Iraq

Bombs kill 18 on eve of election results

A car bomb killed 17 people Saturday and injured 21 others in a mostly Shiite Muslim town south of Baghdad, and U.S. troops backed by tanks battled rebels in the country’s third-largest city as the insurgency showed no sign of abating after national elections.

Officials plan to announce the final results of the Jan. 30 vote today, election commission spokesman Farid Ayar said.

Another car bomb exploded in an eastern Baghdad neighborhood as a U.S. military convoy passed, killing an Iraqi woman and wounding three others but causing no American casualties, Iraqi police said.

The car bomb south of Baghdad exploded near the main hospital in Musayyib, a mostly Shiite town 35 miles south of Baghdad along the Euphrates River. It appeared the attack was part of a campaign by Sunni Arab extremists against the country’s Shiites — an estimated 60 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people — who stand on the verge of a major election victory as officials finish the final vote tallies.

Spain

Spectacular fire ‘melts’ office building

A raging fire swept through the upper levels of a 32-story office building in downtown Madrid early Sunday, melting the structure like a candle and collapsing the top six floors in a shower of flaming debris.

TV footage showed bright orange flames shooting out the sides of the Windsor Building, believed to be empty and located near one of Madrid’s main boulevards. The fire started around 11:30 p.m. Saturday and was still burning out of control more than two hours later.

The cause of the blaze was not immediately known, but emergency services spokesman Javier Ayuso said firefighters believed it might have been a short circuit.

The Windsor Building was built in 1973 and is a landmark structure in Madrid’s business district. It was surrounded by scaffolding due to recent repairs, Ayuso said.

Iran

U.S. using drones to spy on nuclear sites

The Bush administration has been flying surveillance drones over Iran for nearly a year to seek evidence of nuclear weapons programs and detect weaknesses in air defenses, according to three U.S. officials with detailed knowledge of the secret effort.

The small, pilotless planes, penetrating Iranian airspace from U.S. military facilities in Iraq, use radar, video, still photography and air filters designed to pick up traces of nuclear activity to gather information that is not accessible to satellites, the officials said.

The Iranian government, using Swiss channels in the absence of diplomatic relations with Washington, formally protested the incursions.

The drones were first spotted by dozens of Iranians and set off a national newspaper frenzy in late December over whether the country was being visited by UFOs.

Mexico City

Plot to assassinate president investigated

Mexican and U.S. officials are probing reports that a group of Mexican army deserters who work for the violent Gulf drug cartel may have acquired two anti-aircraft missiles that could be used to assassinate President Vicente Fox.

The renegade paramilitary group, known as the Zetas, allegedly purchased the two Russian surface-to-air missiles from the black market in Central America, according to a January report by private intelligence service Stratfor and a report in Saturday’s Mexico City newspaper, El Universal, which quoted officials in both Mexico’s Interior Ministry and Secretary of Public Security.

At a news conference Saturday, the nation’s top crime fighters played down the threat and said they needed time to verify the information.

“We’re not assigning this any credibility,” Mexican Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha said. “It’s worthy of an investigation … (but) the public should not be alarmed by this.”