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| Mortars kill 11 in east Baghdad | Mortars kill 11 in east Baghdad |
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| Eleven people have been killed and 31 injured by a mortar attack on a mainly Shia eastern suburb of Baghdad, security officials say. | Eleven people have been killed and 31 injured by a mortar attack on a mainly Shia eastern suburb of Baghdad, security officials say. |
| Women and children are said to be among the dead and wounded and a number of houses were damaged in the area, close to the giant Shia slum of Sadr City. | |
| Iraqi leaders are in talks this weekend to resolve a crisis which has left nearly half the cabinet posts empty. | Iraqi leaders are in talks this weekend to resolve a crisis which has left nearly half the cabinet posts empty. |
| Shia leaders are meeting Sunnis and Kurds to try and end the infighting. | |
| They are the first political talks of their kind in two months, BBC World Affairs correspondent Mike Wooldridge reports. | |
| Prisoner issue | |
| Some progress is said to have been made in the first round of talks on Saturday at which Iraq's Sunni Vice-President, Tareq al-Hashemi, raised the issue of detainees held without charge. | |
| Most such detainees are believed to be Sunnis. | |
| Mr Hashemi had personally visited a tented prison camp in eastern Baghdad, talking to detainees pressed against the wire mesh walls and promising to work for better treatment for them. | |
| His office released video footage of the visit afterwards. | |
| The vice-president's party is part of a Sunni political grouping that has withdrawn ministers from the government, in part over the detention issue. | |
| Our correspondent notes that the government has been speaking of political paralysis in the country, hampering the passage of important legislation and clearly making it no easier to tackle the violence. | |
| President Jalal Talabani described the first round of talks on Saturday as one of the most important meetings he had ever attended. |