WORLD
May 20, 2013 | By Aziz Alwan
BAGHDAD -- Car bombs around Iraq killed at least 65 people Monday as the country's worst wave of violence since U.S. troops withdrew a year and a half ago continued. The attacks that occurred by busy commercial streets in Shiite and Sunni areas followed a string of bombings last week that killed more than 200 people. The ongoing violence has stoked the impression among ordinary Iraqis that the country is sliding back into chaos reminiscent of the civil war that claimed thousands of lives between 2005 and 2008.
WORLD
May 20, 2013 | By Aziz Alwan and Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD - Car bombs around Iraq killed at least 65 people Monday amid the worst wave of violence in the country since U.S. troops withdrew a year and a half ago. The attacks, which occurred along busy commercial streets in Shiite and Sunni areas, followed a string of bombings and other attacks last week that killed more than 200 people. The ongoing violence has stoked the impression among Iraqis that the country is sliding back into chaos reminiscent of the civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives between 2005 and 2008.
WORLD
May 17, 2013 | By Robyn Dixon
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Security forces in Nigeria have launched airstrikes against encampments of the Islamist militia Boko Haram as part of a major military operation in the country's northeast, military officials said Friday. The airstrikes hit one of the main rebel bases, in the Sambisa Forest Reserve south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, according to military officials cited by news agencies. The Nigerian military have also sent several thousand soldiers to the area in recent days.
WORLD
May 16, 2013 | By Richard Fausset and Cecilia Sanchez, Los Angeles Times
MEXICO CITY - Responding to mounting concern about disorder in the Mexican state of Michoacan, officials announced Thursday that an army general would take over as its public security chief, overseeing both state and federal security forces. The appointment of the general, Alberto Reyes Vaca, was announced by state officials but had been arranged in coordination with the federal government. For President Enrique Peña Nieto's administration, the move is part of a promised new focus on the southwestern state, long a hotbed of drug cartel violence.
WORLD
May 10, 2013 | By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD - Less than a year and a half after the last U.S. troops left, Iraq's political leaders are openly debating the prospect of two dangerous paths for their country: de facto division or civil war. Perhaps both. Tension between the Shiite majority, now in control of the levers of power, and the Sunni Arab minority, which dominated under Saddam Hussein, has been building for months. But politicians on all sides agree that the country has entered a perilous new phase, highlighted in late April by an attack on a Sunni protest camp by security forces that killed at least 45 people.
WORLD
May 2, 2013 | By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD - Iraqi security used disproportionate force, including shooting unarmed civilians, during a raid on an encampment of Sunni Arab protesters last week that left 45 people dead, according to two government investigations and foreign diplomats. The predawn raid in the city of Hawija in Kirkuk province April 23 involved security forces demanding that protesters hand over demonstrators suspected of killing an Iraqi soldier four days earlier, officials said. Shooting erupted during the raid, enraging Sunnis and leading to violence in other parts of the country.