The New York Times reports on a massive tragedy in Iraq:

More than 600 people were killed and hundreds injured this morning when rumors of a suicide bomber led to a stampede in a vast procession of Shiite pilgrims as they crossed a bridge on their way to a shrine in northern Baghdad.

Most of the dead were crushed or suffocated, witnesses said, but many also fell or jumped into the Tigris River after the panicking crowd broke through the bridge’s railings.

The pilgrims were among a throng of hundreds of thousands who had converged on the capital over the preceding day to mark the anniversary of the death of Imam Musa al-Kadhim, one of Shiite Islam’s holiest figures.

Fear had begun spreading in the crowd an hour earlier, after insurgents fired rockets and mortars near the shrine, killing seven pilgrims and wounding two dozen, and leading to a counter-attack by American military helicopters.

But the stampede, which caused the greatest one-day loss of life since the American invasion in March 2003, appears to have been caused by unfounded rumors of a man wearing a suicide belt in the crowd.

An Interior Ministry official said at least 647 people were killed and at least 301 injured.

You can read about the various predictions for the end of the world here.

You can read a comparison of Bush and Nero from 2004 here.

Whenever Bush finally takes his helicopter tour of Louisiana and Mississippi he should bring his lyre and a toga:

Viewing the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas and exulting, as he said, in “the beauty of the flames,” he sang the whole of the “Sack of Ilium,” in his regular stage costume.- Suetonius describing Nero as he watched Rome burn.