Iraqi bombing death toll climbs

The death toll from an attack near the Iraqi city of Kirkuk - the deadliest in Iraq for more than a year - has risen to at least 72, security officials say.

About 200 people were injured in the truck bombing, which flattened dozens of mud-brick houses.

It happened as worshippers were leaving a Shia mosque run by the Turkmen community in the town of Taza.

US forces are due to leave Iraqi towns and cities this month, leading to fears that violence could escalate.

Saturday's blast, which officials said bore the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack, left a deep crater in the ground.

There were conflicting reports about whether the truck had been driven by a suicide bomber or had been booby-trapped.

The search for survivors was continuing on Sunday, and officials said the death toll could rise further.

Volatile mix

"Most of the victims were children, the elderly, or women who all represent easy targets for terrorists," provincial governor Abdel Rahman Mustafa told AFP news agency.

"They want to plant the seeds of sectarian division among the Iraqi people."
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Kirkuk, about 250km (155 miles) from Baghdad, was the scene of two suicide bombings last month, in which 14 people were killed.

The city is the centre of northern Iraq's oil industry, and home to a volatile mix of Kurds, Arabs, Christians and members of the Turkmen community.

Sunni insurgents and groups including al-Qaeda remain active in the area despite security improvements in other parts of the country, correspondents say.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki called the bombing "an attempt to harm security and stability and spread mistrust of the Iraqi forces".

The US plans to withdraw its troops from Iraqi cities and major towns by 30 June, and is due to end combat operations across Iraq by September 2010, leaving Iraqi security forces to cope alone.

There are concerns that insurgents may try to take advantage of the withdrawal, although the country's leaders say Iraqi forces are capable of handling internal security without US support.

Just hours before the attack, Mr Maliki had promised the withdrawal would go ahead as promised, calling it a "great victory".
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Do Blogs Dynamically Transform the Modern American Political Culture ?

Recently web logs, or blogs, have exploded in popularity and have come to occupy an increasingly important place in American politics. Given the disparity in resources and organization against other actors, their influence presents a puzzle. How can a collection of decentralized, nonprofit, contrarian and discordant websites exercise any influence over political and policy outputs?

As the World Wide Web approaches its teens, we have new expectations about both the right to express an opinion and access to information upon which to base that opinion. Blogs have begun playing an important role in raising people's expectations Thus, blogs have demonstrated influence; the power to affect events. Blogging is now positioned inside the context of participatory journalism and the responses of mainstream media and political parties to the new technology are reflections of its emerging influence. From what evidence illustrates, blogs have managed to affect today's news agenda.

The Italian Renaissance gave Western civilization several crucial transformations. None, for this article's purposes, matters more than perspective. Boccaccio's Decameron, published in 1353, is considered to be among the earliest works of literature to propose that a point of view is crucial to understanding. Gutenberg's printing press brought forth a revolution that no one could have anticipated at the time. Today, the Internet is the most important medium since the printing press. It subsumes all that has come before and is, in the most fundamental way, transformative. When anyone can be a writer, in the largest sense and for a global audience, many wish to become one. Actually, no better environment exists nowadays for people to exercise these among many other rights, than the Internet and one of the best mediums to exercise these rights are weblogs.

According to some critics, most weblogs will never attempt to reach a public, even if they are in theory reachable by all Net users. The great majority of weblogs will probably be for personal use, while the user base will be peer to peer, not author to public. Other critics, in their attempt to evaluate the accelerating speed of the weblog trend, support that from what it seems so far, it is probable that most weblogs will be short lived, and wind up abandoned, just as most conversations are abandoned. Also it is probable that a few popular blogs will have huge user base and the vast majority will be invisible most of the time, a pattern that reminds some of the "old" and "traditional" mass media. Since the software and interface are highly flexible, and the uses of an easily updated, good-looking page are endless, weblogs will be commonly used in closed systems - private and company networks - as much as the open waters of the Web.

In relation to political coverage and news stories, bloggers have broken or magnified major news stories and blogs themselves draw fire for partisan politics, poor journalistic practices, and duplicity. But the issue still remains that blogs are still in their infancy, despite the wave of press they have received during the last two years. They provide a reasonable, but far from perfect, entry point into the news space, better at offering commentary and starting conversations than serving a current-events-indicator role.
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Zimbabwe's Tsvangirai takes office as PM

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was sworn in as prime minister on Wednesday under a power-sharing deal with President Robert Mugabe.
The two agreed to share power last year to end political deadlock, but their mistrust and continued disagreements have raised questions over how well they can work together to rescue the ruined southern African country.

Tsvangirai, 56, took the oath of office administered by Mugabe at a ceremony in Harare.

The opposition leader won a first round presidential poll against Mugabe last year but boycotted a subsequent run-off over electoral violence.

Implementation of the power-sharing deal only came after increased pressure from southern African countries, fearing a total meltdown in once-prosperous Zimbabwe.

Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, is one of Africa's craftiest political operators. Tsvangirai is a former trade union leader known for fiery speeches, but his leadership skills in government remain untested.

Zimbabweans hope the new government will bring policies to revive a country suffering hyper-inflation, unemployment above 90 percent, food shortages and a cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 3,500 people.
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