BBC | A car bomb has ripped through a funeral tent in a mainly Shia Muslim area of Baghdad, killing 48 people.

Huffington Post | A federal judge has tossed a lawsuit that blamed the security company formerly known as Blackwater for the deaths of four contractors killed in a grisly 2004 ambush on the restive streets of Iraq.

AFP | KUALA LUMPUR — Former prime minister Tony Blair’s sister-in-law Lauren Booth, a rights campaigner and Muslim convert, said on Wednesday that he should be tried for war crimes over the invasion of Iraq.

Bloomberg | Iraq’s central bank chief warned Tuesday that a high court decision to put the financial institution under the supervision of the Cabinet instead of parliament could threaten the country’s assets abroad.

Radio Free Europe | At least 18 people were killed today in two car bomb explosions in Iraq’s holy city of Karbala as crowds gathered for a religious ritual.

LA Times | Detainees are reportedly held without trial and are subject to abuse at a Green Zone jail run by an elite unit that falls under Prime Minister Maliki’s office. Promises of reform have not been met, even as he appears to consolidate more power.

London Guardian | Tony Blair told one of his closest advisers a year before the invasion of Iraq that his government should be “gung-ho on Saddam” and had to “reorder our story and message” to convince public opinion of the need to get rid of him.

The Los Angeles Times | Twenty years ago this week, despite fears of “another Vietnam,” the House and Senate voted to authorize the use of force against Iraqi troops occupying Kuwait.

Reuters | Exports from Iraqi Kurdistan will start at 100,000 barrels per day.

Reuters | A suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives and ball bearings attacked Iraqi police recruits.

Bloomberg | A local governor in Iraq’s oil-rich north cut the electricity going to Baghdad from a power station in his province Monday over a dispute with the central government that he said had left his residents without power in the cold winter months.

Reuters | Iraq’s Transport Ministry said on Sunday it would invite foreign firms in early March to submit bids to build 10 ships, including bulk cargo and container vessels, for an estimated value of $110 million.

Reuters | (Reuters) – Two U.S. soldiers were killed and a third was injured when two Iraqi soldiers opened fire on U.S. troops during training in the northern city of Mosul on Saturday, Iraqi army sources said.

CNN | Kuwait’s prime minister will meet top Iraqi officials in Baghdad Wednesday, state media reported, the highest-level Kuwaiti visit to Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded the smaller country in 1990.

Guardian | Tony Blair, summoned back to the inquiry into the Iraq invasion in light of damaging and conflicting evidence revealed since he answered questions a year ago, is to appear before Sir John Chilcot on 21 January, it has been revealed.

LA Times | A number worry that the firebrand cleric will once again spark violent confrontations and question whether he has really changed.

London Guardian | Dominic Streatfeild explains how despite expert warnings, the US let al-Qaida buy an arsenal of deadly weapons – then tried to cover it up.

BBC | A Spanish judge has opened a probe into a raid by Iraqi security forces on a camp housing an Iranian exile group in July 2009 which left 11 people dead.

Bloomberg | France Telecom SA’s talks on acquisitions in Iraq and Cambodia are progressing, and the company may enter Algeria as it expands further into emerging markets, Chief Executive Officer Stephane Richard said.

Guardian | The cleric once described by the US military as the most dangerous man in Iraq, Muqtadr al-Sadr, slipped back into his homeland today after three years in Iran to lay claim to a lead role in Iraqi affairs.

NY Times | The Ministry of Health here is campaigning to ban the sale of guns in Iraq. Toy guns, that is.

The Guardian | Iraq Body Count has produced its annual comprehensive look at deaths in Iraq, Download the data – and see how it compares to the Wikileaks war logs.

The Telegraph | Unusually high rates of birth deformity in an Iraqi city at the centre of the biggest battle of the allied occupation may be due to war contamination, a new study has concluded.

Xinhua | Nine people were killed and some 40 others were wounded in twin suicide bomb attacks outside government buildings in the city of Ramadi.

AFP | Iraqi forces have arrested 93 suspects, including 60 wanted men, in a crackdown on Al-Qaeda in Anbar province.

CNN | At least seven people have been killed in Iraq over the last 24 hours, Iraqi officials said Friday.

AFP | Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark on Wednesday denied sending non-combat troops to Iraq in 2003 to ensure one of her country’s largest companies retained lucrative UN contracts.

Reuters | Iraq’s Parliament approved Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his new government Tuesday, nine months after an inconclusive election left politics in limbo and delayed investments to rebuild the country after years of war.

UK Daily Mirror | An American jailed for raping and killing a girl of 14 and murdering her parents and sister in Iraq has blamed trauma in the war zone for his actions.

NY Times | American and Iraqi officials had long expected that some American military presence, even if only in an advisory role, would continue beyond 2011.

New York Times | Iraq moved one step closer to finally forming a government on Saturday as lawmakers overturned a contentious decision banning three prominent Sunni Arabs from national politics.

Financial Times | Weir Group, the FTSE 100 engineering company, has been fined £3m after pleading guilty to breaching UN sanctions on oil-for-food contracts in Iraq that it was awarded by Saddam Hussein’s government.

AFP | The US military in Iraq is trying to prevent soldiers from viewing WikiLeaks documents and has posted a web advisory suggesting they could be breaking the law, a spokeswoman said on Saturday.

Ediciones El Pais | One of the biggest objectives at the US Embassy in Madrid over the past seven years has been trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of the killing of a Spanish television cameraman.

Wall Street Journal | Iraqi Interior Minister al-Bolani paraded 39 suspected members of the Islamic State of Iraq.

Robert LeJeune | When you step back and actually start to review the information in the cables and war logs, those whom are our leaders should be the ones under the gun.

Shashank Bengali | American diplomats are in damage-control mode.

Leslie Horn | WikiLeaks is planning to release more than 3 million confidential documents in its biggest release yet.

Gareth Porter | A special envoy raised the possibility in a secret meeting with senior Iraqi military and civilian officials that the Obama administration would leave more than 15,000 combat troops in Iraq after the 2011 deadline for U.S. withdrawal.

AFP | US Defence Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday said Washington was open to keeping troops in Iraq beyond a 2011 deadline.

London Guardian | Al-Qaida in Iraq has threatened more attacks on Iraq’s Christians, claiming that they are legitimate targets who now face the “doors of destruction”.

Press TV | American forces decapitated an Iraqi last year on the order of their higher-up, show recently-exposed US military documents.

Washington’s Blog | Shelton also said that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon officials pushed for war in Iraq “almost to the point of insubordination.”

Guardian | Members of panel are believed to be concerned about damaging and conflicting evidence revealed since former PM’s last appearance

The Guardian | As the international face of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Aziz has a story to tell – which makes it less likely he’ll escape execution

Pepe Escobar | Maliki visited the holy city of Qom, described Iran-Iraq relations as “strategic” and called for even deeper Iran-Iraq cooperation.

Press TV | As the whistleblower website WikiLeaks plans to release 400,000 more classified documents on the US war in Iraq, an activist says Washington fears that the truth may eventually see the light of day.

Los Angeles Times | Fox to Reid: Did you demoralize the troops when you said the war in Iraq was lost?

Hürriyet Daily News | Turkey’s Parliament passed a bill Tuesday extending the military’s mandate to conduct cross-border operations in northern Iraq against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, for another year.

Amina Yunis | American Ambassador James Jeffrey expressed great concern about the coalition formula backed by Tehran.