Morning News Roundup (03 Apr)

• Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Sunday in an attempt to rally Iraqi politicians to form a unity government quickly. Rice bluntly criticized Jafari's failure to win broad political support after holding a frosty meeting with him. The Iraqis "have got to get a prime minister who can form a government," she said. [WaPo]
  
  
• Iraq's dominant Shiite political bloc fractured when its most powerful faction publicly demanded that the incumbent Shiite prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, resign over his inability to form a unified government. Jaafari has said he will fight to keep his job, and his principal supporter is Moktada al-Sadr, a rebellious cleric whose Mahdi Army militia has resorted to violence many times to enforce his wishes. [NYTimes]
  
  
• A reconstruction contract for the building of 142 primary health centers across Iraq is running out of money, after two years and roughly $200 million, with no more than 20 clinics now expected to be completed. Coming with little public warning, the 86 percent shortfall of completions dismayed the World Health Organization's representative for Iraq. "That's not good. That's shocking," Naeema al-Gasseer said by telephone from Cairo. [WaPo]
  
  
• The NYTimes reports that Secretary Rice received a cool (to put it delicately) reception in her visit to the UK with British Secretary Straw this last week:
  

  She was heckled by protesters and faced criticism from Muslim leaders hand-selected to meet with her by the Foreign Office during a visit here, the district Mr. Straw represents in Parliament. About 250 protesters ringing Blackburn's City Hall shouted "Shame on you" as the two arrived.

• Since 2000, the number of American children living in poverty has risen 12 percent -- to 13 million. By contrast, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has succeeding in reducing child poverty by 17 percent -- approximately 700,000 kids -- over the past five years. The UK government is in the midst of implementing a 10-year national child-care strategy designed to help parents get access to affordable, high-quality child care (to make it easier for them to hold down a job), and they instituted programs to develop healthy and school-ready preschoolers, teens and young adults. [WaPo; hat tip to the Progress Report email from The Center for American Progress]
  
  
• Sudan has prevented the United Nations' top humanitarian official from visiting the troubled Darfur region. Jan Egeland told the BBC he thought the government did not want him to see the latest wave of "ethnic cleansing" against black Africans in South Darfur. [BBC]
  
  
• Sad news: silver-tongued Scott McClellan (aka, MC Scottie McC) might be next, along with Treasury Secretary John Snow, to get bumped from the administration. [CNN]
  
  
• Canada's new Conservative government will scrap draft legislation which would have decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana. [Reuters]
  
  
• Surstromming, the highly pungent but much-loved Swedish dish of fermented herring, has a habit of offending the uninitiated with its peculiar taste and overpowering smell of rotten garbage. But now the national favourite, traditionally devoured in the summer months with large quantities of highly alcoholic liquor, has fallen foul of the airline industry which has asked passengers not to take it on board, saying it poses a safety risk. [The Independent]
  
  
• The UK has its first digital-only single (i.e., no CD released) to hit the top of the charts: "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley (a collaboration between former Goodie Mob principal Cee-Lo and artist/producer Danger Mouse, who produced the last Gorillaz album). More than 26 million songs were downloaded legally in the UK in 2005 - up from virtually zero two years earlier. And downloads now account for about three quarters of all singles sold. [BBC and Billboard]