Iraq bomber targets mourners, 11 killed

A SUICIDE bombing has ripped through a Shi'ite funeral tent in Iraq, killing five mourners.

Six others also died in violence elsewhere in the country on Saturday, police and medics said.

The bomber detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle near a funeral tent in the village of Zahra, north of Baghdad, where family members of a deceased Shi'ite man were receiving condolences.

Five people were killed and 10 wounded, two days after a copycat attack in nearby Muqdadiyah killed 10 mourners.

Sunni militants including those linked to al-Qaeda frequently target members of the Shi'ite majority, whom they regard as apostates.

Iraq has been hit by a surge in violence that has killed more than 2500 people this year, including 310 this month.

Also on Saturday, a roadside bomb in a Shi'ite area of Muqdadiyah killed two people and wounded five, while another exploded when people gathered at the scene, wounding four more.

In Baquba, north of the capital, gunmen killed a shopowner, while others shot dead an army officer in the northern city of Mosul.

And gunmen killed a soldier and wounded another in Kirkuk, also in northern Iraq.

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Bhutan's opposition party scores upset win

THE tiny landlocked Buddhist nation of Bhutan has a new government.

The opposition People's Democratic Party has stormed to an upset victory, with voters ousting the country's first democratically-elected administration.

The People's Democratic Party (PDP) had won 31 seats in the vote for parliament while the incumbent Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT) party had snared just 14 seats according to the website of Bhutan's national newspaper Kuensel on Saturday afternoon.

The winning party needed 24 out of 47 seats up for grabs to form the next government in the "land of the thunder dragon", according to the Kuensel website, after two other groups were knocked out in a primary voting round in May.

The polling marks only the second time in history that voters in the nation sandwiched between India and China have elected a government,

Remote Bhutan's line of "dragon kings" ceded absolute power five years ago, introducing democracy to an electorate of fewer than 400,000 people.

The royalist DPT won the first election by a landslide in 2008 and bagged this year's primary round with 45 per cent of votes.

But recent gains by the PDP shook up the contest with one local editorial calling it "a neck-and-neck race".

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18 dead in bus-truck crash near Moscow

AT least 18 people have been killed in a collision between a bus and a truck on the outskirts of Moscow.

Russia's Emergency Ministry said on Saturday 41 people including two children were injured, according to the Itar-Tass news agency.

Sixteen of the injured were in "grave condition".

The collision took place in the city of Podolsk, about 35 kilometres north of the Russian capital, between a packed passenger bus and truck carrying gravel. The impact ripped the bus in two.

The Emergency Ministry said more than 230 rescuers, 30 ambulances and two helicopters were deployed to the crash site.

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Egypt PM edges closer to forming cabinet

EGYPT'S new prime minister is edging closer to forming a cabinet, with supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi vowing to keep fighting for his reinstatement.

Hazem al-Beblawi held talks with candidates for ministerial posts accompanied by vice president Mohamed ElBaradei and centre-left lawyer Ziad Bahaa Eldin, who is in the running for the post of deputy prime minister for economic affairs, the official MENA news agency reported on Saturday.

The consultations will continue on Sunday.

The new cabinet's top priorities will be to restore security, ensure the flow of goods and services and prepare for parliamentary and presidential elections, said Beblawi.

The premier is working according to a roadmap drafted by the military which overthrew Morsi on July 3 after millions took to the streets calling on him to step down.

Morsi, the country's first freely elected president, was accused of concentrating power in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, sending the economy into freefall and failing to protect minorities.

The state prosecutor is investigating accusations filed by individuals that Morsi incited the killing of protesters and damaged the economy, judicial sources said.

Military and judicial sources have previously said he may eventually face charges.

Morsi's supporters say his removal from power was a flagrant violation of democratic principles and refuse to join an interim government as tens of thousands have taken to the streets to demand his reinstatement.

"There will be another mass protest on Monday," said Tareq al-Morsi, a Brotherhood spokesman said on Saturday, a day after tens of thousands of Morsi's supporters rallied in Cairo.

