would result in elections being postponed. The ?threshold rule? applies here: the state has virtually no capacity to prevent targeted violence up to a certain threshold; beyond this, the militants have little chance of carrying out a coordinated campaign of major attacks in city centres in a short time. There is little reason to believe this will be upended over the coming fortnight.

Two of the frontrunners in the national campaign are the center-right Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and the centrist party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Taliban attacks, on the other hand, have largely targeted left-leaning parties, including the ruling Pakistan People?s Party (PPP), the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), and the Awami National Party (ANP).

Local candidates for these parties complain that the violence has forced them to dramatically scale back their campaigning activities, leaving the field open for Islamist candidates to win over voters.

"If you tie my hands, and you want me to fight, I can?t,? Mian Iftikhar Hussain, a local candidate for the ANP in the city of Peshawar, told Dawn.

Overall, however, there is halting optimism in many quarters for Pakistan?s fragile democratic institutions. As the Monitor reported in March, the Pakistani National Assembly recently completed a five-year term for the first time in the country?s history, a signal that the country is finding new and non-militaristic ways to respond to its political grievances.

?These five years we saw many instances of corruption, confrontations with the judiciary, and absence of law and order,? says Rasul Bakhsh Raees, a professor of political science in Lahore, pointing to Karachi and Balochistan. ?But the military decided not to intervene, which shows even their attitude is changing.? ?

?Every phase of democracy in Pakistan has been a battle, but the trend shows it?s [heading] toward improving the overall institutional balance,? [he says].

Violence also cast a shadow over Pakistan?s last election, in 2008. On Dec. 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister and the head of the PPP ? then the leading opposition party ? was assassinated after a campaign rally. Two months later, however, her party and the PLM-N emerged victorious from the campaign and formed a coalition government. That August, former military leader Pervez Musharraf stepped down as president and went into exile, formally ending his nine-year military rule.

RECOMMENDED: Pakistan elections: Who's running?

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pre-election-violence-impact-pakistans-elections-163008551.html

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New study: debt limit deadline likely extended

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The likely deadline for Congress to prevent the government's first default will be later than earlier thought, a Washington think tank has found.

The Bipartisan Policy Center said Friday that the government probably won't reach the brink of default until early September or early October. It had previously said default would come in July or August.

Congress acted to suspend the government's borrowing cap in February, and it will be reset next month. The Treasury Department then can resort to accounting steps to prevent the government from defaulting on bondholders or other obligations such as Social Security.

A 2011 battle between President Barack Obama and Republicans controlling the House over raising the so-called debt ceiling brought the nation close to default and resulted in a hard-fought budget deal. Obama says he won't be bullied on the debt limit again, but many in Washington believe the need to increase the borrowing cap later this year will prompt some kind of budget bargain.

The think tank said higher tax revenues and lower spending ? in part because of across-the-board spending cuts that kicked in after Congress couldn't agree on a follow-up budget pact ? are responsible for the additional leeway. It added that if the government can get through a cash crunch in early September, it will be able to make it until early October before default.

Treasury is declining to reveal its estimate of when the default date would come, saying there's too much uncertainty.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-04-26-US-Debt-Limit-Deadline/id-452cd67f214045e0abad9cf58382b108

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New conservative lobbying push for gay marriage

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) ? A national group of prominent GOP donors that supports gay marriage is pouring new money into lobbying efforts to get Republican lawmakers to vote to make it legal.

American Unity PAC was formed last year to lend financial support to Republicans who bucked the party's longstanding opposition to gay marriage. Its founders are launching a new lobbying organization, American Unity Fund, and already have spent more than $250,000 in Minnesota, where the Legislature could vote on the issue as early as next week.

The group has spent $500,000 on lobbying since last month, including efforts in Rhode Island, Delaware, Indiana, West Virginia and Utah.

Billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican donor Paul Singer launched American Unity PAC. The lobbying effort is the next phase as the push for gay marriage spreads to more states, spokesman Jeff Cook-McCormac told The Associated Press.

"What you have is this network of influential Republicans who really want to see the party embrace the freedom to marry, and believe it's not only the right thing for the country but also good politics," Cook-McCormac said.

In Minnesota, the money has gone to state groups that are lobbying Republican lawmakers and for polling on gay marriage in a handful of suburban districts held by Republicans. So far, only one Minnesota Republican lawmaker has committed to voting to legalize gay marriage: Sen. Branden Petersen, of Andover.

"I think there will be some more. There are legislators out there that are struggling with this," said Carl Kuhl, a former political aide to former GOP Sen. Norm Coleman and Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. Kuhl's public affairs firm is contracted by Minnesotans United, the lead lobby group for gay marriage in Minnesota and main recipient of American Unity's Minnesota spending.

Gay marriage's fate in Minnesota may rest with the House, where support is seen as shakier than in the Senate. A handful of votes from Republicans could put it over the top. Nearly two dozen House Republicans represent more socially moderate suburbs and might be candidates to vote yes.

House Speaker Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, said he has encouraged advocates of the marriage bill to round up Republican votes, if nothing else than to send a message to Minnesota residents that it's not a partisan proposition. But that will be politically risky; the main opposition group to same-sex marriage, Minnesota for Marriage, has said it will seek consequences for Republicans who stray on gay marriage.

Part of American Unity PAC's original mission was to spend money on behalf of Republican gay marriage supporters. Many GOP lawmakers have faced primary challenges funded in part by anti-gay marriage groups such as the National Organization for Marriage, which argue that the lawmakers had betrayed the party's core principles.

Since forming the lobby group last month, American Unity also spent money to win over Republican lawmakers in Rhode Island, where last week all five Republicans in the state Senate jumped on the gay marriage bandwagon. Rhode Island is on track to legalize gay marriage by next week, which would make it the 11th U.S. state where gay marriage is legal.

There are also plans to lobby federal lawmakers on gay rights issues.

"We intend to work on this effort until every American citizen is treated equally under the law," Cook-McCormac said. Other wealthy, traditionally Republican donors giving money to the group include Seth Klarman, David Herro and Cliff Asness.

Though only one current GOP officeholder in Minnesota is on record supporting gay marriage, a handful of prominent Republicans have spoken out in favor of it. They include former state auditor Pat Anderson and Brian McClung, who was spokesman for former Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Prominent Republican donors including former politician Wheelock Whitney and businesswoman Marilyn Carlson Nelson have also lent support and donated money.

Since it first formed to campaign against last fall's gay marriage ban and then shifted to pushing for its legalization at the Capitol, Minnesotans United has been building Republican alliances, hiring multiple lobbyists with Republican ties.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/conservative-lobbying-push-gay-marriage-050802280.html

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