LATEST NEWS | Developments

The latest developments in Iraq:
A string of car bombs and other blasts killed at least 54 Iraqis on Tuesday, including 17 outside Baghdad's most venerated Sunni mosque, while U.S. troops battled Shiite militiamen in Baghdad. In the most lethal episode Tuesday, three parked cars exploded one after another in western Baghdad, police and Iraqi media reported. The blasts killed 25 people and wounded 55, one physician said by telephone, as he watched the victims being carried into Yarmouk hospital.
A Chicago-area engineer who has been on the lam since escaping last week from an Iraqi jail where he was being held on corruption charges has surfaced in Jordan. Speaking to reporters Tuesday in the Jordanian capital, Prime Minister Marouf al-Bakhit said Aiham Alsammarae "arrived in Amman as an American and on an American plane," according to The Associated Press. Lou Fintor, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, vigorously denied any U.S. government involvement in transporting the former Iraqi electricity minister out of Iraq.
Source: Combined dispatches