Scenes of destruction in Baghdad after a series of coordinated car bombs and roadside blasts 10 years to the day since the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Officials say more than 30 people were killed and 80 wounded as small restaurants, bus stops and groups of labourers were targeted. The attacks all happened within a one-hour period.

Updates from Al-Jazeera report that the death toll from Tuesday's blasts is now 56 with 88 people wounded, the extent of their injuries unknown at this time. Ten car bombs, including two detonated by suicide bombers, one roadside bomb and two gun attacks struck in and around the Iraqi capital during morning rush hour.

The attacks cames as the cabinet announced on Tuesday that it would postpone provincial elections in two provinces that were scheduled for April by up to six months over security concerns.

Polls in Anbar province in west Iraq and Nineveh in the north have been delayed, Ali Mussawi, the Iraqi premier's spokesman said.

Mussawi said that candidates have been threatened and killed, while there were also requests for a delay from the two provinces.

Several provincial elections candidates have also been killed in attacks in recent weeks.

It appeared that elections in the 12 other provinces where they were set to be held on April 20 would go ahead as scheduled.

Violence in Iraq has decreased from its peak in 2006 and 2007, attacks still remain common, killing 220 people in February alone.

A Turkish security guard and a suicide bomber were killed and several more were wounded early Friday in an explosion at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkish media reported. “It was a huge explosion,” said travel agent Kamiyar Barnos, whose shop just 100 meters from the embassy was shattered. While no one has taken credit for the attack yet, Turkey has long called for U.S. intervention in Syria, and Turkey is hosting hundreds of NATO soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere who are using a Patriot missile defense system along the border with Syria. Domestically, Turkey's main domestic terrorist group is the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, whose leaders were killed last month in Paris.

The number of Palestinians killed rises to 96 with hundreds more wounded after six days of air raids, as UN secretary-general calls for ceasefire. And in an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post, Gilad Sharon, the son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon writes“We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza.”

AlJazeera:

Three people, including two children, were killed and 30 others were injured in an air raid before dawn on
Monday on a family home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood in Gaza City, medical officials said.
...
Israel bombed 80 locations in Gaza overnight, the military said on Monday, as officials prepared for a ground offensive if talks for a truce fail.
...
Ashraf al-Kidra, a spokesperson of the health ministry in Gaza, said on Sunday that civilians accounted for half of the Palestinian toll.

Gaza health officials said at least 23 children and several women have been killed since Israel's attacks from the air and warships began on Wednesday.

Hundreds of others have been wounded, and Palestinian hospitals are struggling to cope.

The Israeli army said it had fired missiles at more than 1,300 locations in Gaza since Wednesday, and that more than 550 rockets were fired back against Israel. Three Israelis have been killed and a few dozen wounded.

The army said about 300 rockets fired by Palestinian fighters were intercepted by Israel's anti-missile system, the Iron Dome, and at least 99 failed to reach Israel and landed inside Gaza.

In an op-ed, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s son, Gilad, argues that Israel needs to step up its strikes on Gaza. “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza,” he writes. “The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas.” He continues with a comparison of the current situation to dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese in World War II. And concludes that “there’s no middle path here.”

A side note, Reuters reports the Israeli government as saying that more than 44 million hacking attempts have been made on its web sites since Wednesday:

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said just one hacking attempt was successful on a site he did not want to name, but it was up and running after 10 minutes of downtime.

Typically, there are a few hundred hacking attempts a day on Israeli sites, the ministry said.

Attempts on defence-related sites have been the highest, while 10 million attempts have been made on the site of Israel's president, 7 million on the Foreign Ministry and 3 million on the site of the prime minister.

A video message claiming to be from the hacktivist group, Anonymous, has appeared on the net.

It states: "We will strike any and all websites that we deem to be in Israeli Cyberspace in retaliation for the mistreating of people in Gaza and other areas."

Check back for more on the situation in Gaza later in the day.

Here's the latest on the situation from AlJazeera:

Fresh Israeli air raids have killed at least eight Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and wounded dozens more, medics say, with Palestinian security sources confirming that at least three of the dead were Hamas fighters.

