Iraq: Iraq's parliament finally approved a draft constitution yesterday, just four weeks before the text is put to a referendum, as violence persisted after one of the bloodiest weeks since the US invasion of 2003.
Kurdish parliamentary deputy Faris Hussein was shot dead along with three bodyguards on Saturday night as he travelled to Baghdad from the north. Fellow deputy Haider Qassem was wounded, National Assembly spokesman Peshro Saeed said.
The shooting - as well as a car bomb which killed 30 people in Baghdad on Saturday - rounded off a week of carnage which saw 250 people killed in the capital and elsewhere.
The Kurdish and Shia-led government, backed by occupying US forces, is facing a Sunni Arab insurgency aimed at bringing it down, and the US military has said it expected violence to rise before the October 15th constitutional referendum.
The National Assembly only approved a final text of the constitution yesterday, giving little time for the United Nations to print five million copies and distribute them nationwide ahead of the referendum.
Hussain al-Shahristani, the deputy speaker of parliament, told reporters it was an absolute final draft of the text, which has been held up repeatedly by last-minute amendments.
"There is no way there will be any changes now," he said. "The draft is being submitted to the United Nations and will be presented to the Iraqi people soon."
The UN official in charge of printing the text, Nicholas Haysom, said his office could get it out on time even though it had come in so late. He said the first copies would be ready for distribution in about five days.
"We're pretty confident that we're going to be able to get it done," he said.
"There's a lot of demand out there from civic groups, political offices and others to get copies of the draft constitution and see it distributed," he added, saying all five million copies would be run off by the end of September.
Sunni Arabs, who dominated Iraq under ousted leader Saddam Hussein and for decades before him, fear the charter will formalise the loss of influence they have endured since he fell. They also fear it will boost the autonomy of southern Shias in line with that already enjoyed by northern Kurds.
Many Sunnis have said they will reject it. And Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, last week called for a war against Shias following an Iraqi-led, US-backed military assault on the northern town of Tal Afar.
Baghdad and Washington say Tal Afar was a stronghold of "terrorists and foreign fighters", and have blamed Zarqawi for the bomb attacks and shootings across Baghdad last week.
Meanwhile, the US and its allies should name a deadline for pulling their troops out of Iraq,Russia's president Vladimir Putin said in an interview yesterday.
Mr Putin said the pull-out should take place within one or two years, but added that the exact timetable depended on the security situation in Iraq.
"It would be the right thing to do if we precisely set out this timetable," Mr Putin said in an interview with US network Fox News, a transcript of which was published on the official www.kremlin.ru website.