At least 19 people were killed and 80 wounded when a suicide truck bomb ripped through the Iraqi Interior Ministry in the relatively peaceful Kurdish city of Irbil today.

Traffic stopped and people stood still in the streets despite rain for a period of silence today as Kurds in northern Iraq commemorated the anniversary of a 1988 chemical weapons attack that killed an estimated 5,600 people.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s private doctor today said the president had not suffered any heart troubles.

Bowing to intense pressure, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari agreed to allow Shiite politicians to find someone else to head the new government, abandoning his claim on another term in the face of Sunni and Kurdish opposition.

IRAQI Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, under intense pressure to give up plans for a second term, agreed yesterday to let Shi’ite lawmakers reconsider his nomination, a step that could mark a breakthrough in the months-long effort to form a new government.

US and UN officials urged the Shiite-led government to reverse last-minute changes to voting rules for a referendum on Iraq’s new constitution and head off a threatened Sunni boycott.

Iraq’s Environment Minister Narmin Othman escaped an assassination attempt when gunmen attacked her convoy north of Baghdad wounding three bodyguards, state-run Iraqiya Television reported today.

A firebrand cleric who issued religious decrees for an al Qaida-linked terrorist group has been killed during a car chase and shootout with Saudi police that also killed a policeman.

Gunmen today ambushed a convoy carrying a member of the Iraqi Governing Council as she was returning to Baghdad from mediation efforts in Najaf, an aide said.

The US is to bring members of Saddam Hussein’s disbanded Baath party in from the cold – allowing thousands of former army officers and teachers back in their jobs.

A third round of negotiations aimed at ending fighting in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah will be held today, a US commander said.

US administrator Paul Bremer says it could take more than 15 months to hold elections in Iraq – a much longer timeframe than the country’s Shi’ite Muslim clergy and some political leaders seem prepared to accept.

Iraq’s US-appointed Governing Council has met for the first time to look into ways of appointing judges to a new war crimes tribunal that could try Saddam Hussein.

REPORTERS Without Borders yesterday wrote to General Tommy Franks, the commander of the coalition forces operating in Iraq, to ask him to order an immediate inquiry into the exact circumstances of the death of British TV reporter Terry Lloyd of Independent Television News (ITN) and disappearance of French cameraman Frederic Nerac and Lebanese interpreter Hussein Othman on 22 March near Basra in southern Iraq.

United Nations prosecutors in East Timor today filed the first charges for ‘‘extermination’’ against nine anti-independence militiamen and two Indonesian soldiers for crimes committed after the territory seceded from Indonesia in 1999, officials said.