Officials living in the Green Zone will have to endure the same electricity shortages as other Iraqis following a decision to ax their special privileges in the wake of violent protests over prolonged power outages.

Acting Electricity Minister Hussein Shahristani, who is also the oil minister, announced the measure today at his first news conference since taking over the electricity portfolio Wednesday after the resignation of the previous minister.

“We have made the decision to cut all exceptional supplies of electricity for officials, starting with the Green Zone, as well as other [official] neighborhoods in Baghdad,” Shahristani said.

The U.S. assistant secretary of State for near eastern affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, is making his second visit to Baghdad in a month, checking in on the negotiations to form a new government.

In an interview with Babylon and Beyond, he talked about the efforts the United States making to hasten formation of a new government in the wake of the March elections, along with his hopes and fears for Iraq's future. Here are some excerpts:

Q: Are you concerned that U.S. troops may well complete their drawdown (to 50,000 by Sept. 1) before a new Iraqi government is formed?
 
A: I don't see the linkage between the U.S. troop withdrawal schedule and the government formation exercise, and I'll explain why. The U.S. troops withdrew from all the cities towns and villages in June last year. So since June of last year Iraqi security forces have been responsible for security in all the populated areas of Iraq. So, I don't see our fulfillment of President Obama's commitment to get down to 50,000 by Sept. 1 as having any intrinsic change on the ground.

Q: Does the U.S. have a preferred candidate?

We obviously have an interest in seeing the government of Iraq formed. We want to have a long -term partnership with Iraq. We want to work with Iraq to improve its relationship with its Sunni Arab neighbors.  But we 're not playing any kind of name game here.

The United States simply isn't getting into the game of saying, we believe this candidate is appropriate for this particular job, that this candidate is how you achieve this kind of balance. It's got to be something the Iraqis decide for themselves. 2010 is not 2005.  We're happy to play a consultative role, but in the context of Iraqis making the decisions.

When Baghdadis awoke this morning to find their streets sealed off and the city under virtual lockdown, the rumors began to fly.

Army officers had staged a coup in the Green Zone, one version said. No, it was Baathists loyal to the former regime who had taken over, according to another.

Mostly, the rumors concerned the Sunni lawmaker Saleh Mutlak, who has been recommended for disbarment from the upcoming March elections by the former De-Baathification Committee, now known as the Accountability and Justice Committee.

Mutlak had been assassinated, according to the most widespread rumor, a variation of which had Mutlak staging the coup in the Green Zone. The Mutlak rumors reached Kurdistan, where anxious travelers fretted over whether it would be safe to fly back to Baghdad.

At midday, government officials appeared on television to calm the capital.

"The security forces can't stage a coup. Our security forces are professional," military spokesman Mohammed Askari told a news conference. "The era of coups is gone."

The Iraqi parliament acknowledged failure in its efforts to pass an election law today and referred the issue to the Political Council for National Security, an informal advisory body comprising all the heads of the major political blocs.

The move seems certain to delay at least until next week an agreement on the new law needed to regulate nationwide elections due to be held on Jan. 16, putting at risk the date of the election.

The U.S. military is closely watching the battle over the new law because it plans to begin withdrawing the bulk of its forces from Iraq once a new government is seated. A delay in the election could therefore delay the troop withdrawal.

The head of Iraq's election commission, Faraj Haidari, said at a news conference that he was determined to hold the election on schedule, but that the quality of the election could be affected by continued delays in an election law. The commission needs at least 90 days to prepare for the poll, he said, and that deadline has passed.

The U.N. also warned that the delay could "considerably disrupt" the election schedule and preparations, jeopardizing the credibility of the electoral process.

The law has snagged on disputes over voting procedures in the contested province of Kirkuk, which is claimed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen.

But there are also suspicions that some lawmakers are dragging out the process of agreeing on a new law in order to force a reversion to the previous election law, under which voters will not get the chance to select individual candidates, only party names. The election commission has said it needs less time to prepare an election in which ballot papers feature only party names.

-- Liz Sly in Baghdad

The man charged with organizing next January's crucial nationwide elections is fretting that it will soon be too late to hold the poll unless parliament comes up with an election law this week.

Faraj Haideri, the head of Iraq's election commission, had given parliament an Oct. 16 deadline to pass the law, saying he needs three months to plan and prepare for the election, scheduled for Jan. 16, 2010. Then he said he could push the deadline to Oct. 20.

