Iraq

Seventy-one US soldiers have died in Iraq this month, fifteen of them this weekend:

BAGHDAD - Bombings killed seven U.S. soldiers in Baghdad and a southern city, the U.S. military said Sunday, and the country's Sunni vice president spoke out against a proposed oil law, clouding the future of a key benchmark for assuring continued U.S. support for the government.

Six of the soldiers were killed Saturday in a bombing in western Baghdad, the military said in a statement. Their interpreter was also killed.

The other soldier died in a blast Saturday in Diwaniyah, a mostly Shiite city 80 miles south of the capital where radical Shiite militias operate. Two soldiers were wounded in that attack, the military said.

Those deaths brought the number of American troops killed in Iraq since Friday to at least 15 — eight of them in Baghdad. So far, at least 71 U.S. forces have died in Iraq this month — most of them from bombs.

Elsewhere, several explosions were heard from the area around the Green Zone in central Baghdad, but it was unclear if any were inside the U.S.-controlled area, which has increasingly come under mortar and rocket fire. The American military referred questions about the explosions to the U.S. Embassy, which did not respond.