IRAQ

Biden Assures Leaders Of Ongoing U.S. Amity

Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived in Baghdad on Monday for the last leg of a trip that included stops in Pakistan and Afghanistan, battlegrounds the Obama administration will inherit in a week.

Biden met with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a staunch U.S. ally, whose office said in a statement that Biden had assured the Iraqis that "Obama and the new administration are Iraq's friends."

The Democratic senator from Delaware, accompanied by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), didn't speak to reporters during his first day in Baghdad, and a spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy said there was no plan to organize a news conference Tuesday.
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The visit occurred on a day when a series of attacks in Baghdad killed at least eight people and wounded more than two dozen, according to Iraqi officials.

In the New Baghdad neighborhood, in southeastern Baghdad, a suspected magnetic bomb detonated under a crane about 7 a.m., residents said. When police officers and others rushed toward the site of the blast, a man in a white sedan drove toward the crowd, jumped out of the vehicle and detonated explosives inside it. Three people were killed, including an Iraqi policeman who tried to prevent the driver of the vehicle from approaching.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military announced Monday that it turned over control of one of its largest bases in Anbar province, in western Iraq, to the Iraqi government. Camp Fallujah is the latest of several large bases the U.S. military has shut down.

more information:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/12/AR2009011203352.html