BAGHDAD: A suicide bomber attacked a restaurant on Thursday where Sunni Arabs and Kurds were meeting to ease friction in the tense northern city of Kirkuk. At least 48 people were killed in the bombing, apparently aimed at provoking extremists along widening ethnic fault lines just as American plans to withdraw militarily from Iraq became official.
Nearly 100 were wounded in the bombing, which was the deadliest in Iraq in six months. It occurred north of Kirkuk in a huge restaurant packed with as many as 3,000 people to celebrate the …

BANGKOK (AFP) — A grenade attack killed an anti-government protester at a besieged Bangkok airport Tuesday, as further unrest forced a key hearing on the possible dissolution of the ruling party to move.
The incidents raised tensions in an increasingly bloody political stand-off that began a week ago, stranding about 350,000 frustrated travellers and causing massive damage to Thailand’s economy.

At least two foreign contractors have been killed and 15 others wounded after a rocket fell near a UN compound in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, according to a UN official.
In a separate incident on Saturday, three people died and 13 others were injured when a car bomb went off in central Baghdad.

BANGKOK (Reuters) – A grenade blast wounded 46 anti-government protesters in Bangkok, hospital officials said on Sunday, the latest escalation in the country’s increasingly violent political crisis.
The blast occurred around midnight at Government House, where thousands of supporters of the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), who have occupied the prime minister’s compound since August in a bid to unseat him, were attending a rally.

KABUL, Afghanistan: A suicide car bomber plowed his Toyota into rush-hour traffic on a commercial boulevard in Kabul on Thursday morning, killing at least four civilians and wounding up to 17 , the police and hospital authorities said.
The bomber was apparently targeting a passing convoy of NATO troops, the Interior Ministry said in a statement, but several witnesses said there were no security forces, either Afghan or foreign, in the immediate vicinity of the blast.
The explosion occurred about 150 yards from a major traffic circle and a heavily-guarded entrance to …

A car bomb has killed one of Israel’s most prominent crime bosses in Tel Aviv, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reports.
Israeli police identified the dead man on Monday as Yaakov Alperon, the head of one of the country’s most powerful crime families.
Alperon is the most senior figure to be killed and the latest casualty of ongoing gang wars that have left scores of people dead.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan and Istanbul –A suicide car bomber struck an American military convoy today as it was passing through a busy open-air livestock market, killing at least 20 Afghan passers-by, together with a U.S. soldier, authorities said.
The attack outside the eastern city of Jalalabad, which also left scores of market patrons and other bystanders injured, pointed up one of the conflict’s grimmest ongoing patterns: civilians being caught up almost daily in insurgent attacks aimed at foreign troops.

At least 28 people were killed, including women and schoolgirls, and dozens wounded in a triple bombing in a Baghdad market on Monday, the deadliest attack to rock the Iraqi capital in months, security officials said.
The attackers detonated a car bomb in the Sunni district of Adhamiyah, then minutes later a suicide bomber ran into the resulting melee and blew up, according to defence and interior ministry officials.
A third explosion caused by a roadside bomb around 30 metres (yards) from the first two blasts tore through the market moments …

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — A triple bomb attack in a northeast Baghdad neighborhood killed 28 people and wounded 68 others on Monday, Iraq’s Interior Ministry said.
It was the deadliest attack in the capital city in almost four months.
First, a bomb inside a parked car exploded in a marketplace in the Kasrah section of the Adhamiya neighborhood, a ministry official said.

Russian investigators say they are trying to identify the woman they suspect launched a suicide attack on a minibus in the North Caucasus.
Twelve people were killed in Thursday’s attack in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia. Officials believe one of them was a female suicide bomber.