By Jim Randle
Baghdad
31 January 2007

At least 25 people died and many more were wounded in car bombings in Baghdad and elsewhere Wednesday.  VOA's Jim Randle reports from Baghdad.

 
Iraqis stand by car bomb wreck in Baghdad, 31 Jan 2007

Most of the car bombs exploded in areas of Baghdad that are predominantly Shi'ite.

One blast hit a waiting area for minibuses.

Another blew up in a mixed neighborhood in the western part of the city.

North of Baghdad, at a checkpoint close to an Iraqi army headquarters, a bomber blew himself up along with the oil truck he was driving. Several soldiers were wounded in the explosion.

Tuesday, insurgents killed more than 50 people, many of them Shi'ite Muslims performing rituals for the Shi'ite holy day of Ashura.

U.S. authorities said two U.S. soldiers and a Marine that were wounded in fighting Tuesday in al-Anbar province have died.

 
Nancy Pelosi
In Washington, a critic of President Bush's approach to Iraq, Speaker of the House of Representatives  Nancy Pelosi said she was disappointed by what she saw on a recent trip to Baghdad.

"We went with the hope and expectation that what we would see in Iraq was some coordinated effort to have political solutions, to relieve the civil strife and violence there, and diplomatic efforts to bring stability to the region," she said.  "We saw no evidence of either, sadly."

Polls show that in the United States public sentiment has turned against the war that has cost more than 3,000 American lives in nearly four years.

And a new audit of reconstruction projects in Iraq published Wednesday says reconstruction efforts have lost millions of dollars to waste, fraud, and abuse.