Israel on Saturday expanded its fierce air assault on rocket operations, striking Hamas government and security compounds, tunnels and electricity transformers after an unprecedented rocket attack on Friday aimed at the holy city of Jerusalem raised the stakes.

The Israeli army said that four of its soldiers were injured by a rocket fired from Gaza. Meanwhile, a newly installed battery of Israel's Iron Dome defence system successfully intercepted a Gaza rocket aimed at Tel Aviv on Saturday.

Palestinian medics said 40 Palestinians have been killed and 345 wounded since Israel launched the aerial campaign against the Palestinian enclave on Wednesday.

In the same period, three Israelis have been killed and 18 injured, including 10 soldiers.

Since the start of its operation, Israel's army said it carried out some 700 airstrikes. It also said that fighters have fired more than 580 rockets over the border, 367 of which hit southern Israel, and 222 of which were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

Also now at AlJazeera, breaking news banners read "Israeli air strike hits main gaza police headquarters and prime minister ismail haniyeh's office," and "Israeli cabinet approves plan to call up 75,000 reserve soldiers as air strikes continue on the gaza strip," with no further details as yet.

In this video, Omar Khadr, a 15 year old Canadian detainee – the youngest at Guatanamo bay – speaks to a team of Canadian intelligence agents after being tortured by US officials before even arriving at the facility.

This just-barely teen boy was taken into custody by the US after a firefight in Afghanistan in September 2002. Khadr was severly wounded in this battle, tortured after being taken into custody, and a month later was sent to Guantanamo Bay. Shortly after he arrived, Canadian security agents spent four days interrogating him, which are documented here. In this clip,the psychologically perverse interrogation techniques used are exposed, as you follow Khadr's painful realization that the Canadian agents are not there to take him home but to manipulate him into making incriminating statements whether or not those statements are true.

In July 2008, the video of this interrogation was ordered to be made available in a Canadian supreme court ruling that stated: “ Interrogation of a youth, to elicit statements about the most serious criminal charges while detained in these conditions and without access to counsel, and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the US prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.”

The transformation of this 7 minute video into a documentary titled “Four Days in Guantanamo” is increasing the level of awareness regarding the treatments of prisoners at this infamous detention center.

The directors explain that International conventions which protect the rights of children in wartime (especially child soldiers) should have applied to Omar, but the Canadian government sidestepped those laws.

In October 2010, Omar pleaded guilty to all the charges pressed by the US. It was a strategic plea bargain which enabled the young boy to serve eight years in jail, instead of 40. He is the first person ever convicted as a war criminal for acts committed as a juvenile. He served a total of 3619 days in Guantanamo.

Omar has returned to Canada after a decade in custody and has been transferred to a maximum security prison in Canada where he awaits parole, which, according to his attorney, could be as early as 2013.

Afghan militants armed with rocket propelled grenades managed to break into a main U.S. Marine base in Afghanistan Friday, killing at least two and wounding an unknown amount. A spokesman says the attack may still be ongoing and that there has been major damage done to buildings, an aircraft hangar, and several military jets. According to a NATO spokesman, Prince Harry was on the base at the time of the attack but was "never in any danger."

Via:

The attack was aimed at Camp Leatherneck, the US sector of Camp Bastion which is the main American base in southern Afghanistan. Although Bastion is a British base, it is also home to American, Estonian, Danish and Afghan troops. It has two runways, a hospital and is the supply hub for southern Afghanistan handling thousands of flights of every month. The base is in desert several miles outside of Lashkar Gar, the capital of Helmand province.

A Washington official said the attack involved a range of weapons, possibly including mortars, rockets or rocket-propelled grenades, as well as small arms. The base is often subject to mortar fire, but officials in Afghanistan said the damage was far more severe than normal.

Meanwhile, from Yemen to Sudan, the number of killed and wounded from demonstrations in front of American embassies grows after an anti-Islam movie sparked furor in Muslim countries. It is not yet clear if the attack is related.

