A Christian martyr. Two days after three candidates and two campaign workers were kidnapped and murdered, Iraqis voted in the first national elections since 2005, choosing between 14,000 candidates running for 440 provincial offices. Two men were shot and wounded at a polling place in Sadr City, and some voters were turned away when their names could not be found on voting rolls dating from food ration lists held over from Saddam Hussein’s reign. CNN“This day is a victory for all Iraqis,” said an Iraqi general in Kirkuk. “I don’t know whom to vote for,” said an inmate at Basra’s …

More than 100 people were killed in fighting in Iraq. “I think,” said the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, “the country came to the brink of civil war. But Iraqis decided that they didn’t want to go down that path.”The New York TimesThe New York TimesIn the Baghdad area, Sunni militants were evicting Shiites from their homes. “We want you out of here by 8 p.m. tomorrow,” one man was told. “If we find you here, we will kill you.”The Washington PostPresident George W. Bush said that Iraq’s choice was between “chaos or unity,”The New York Timesand it was reported that …

A Christian martyr. In Iraq, the director of the al-Furat hospital in Baghdad was shot dead. A roadside bomb went off in Basra, killing a policeman, and two Sudanese drivers who work with U.S. forces were taken hostage.BBC NewsA gunman opened fire on a minibus filled with people working for a Kuwaiti company, killing one and wounding three, and a garbage-truck suicide bomb killed three people and injured more than twenty.BBC NewsThirty-nine dead bodies were found west and south of Baghdad; some had been beheaded, and others had been handcuffed before they were shot. Many were members of the Iraqi …

A Christian martyr. Former secretary of the treasury Paul O’Neill revealed in a new book that President George W. Bush was already looking for an excuse to invade Iraq during the first few weeks of his presidency. “It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it,” O’Neill said. “The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this.’”CBS NewsO’Neill said that the very first meeting of the National Security Council involved discussions of a “post-Saddam Iraq,” peacekeeping troops, and war-crimes tribunals. O’Neill provided the book’s author, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, …

Lawyers at the Environmental Protection Agency announced that they were dropping lawsuits against 50 power plants for violating the Clean Air Act, because newly weakened enforcement rules have undermined the cases; theNew York TimesBush Administration previously had promised that the lawsuits would continue after the rules change.New York TimesThe state attorneys general of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, which are downwind from many of the plants, promised to sue the polluters directly.New York TimesA new study found that tiny golden “nano-bullets” could be used in the future to destroy cancer tumors.New ScientistEnvironmentalists sued the federal government to force it …