Suicide bomber kills 23 at funeral

A suicide bomber struck a tent filled with Kurdish funeral mourners Monday, unleashing a huge fireball that killed at least 23 people in a northern town where Kurds and Arabs are competing for power.

Elsewhere, eight people were killed and 10 wounded in a bombing near a bus stop west of Baghdad, and a policeman died and eight people were wounded in a suicide blast at a market in the northern town of Tal Afar.

A series of high-profile bombings this month has raised concern that insurgents may be regrouping as the U.S. begins to scale down combat operations and hand over security responsibility to the Iraqis.

GUATEMALA CITY

Investigation finds wrongful adoptions

Guatemala’s government said Monday it has uncovered evidence supporting the long-held belief that children whose parents were killed during the country’s 36-year civil war were put up for adoption.

Human rights groups have long accused the government of offering the children for adoption rather than reuniting them with surviving family members. Officials had never acknowledged that.

A government investigation has now found at least one case in which security forces killed the parents of a boy and a girl and then turned the children over to an orphanage, declaring them abandoned, investigator Marco Tulio Alvarez said.

Evidence suggests that hundreds of other children were likely taken to orphanages and were probably adopted by Americans, Alvarez said.

MEXICO CITY

Rewards offered to quell drug gangs

Mexico’s government on Monday offered $2 million each for information leading to the arrest of 24 top drug lords in a public challenge to the cartels’ violent grip on the country.

The list indicated that drug gangs have splintered into six main cartels under pressure from the U.S. and Mexican governments. The two most powerful gangs – the Pacific and Gulf cartels – each suffered fractures that have given rise to new cartels, according to the list published by the attorney general’s office.

Mexico’s drug violence has killed more than 9,000 people since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 as gangs battle each other for territory and fight off a government crackdown. Some of that violence is spilling over into the United States.

KABUL, Afghanistan

Taliban commander killed in attack

NATO troops killed a senior Taliban commander and nine other militants in southern Afghanistan, officials said Monday, striking a blow in the group’s heartland where the U.S. plans to send thousands of additional troops to stem the growing violence.

Over a dozen Afghan and coalition forces have been killed in the south in recent days, including eight Afghan police who were killed by Taliban fighters Monday in the Kandahar province.

From wire reports