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A powerful car bomb wounds a senior Iraqi official outside his Baghdad home, kills at least five people -- including the sucide bomber -- and injures others. The attack comes just a few days after the assassination of the head of Iraq's Governing Council. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports.

The New Yorker reports that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized a secret program that allowed interrogation practices that may have led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. The Pentagon calls the story "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture." Lawmakers say they will pursue the growing scandal as high as it goes. Hear NPR's Jackie Northam.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pays a one-day visit to Baghdad, visiting the Abu Ghraib prison complex where abuses of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody took place. While in the Iraqi capital, Rumsfeld also addressed troops at the heavily guarded American headquarters. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports.

A federal elections panel meets to examine the future of touch-screen voting machines, as several states reconsider the machines' reliability. Last week, concerns about accuracy prompted California's secretary of state to decertify 42,000 machines in 14 counties for the November election. John Myers of member station KQED reports.

President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney meet with the 10-member bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Members of the commission say they heard some new information during the closed-door meeting but would not specify what that information is. Hear NPR's Bob Edwards and commission member Richard Ben Veniste.

Two U.S. soldiers and several dozen Iraqi militiamen are dead after overnight gun battles in the Iraqi city of Kufa. The continuing fighting in Kufa and in the nearby city of Najaf threaten last week's truce between the U.S. military and radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. NPR's Eric Westervelt reports.

An explosion during evening prayers at a Shiite mosque in Pakistan kills at least 15 people in Karachi. Many suspect the blast may have been in retaliation for the killing of a senior Sunni cleric Sunday. NPR's Melissa Block talks with Shoaib Hasan of the Pakistani English-language monthly the Herald.

As George Tenet prepares to leave his post as CIA director, critics call for reforms that would give the position greater direct oversight over all U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI. FBI Director Robert Mueller is also resisting a reform initiative that would create a domestic spying agency. Hear NPR's Larry Abramson.

Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi says that if violence continues in Iraq, it may become necessary to delay a deadline to hold elections by the end of January of next year. Allawi's comments came just days before the June 30 U.S. handover of power to the new government. NPR's Deborah Amos reports.

Many Kurds distrust the Arab-dominated interim government now in charge of Iraq and feel betrayed by a lack of guarantees over the future of their autonomy. Although most Kurds would prefer independence, Kurdish leaders are seeking a compromise that would allow Kurdistan to be part of an Iraqi federation. Hear NPR's Ivan Watson.