Protesters will also march on Monday to the Cairo headquarters of the elite Republican Guard, scene of deadly clashes last week, the spokesman told AFP, insisting it would be "peaceful".

Several thousand people attended a protest in central Tunis on Saturday, called by the country's ruling Islamist party Ennahda, against the military coup that deposed Morsi.

On Friday, Washington and Berlin called on the Egyptian military to release Morsi, who was detained just hours after the coup and is held in a secret location.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the United States agreed with Germany's earlier appeal for Morsi to be released and was "publicly" making the same request.

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Crane to clear Paris tracks

BRETIGNY-SUR-ORGE, France, July 13 AP - A powerful crane will start lifting smashed train cars over buildings to clear tracks after a derailment killed six and injured nearly 200 people south of Paris.

Investigators believe the accident may have been a case of equipment failure.

Human error has been ruled out by France's transport minister and the focus of the investigation is on a detached piece of metal in a switching joint on the tracks.

The national rail company, SNCF, has already taken blame for Friday evening's crash at Bretigny-Sur-Orge station, which occurred at the start of a busy holiday weekend.

"The SNCF considers itself responsible," rail company chief Guillaume Pepy said.

"It is responsible for the lives of its clients."

The packed train, carrying around 385 passengers, was travelling below the speed limit at 137km/h when it derailed, skidded and slammed into the station platform in the small town outside the capital.

It was 20 minutes into a scheduled three-hour trip to Limoges in central France.

The 700-tonne crane, sent from northern France, towered over small buildings that surround the railway station to begin work on clearing the tracks.

The operation is an "extraordinarily difficult technique given that we are in a train station," Pepy said.

"For the moment, we don't know how long it could take."

He said the operation could last through Sunday, which is the July 14 Bastille Day holiday, and into Monday.

Pepy stressed the crane operators will be careful and slow in lifting the cars, because authorities need to verify that nobody is trapped underneath the wreckage.

He said investigators found that a 10-kilogram piece of metal he compared to a staple between two rails in a switching system, which guides trains from one track to another, apparently "detached itself from the rails, lifted and constituted the initial cause of the derailment."

Investigators were looking into how this happened since another train had travelled safely through the station about 30 minutes before.

In addition, they were trying to determine why the train's third car was the first to derail.

Pierre Izard, another SNCF official, said the metal piece "moved into the centre of the switch and in this position it prevented the normal passage of the train's wheels and it may have caused the derailment."

But Pepy said track failure was a likely preliminary cause.

"There can be no (definitive) answer in a few minutes, in a few days," he said at a news conference.

Passengers and officials in train stations throughout France held a minute of silence at noon to commemorate the accident.

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Mandela sparks end-of-life discussions

END-OF-LIFE decisions have become a burning topic of discussion in South Africa, where former President Nelson Mandela has been hospitalised for five weeks.

Graca Michel, Mandela's wife, said on Friday she is "less anxious" about her husband's health than she was a week ago.

Friends and family who have visited Mandela say he is responsive and they feel he is communicative through facial and eye movements.

He is assisted by mechanical breathing, support he may require for the rest of his life.

Sean Davison, the founder of DignitySA, a group working to legalise suicide for the terminally ill, says Mandela's critical health has made death and dying a big topic of discussion in South Africa.

Davison says that's good because most people in Western society avoid talking about the topic.

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787 fire not caused by battery fault

A BRITISH government body investigating a fire on an empty Boeing 787 at London's Heathrow Airport says there is no evidence it was caused by faulty batteries.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch said in a statement on Saturday it was clear the damage to the Ethiopian Airlines plane was far from the area where the carrier's batteries are located.

Investors in Boeing, which calls the plane a Dreamliner, had feared that Friday's fire meant the battery problem had grounded the whole fleet of such planes in January had not been fixed.

The incident did not cause any injuries because no one was aboard the plane but forced runways at Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports, to shut down for nearly an hour.

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