Suicide Bombings

A car bomb exploded Wednesday near several restaurants in a Shiite neighborhood of northwest Baghdad, killing at least 34 people and injuring more than 70, police and hospital officials said. The blast appeared timed for maximum civilian casualties, going off about 7 p.m., when many Baghdad residents take advantage of cooler evening temperatures for shopping and dining in outdoor kebab restaurants.

Officers guarding Pakistani police and intelligence agencies saw the gunmen jump out of the white van that had stopped at their gate. The assailants wore white shirts and trousers, and sprayed gunfire in the air and at the police. One tossed a grenade in the direction of officers who had begun firing back. Then, on a bustling workday morning in the heart of Pakistan's second-largest city, the explosives-laden van rammed the steel gate and detonated.

A suicide bomber killed six people in an attack Wednesday in a former insurgent stronghold in Iraq's western province of Anbar, police said. A Baghdad bombing killed five other people. The bomber in Ramadi struck a checkpoint of Iraqi soldiers and police, killing a policeman and five civilians, a local police officer said.

Twin suicide bombings in the heart of a busy section of downtown Baghdad killed 147 people Sunday in an apparent attempt to undermine Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government at a time of rising political tensions over crucial national elections due in January. The attacks outside the Justice Ministry and the Baghdad provincial council headquarters injured an additional 700 people. They were the deadliest bombings in Iraq in more than two years. The midmorning explosions, in a closely guarded area packed with government buildings, served as a fresh reminder that although U.S. attention has shifted in large part to Afghanistan, Iraq remains a highly volatile place.

A suicide attacker set off a car bomb at a police checkpoint Saturday, killing at least 10 people, officials said. The city of Peshawar, near the Afghan border, has seen several bomb attacks since the army began an offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan last month. Militants have hit back by stepping up attacks on towns and cities, killing several hundred people. "The car bomber approached a barrier near the police check post, and then it exploded," said city official Sahibzada Anis.

Re "How to be stupid . . ." Opinion, Jan. 8 Rosa Brooks' insightful slings and arrows of sarcasm have never been better aimed than in her recent attacks on the stupidity of all parties involved with the horror show in Israel/Palestine. Everybody wants to defend, attack, blame or make a martyr out of Israel or Palestine. Nobody seems to want to place the blame squarely on both of them -- where, as Brooks so powerfully states, it obviously belongs. Tim Dufelmeier Los Angeles -- Brooks correctly makes the point that both sides are contributing to the problem.

A suicide bomber drove a truck through a sandbag barrier at a checkpoint to strike a police station in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, killing at least eight people and wounding 12, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. The bomber broke through the first checkpoint on the station's perimeter, then detonated his explosives when he reached a concrete wall a few yards from the building, police said. No one had claimed responsibility for the attack.

A would-be suicide bomber shot himself to death when mourners confronted him at the funeral of a Pakistani police officer recently killed by militants, police said. The assailant panicked and ran when people at the funeral in the northwestern area of Batkhela grew suspicious, said Aziz Khan, a local police official. It was unclear if the man had tried to detonate the explosives-filled vest found on his corpse. He was also carrying a hand grenade, Khan said. The funeral was for a senior police officer killed along with four colleagues when militants fired rockets at their vehicles in the nearby Dir region Wednesday.

A plainclothes Palestinian police officer was shot dead during riots against Israeli soldiers near the West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday, as Israel held Yasser Arafat responsible for two botched suicide bombings earlier in the day. The police officer, 22-year-old Haitham Mansour, was the second fatality in nearly two weeks of street clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli forces following Israel's groundbreaking for a new Jewish neighborhood in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.

Fresh threats of suicide bombings and Israel's closure of Palestinian areas kept many people away from the Good Friday procession marking Jesus' crucifixion. Fewer than 5,000 pilgrims took part in the procession Friday, compared to about 10,000 in calmer years. Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the government's chief policy advisor on Palestinian affairs, said Israel had fresh warnings that Islamic militants would try to disrupt Passover with more bombings, which have left scores dead.