It was a Bloody Sunday, indeed for Iraqis as bombs and small arms attacks claimed at least 75 lives and left another 285 wounded in a series of attacks that targeted the country’s security forces. The onslaught by insurgents struck a dozen cities and an outpost of the Iraqi Army. Ten soldiers were killed in that assault, and 8 more were wounded. A brigadier general and 7 police recruits were killed when a bomb exploded in the city of Kirkuk, and 2 more car bombs detonated outside the French Consulate in Nasiriyah. Explosives went off in a number of other cities, including Baghdad. No group claimed immediate responsibility for the violence.

Via:

"What kind of life is this?" said Safeen Qadir, 26, a university student in Kirkuk. He described dead bodies and weeping, shouting relatives at bombing scenes in Kirkuk, where three midmorning explosions killed seven and wounded about 70.

"Because of the daily explosions, we must write our wills before go out of home," Qadir said. "The death exists in every inch of the city of Kirkuk, and no one is spared from the crime of terrorism."

Via:

Journalist Ahmed Rushdi, reporting from Baghdad, told Al Jazeera that, according to him, it was not only al-Qaeda that was behind the attacks.

"It is also the insurgency against the government and the political parties, because there is a major political dispute between al Maliki and his opponents," Rushdi said.

"It is another day in the major failure of the security forces in Iraq. The people here are asking themselves; what is the government doing to regain control of the situation? There seems to be no real intelligence data concerning these attacks."

As the attacks were sweeping across Iraq on Sunday, a Baghdad criminal court sentenced Iraq's Sunni vice president to death after finding him guilty of masterminding the killing of two people. The sentence was handed down in absentia.

Hashemi fled the country after Iraq's Shia-led government authorities had accused him in December of running a death squad, as the last US troops were withdrawing from the country.

A 14-year-old suicide bomber attacked NATO headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan on Saturday, killing six civilians and wounding five, including children. No soldiers were struck. The teenage attacker was wearing a vest packed with explosives, and rode up to the building on a bike before detonating. Although the Taliban claimed initial responsibility for the attack, they say the bomber was a 28-year-old and the target was the CIA's Kabul offices. The latest attack highlights militants' abilities to strike even the most secure parts of the Afghan capital, worrying officials.

Hashmat Stanikzai, a police spokesperson, said the dead and wounded were all street sellers aged between 12 and 17.

Street children routinely gather outside NATO headquarters to peddle small trinkets and sweets, looking out for soldiers leaving or getting into the base.

Pieces of flesh and splattered blood lay on the street near the base, where small bodies were seen being lifted into ambulances, witnesses said.

"I was here when the blast occurred. I saw some wounded children on the ground. The wounded [were] transferred to emergency hospital for treatment and I heard that three of the injured children have died," said Ahmad Sameer, a witness.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) condemned the use of children. "Forcing underage youth to do their dirty work again proves the insurgency's despicable tactics," said spokesman Brigadier General Gunter Katz.

The U.S. embassy in Kabul said in a statement that using "the most impressionable and vulnerable", such as a teenager, to carry out such attacks revealed the true nature of the insurgents.

A South African court is set to release 270 miners who were arrested on charges of murder after police there gunned down 34 of their co-workers, and wounded 78 others.

The release was due to start on Monday around 2:00pm (12:00 GMT), after the public prosecutor on Sunday provisionally dropped murder charges brought against the miners for the killings by police at platinum giant Lonmin's Marikana mine.

"We still have to establish what the numbers [due to be released] are and get a true reflection of what the intention of the prosecution was," Mapule Keetse, the lawyer for the detained, told the AFP news agency.

Murder had been added to the chargesheet against the miners last week, after they were originally charged with public violence, illegal gathering and attempted murder.

"The murder charge against the current 270 suspects, which was provisional anyway, will be formally withdrawn provisionally in court on their next court appearance," Nomgcobo Jiba, acting national director of prosecutions, announced on Sunday.

Jiba said other charges, including public violence, would remain.

The announcement of the release follows intense criticism from political parties, trade unions, civil society and legal experts.

The strike by the miners of Gold Fields' KDC gold mine is said to likely continue. The miners were seeking a wage increase to $1,500 a month.

More at AlJazeera.