IRAQ Insurgents kill Kurdish official

Dozens of other fatalities were reported throughout Iraq.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents assassinated a Kurdish member of parliament, and police found 20 bodies shot to death and dumped in the Tigris River north of the capital, where there was no major violence Sunday for the first time in five days.
Faris Nasir Hussein, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, was killed along with his brother and their driver in an ambush 50 miles north of Baghdad. A second Kurdish lawmaker, Haidar Shanoun, was wounded in the attack near the town of Dujail.
Police and PUK officials said the men were killed Saturday night as they drove to the capital for Sunday's session of the legislature which signed off on minor amendments to Iraq's draft constitution and delivered it to the United Nations for printing. The United Nations will distribute 5 million copies in advance of the Oct. 15 referendum.
Lawmakers sat for a moment of silence to honor their dead comrade.
"The terrorists have launched a war of aggression against all Iraqis, [but] we are up to it," said Deputy Speaker Hussain al-Shahristani.
Deaths reported
Authorities reported finding two dozen more bodies Sunday, men shot to death in the apparent ongoing tit-for-tat killings between Sunni and Shiite death squads.
Four of the dead were found handcuffed and shot in east Baghdad. Twenty more were dragged from the Tigris River near Balad, a city 50 miles north of the capital, police reported.
The U.S. military said a soldier was killed in a roadside bombing while on patrol near Al Asad Air Base in a violent insurgent-infested region near the Syrian border. The dead soldier was assigned to the 56th Brigade Combat Team.
The death count rose to at least 1,899 members of the U.S. military who havedied since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.