As yet another day passed with no sign of the necessary legislation in sight, Haideri warned today that the commission could wait only until Thursday if the election is to be held on time.

"We feel that now it is getting very dangerous," he said in a telephone interview. "If they don't write the law as soon as possible, by the end of this week, we can't do the election on the 16th of January."

The latest snag is over how to organize voting in the disputed province of Kirkuk.  But legislators are also divided on the question of whether voters should be able to cast ballots for individual candidates, a so-called open list system, or simply for party names, a closed-list system.

Haideri said he would need less time to organize an election based on closed lists, because then it would not be necessary to print ballots with the names of individual candidates. But public opinion, most parliamentarians and the powerful Shiite clergy have expressed a preference for open lists as the more democratic of the two options.

Haideri said he suspected, in common with many Iraqis, that some legislators are deliberately dragging out the negotiations so that it becomes impossible to hold the election with open lists – which would subject individual legislators to the whims of voters.

"Maybe they are saying they want open lists to show a good face to the Iraqi people, but really they want closed lists," he said.

There was certainly no sense of urgency in the halls of parliament, where several lawmakers from the Shiite Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council bloc said they believed the election commission needed only two months to prepare for the election, not three.

"That's not correct," said Haideri.

-- Liz Sly in Baghdad

The thorny question of how to organize voting in the disputed province of Kirkuk is threatening to undermine the integrity of crucial national elections that the U.S. military hopes will pave the way for a mass drawdown of American troops.

The Iraqi parliament today missed a second presumed deadline for passing an election law to regulate the poll, scheduled for January, because of the dispute over voting procedures in the oil-rich province, which is claimed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkomans.

At issue is the question of whether all the current residents of Kirkuk should be eligible to vote. In recent years, thousands of Kurds have moved into the area from Kurdistan, supposedly to reverse the Arabization policies of Saddam Hussein, who expelled Kurds and settled Arabs there.

But Arabs and Turkomans say the Kurdish influx has far exceeded the expulsion of Kurds during the Hussein era and that special measures needed to be taken to avoid the Kurds having an unfair advantage in Kirkuk.

Various proposals have been mooted, including one suggested by the U.N. that would pre-assign the province's 13 seats to Kurdish, Arab and Turkoman candidates. Another proposal suggests dividing Kirkuk into regions in such a way as to guarantee representation to Turkomans and Arabs as well as Kurds.

But in negotiations today, the Kurds said they would reject any special arrangement for Kirkuk as anti-constitutional and instead proposed the formation of a committee to vet voter registration lists in all Iraq's provinces -- something that could prove a lengthy exercise.

A sultry Kurdish singer who models herself on the Colombian superstar Shakira is causing a sensation in her socially conservative homeland of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Dashni Murad, 23, wears figure-hugging bodices, skimpy skirts and plunging necklines as she writhes to the rhythm of songs fusing Kurdish and Western beats -- in the way that Shakira has drawn inspiration from her Middle Eastern heritage.

Mosque preachers have railed against Murad and some TV channels have refused to broadcast her clips because they consider her gyrating dances and revealing clothing to be an offense to Kurdish morals.

But Murad refuses to be deterred, and says she will press ahead with her mission to transform Kurdish culture.

“I want to change Kurdish style," she said in an interview in Irbil, the Kurdish regional capital. "I want the youth to see my dance. I want to present something distinctive, far from the half-dead old style.”

With bombings and shootings still taking place on a daily basis, Iraq is not a country where people pay much heed to the health hazards of smoking.

So news that the government plans to introduce a stringent, Western-style anti-smoking law has been greeted with surprise, and considerable dismay by Iraqis accustomed to lighting up wherever and whenever they choose.

The draft law includes a ban on smoking in cafes, restaurants, clubs, and government and private offices, all places where life currently unfolds amid clouds of cigarette smoke. Penalties of $2,500 to $4,200 will be applied to violators.

"Maybe if we were leading normal lives I would consider giving up smoking," said Haidar Latif, 40, as he puffed on a cigarette in one of Baghdad's cafes. "But we are facing tough times. Our minds are tired and we need to smoke."

An account posted on the website of Mother Jones aims to shed light on the questions of how and why three American hikers in Iraq's Kurdistan region ended up straying across the border into Iran, where they have been in detention for the last week.

