BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 25 people were killed and 45 injured Tuesday morning when a car bomber detonated his vehicle at a police recruitment center in Jalula, northeast of Baqouba in Diyala province, Iraqi police said.

Posing as a security officer, the bomber drove up to a checkpoint in the mostly Kurdish town of where dozens of men were standing to register to join a new battalion in the security forces in Diyala province. When questioned, he detonated the car.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry was organizing the new police support battalion following recent security operations in violent Diyala province, police said. Most of the security forces in Diyala are members of U.S.-backed Sunni militias, the Sons of Iraq, while the police are dominated mostly by Shiite Arabs. The new recruits were supposed to help balance the ethnic and sectarian nature of the police. » read more

BAGHDAD — A bombing in the mostly Kurdish town of Jalowlaa, northeast of Baqouba in Diyala province, killed at least 25 and injured at least 45 people, Iraqi police said.

The car bomb's target was a recruiting center where men were registering to become part of a new battalion in the security forces in Diyala province. Most of the men were members of the U.S.-backed Sons of Iraq militia, which American officials say has played a key role in undercutting support for Sunni extremists.

The bomber drove up to a checkpoint where tens of men were standing. The driver of the car posed as a security officer and as he was being questioned the car detonated at the checkpoint at about 10 a.m. Tuesday morning. » read more

BAQOUBA, Iraq — The 15-year-old girl had the chubby cheeks of a child who hadn't lost her baby fat when she was arrested Sunday by an alert policeman. Around her chest was a vest packed with explosives. The policeman chained her to the bars of a window, stripped off her dress, found the vest and deactivated the bomb. Had he not intervened, Rania would have been this year's 31st suicide bomber in Iraq.

A day later, Rania seemed in a daze as she spoke about the people who put her up to it: the relatives who forced her to don the vest and apparently drugged her, her husband, whom police accuse of being a member of the group al Qaida in Iraq, and her mother, who seemed to play a central role in turning Rania into a human bomb but whom she looked to as a rescuer.

Sitting in the office of the Ministry of the Interior, Rania narrated a tale that at times was wrenching, at times highly improbable. She said in an interview Monday with McClatchy that she didn't know that the wired vest was a bomb. But she also said she was suspicious from the moment her husband's female cousins told her to wear it. The police would not provide her full name, nor would she in their presence. » read more

BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki said Monday there would be no security agreement between the United States and Iraq without an unconditional timetable for withdrawal — a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which insists that the timing for troop departure would be based on conditions on the ground.

"No pact or an agreement should be set without being based on full sovereignty, national common interests, and no foreign soldier should remain on Iraqi land, and there should be a specific deadline and it should not be open," Maliki told a meeting of tribal Sheikhs in Baghdad.

Maliki said that the United States and Iraq had agreed that all foreign troops would be off Iraqi soil by the end of 2011. "There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil," Maliki said. » read more