Car bomb hits Karbala,10 killed

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A car bomb has exploded in the city of Karbala in central Iraq, killing at least 10 people and wounding dozens more, officials say, reports BBC.
Police said the target for the blast was a bus carrying Iranian pilgrims. Karbala is a place of pilgrimage for Shia Muslims.
The latest attack came as Iraqi leaders were heading north to the city of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan for top-level meetings aimed at finalising a power-sharing deal for a new government.
Iraq has been without a government for eight months after inconclusive general elections.
The blast went off just 150 metres from the shrine of the Imam Hussein, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam.
Karbala, like other places of Shia pilgrimage such as nearby Najaf, has frequently been the target of bomb attacks, most recently in July and August, says the BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad.
The holy places draw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over Iraq and from neighbouring Iran every year.
The pilgrims have also often been attacked by bombers - who are believed to be Sunni militants - along the pilgrim routes.
Last week, about a dozen co-ordinated bombs targeted Shia districts across the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, killing more than 60 people and wounding hundreds.
Those attacks came two days after at least 52 people were killed as police stormed a church in Baghdad where hostages were being held.
Analysts said of the previous attacks that the spike in violence could be a last-ditch attempt by al-Qaeda to exploit the political vacuum in the country.
Meanwhile: A week after the worst single disaster to afflict Iraq's Christians in modern times, the Catholic cathedral in central Baghdad where the killing took place was back in business.
With its windows still smashed and walls scarred and pocked by blasts and bullets, the building had been quickly cleaned up in time for a service at exactly the same hour as the killers struck a week earlier.
As the cathedral was being readied for its first service since the attack, a senior Iraqi cleric in London, Archbishop Athanasios Dawood, called on Iraqi Christians to flee the country because it was so dangerous.
But in Baghdad itself, both Church leaders and Christian politicians seemed unanimous in urging their communities to stay.