Multiple car bombs exploded at about the same time and killed at least 40 people in a mainly Shi’ite town north of Baghdad on Thursday, officials said. A hospital source said in addition to the 40 dead, at least 80 more people were wounded in the blasts. One witness reported seeing at least eight people killed in one of the blasts.

Two suicide bombers killed 61 people and wounded 150 when they blew themselves up at a crowded market in Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim town of Hilla on Thursday, police said. The blasts, along with bomb and mortar attacks in Baghdad that killed 11 people, underscored the challenges for the government of Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Six months after the United States invasion of Iraq, Esam Pasha, a 30-year-old Iraqi artist and writer, proudly painted a mural called Resilience over a giant portrait of Saddam Hussein on the wall of a government building. Now he lives in the US. Pasha is among hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been driven abroad since the war whose skills Iraq can ill afford to lose.

United States helicopters attacked gunmen holed up inside high-rise buildings in Baghdad on Wednesday in what the US military said was an operation to regain control of a major street cutting through the heart of the city. Thirty suspected insurgents were killed and 35 more detained during day-long gun battles in the area, Defence Ministry spokesperson Mohammed al-Askari said.

The new chief judge in Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial ejected the ousted Iraqi leader from the courtroom for refusing to sit down moments after hearings began on Wednesday. Defence lawyers also stormed out in protest against the sacking of Mohammed al-Ureybi’s predecessor.