Written by Shon Meckfessel, the fourth member of the group who stayed behind at their hotel because he had a cold, it says the trio had no idea the beauty spot they were visiting was close to the border.

The three, Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal, certainly did not intend to wander into Iran, and are guilty of nothing more than "a simple and very regrettable mistake," he writes.

A member of an extremist Sunni group has confessed to the 2006 rape and murder of prominent Iraqi TV reporter Atwar Bahjat, whose brutal death at the height of the sectarian violence shocked even battle-scarred Iraqis.

The confession was made in a videotape broadcast at a press conference today. Suspect Yasser al-Takhi described how he and three others abducted and killed Bahjat and her two-man crew, Adnan Abdullah and Khaled Mohsen, in the central Iraqi town of Samarra.

His two brothers also confessed to killing Abdullah and Mohsen.

Bahjat, who worked for the Arabiya TV network, had gone to Samarra to report on the aftermath of the bombing of a Shiite shrine that ignited a mass campaign of killings against Sunnis by Shiite militiamen.

Her bravery as a journalist at a time when few reporters dared move around touched hearts across Iraq and her death turned her into a national heroine. Moments before the network lost touch with her, she had reported live from the scene, noticeably wearing a gold pendant depicting a map of Iraq around her neck – a symbol widely adopted at the time by Iraqis lamenting the disintegration of their nation into sectarian strife.

Takhi said that the group drove the news team to a side street where he raped and shot Bahjat. His brothers killed Abdullah and Mohsen.

The Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who have jointly ruled Kurdistan for the last 18 years, are facing the first real political challenge to their monopoly on power in Saturday's regional government elections. A newly formed opposition movement called Change has galvanized Kurds frustrated with high levels of corruption and poor services, and hopes to win a sizable number of seats.

On the eve of the poll, the Los Angeles Times sat down with the PUK's Barham Salih, Iraq's deputy prime minister, who heads a joint PUK-KDP list of candidates known as the Kurdistani list. If the list wins, it is likely he will become the region's next prime minister. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Q: You're facing a big challenge from the Change movement. Are you worried?

A: For parties who have been in power for 18 years, one has to expect that there will be big challenges. People have certain questions, legitimate questions. There is opposition that is trying to ride a wave of discontent, displeasure with some of the shortcomings of the situation. So it is definitely a challenge.

But I think we have conducted a very good campaign. We have managed to convey a message that what we have achieved so far is impressive … and that the platform we have adopted is a reformist platform that will take care of the shortcomings and some of the problems that we encountered.

The most important thing is that the process is competitive and proves the maturity of the Kurdish democratic process. I am very hopeful that this will have implications for Kurdish politics, for Iraqi politics and will establish pluralistic democracy in a far more profound way than we have seen in the past.

Q: You admit that there have been shortcomings in the performance of the current government. What are they?

Offering a possible harbinger of what is to come now that U.S. troops have withdrawn from Iraq's cities, the Iraqi death toll in June was the highest in 11 months, the Health Ministry reported today.

A total of 438 Iraqis died in June in shootings, bombings and assassinations, 68 of them members of the security forces. That is the highest monthly total since July last year, when 465 Iraqis died violently, and includes the tolls from a string of bombings such as the one near Kirkuk last week that killed more than 70 people. It's almost three times the figure for May, 165, the lowest number of the war.

Iraqis have been celebrating the departure of U.S. troops from their cities this week, but in fact the withdrawal has been taking place for months, and by June most U.S. soldiers had vacated the bases they had been designated to leave. So the jump in the casualty toll could be a reflection of what Iraqis can expect now that U.S. forces are no longer patrolling their cities.

But the violence in Iraq has a curious habit of waxing and waning, and single monthly tolls don't give a good idea of where trends are heading. The U.S. military says insurgents are no longer capable of sustaining prolonged assaults and instead focus on generating bursts of bloodshed. 

A comparison between the half-yearly figures for this year and last year makes it clear that the level of violence is in steep decline. In the first six months of 2008, 4,514 Iraqis died violently; in the first half of this year, the figure fell to 1,657.

But 438 casualties in a single month is still a lot of deaths -- more than 14 a day -- and it is hardly surprising that a lot of Iraqis are looking to the months ahead with a great deal of trepidation.

-- Liz Sly in Baghdad