Morning News Roundup (14 Mar)

• Things are going very, very well in Iraq. Or, they're not.
  
  The BBC reports that Iraqi authorities have discovered bodies from two mass killings, taking the number of corpses found in the past 24 hours to more than 80.
  
  The bodies of 15 bound and apparently tortured men were found in an abandoned vehicle in Baghdad's Khadra district. Hours later, at least 27 bodies were found bound, blindfolded and buried in a south-eastern suburb of the capital. Analysts say the killings reflect the continuing sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia extremists.
  
  The Boston Globe reports: Scorched pavement, destroyed shops, burned out cars, and four men shot in the head then hanged from electricity pylons -- apparent victims of revenge killings. The scene, although gruesome, was not what many had feared: that deadly explosions the previous night in Sadr City would ignite a civil war, pitting majority Shi'ites against minority Sunnis.
  
  A key to yesterday's relative peace was anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's refusal to be provoked. With thousands of his Mahdi Army militiamen ready to fight, the Shi'ite leader called for calm and national unity. It was the second time in less than three weeks that Iraqis stood at the precipice of civil war but pulled back.
  
  
• Politicians in Iraq are struggling to fill a leadership vacuum that has delayed the sitting of the new parliament - seen as a crucial step toward a unity government that could check Iraq's violent spiral - until Thursday. But Iraqi and American officials are warning that sectarian abuses such as torture and summary executions, by illegal militias and official forces alike, are leading Iraq deeper into civil war. [CSM]
  
  
• President Bush vowed for the first time yesterday to turn over most of Iraq to newly trained Iraqi troops by the end of this year. The president made no commitments about withdrawing U.S. troops, but he repeated his general formula that Americans could come home as Iraqis eventually take over the fight. [WaPo]
  
  
• In a follow-up to a story yesterday, prominent activists inside Iran say President Bush's plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote democracy here is the kind of help they don't need, warning that mere announcement of the U.S. program endangers human rights advocates by tainting them as American agents. [WaPo]
  
  
• "The Pentagon is looking into the possibility of Israel launching a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities," the Jerusalem Post reports. Proliferation expert Joseph Cirincione: such a strike "would not, as is often said, delay the Iranian program. It would almost certainly speed it up. That is what happened when the Israelis struck at the Iraq program in 1981." [ThinkProgress]
  
  
• The winter of 2005-06 has been Canada's warmest on record and the federal agency Environment Canada said Monday that it was investigating whether it was a sign of global warming. [LATimes]
  
  
• The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached “a new record level” and Arctic sea ice “has failed to re-form for the second consecutive winter, raising fears that global warming may have tipped the polar regions in to irreversible climate change far sooner than predicted.” [ThinkProgress]