So Happy It's Thursday

Iraq

Massive Campaign of Violence Kills 68, Wounds Dozens;
Bush Says Guerrillas Marginalized

A horrific day unfolded in Iraq on Wednesday, with a massive bomb at a funeral, a daring raid that destroyed fuel tankers, and deadly bombings and shootings all over the center-north of the country, even reaching into the south.

President Bush's and Vice President Cheney's recent pronouncements do not seem to me to fit very well with the Iraqi reality they say they are describing.

"Those who want to stop the progress of freedom are becoming more and more marginalized." -Bush 1/04/05.

Afghanistan

Suspected Taliban militants have beheaded a headteacher in central Afghanistan, the latest in a string of gruesome attacks on teachers working in schools where girls are taught.

Armed men burst into the home of Malim Abdul Habib in Qalat, the capital of restive Zabul province, on Tuesday night. They dragged him into a courtyard and forced his family to watch as they cut off his head, said Ali Khel, a local government spokesman.

Mr Habib was head of Shaikh Mathi Baba, a coeducational secondary school with 1,300 pupils. Threatening notices calling for an end to the education of girls had been pinned to shop walls in the town in recent months but Mr Habib was not thought to have been directly targeted.

Hundreds of students attended his funeral yesterday. "Only the Taliban are against our girls being educated," Mr Khel said.

The Taliban insurgency has taken a brutal twist in the past year with militants avoiding shoot-outs with American troops - which they usually lose - in favour of targeted assassinations of teachers, aid workers and pro-government clerics.

Turkey

A boy is believed to have died from bird flu in Turkey, its government said last night, while his sister was seriously ill with the same virus. They are the first human cases outside south-east Asia, bringing the spectre of the feared pandemic to the European border.

Mehmet Ali Kocyigit, 14, died on Sunday amid initial assertions from the Turkish authorities that he did not have the H5N1 virus which causes avian flu. His sister, Fatma, was said at the time to be in a critical condition. But the Turkish health minister, Recep Akdag, said yesterday that preliminary tests had found the avian flu virus, H5N1. A third sibling is also suspected of having the virus.