BAGHDAD, Iraq -- At least 31 Iraqis were killed and 71 wounded in a double suicide bombing north of the capital Thursday, police and hospital officials said.

Police said a woman with explosives hidden under her robes blew herself up in a market in Balad Ruz, a religiously mixed town in Diyala province. As rescue workers arrived, a male suicide bomber struck, police said.

The U.S. military put the initial toll at 26 people killed and 52 injured, but hospital officials said the toll was higher.

CAIRO, Egypt -- Al-Jazeera television reports that cameraman Sami al-Haj has been released from Guantanamo after more than six years in U.S. custody and is en route to his home country Sudan.

Wadah Khanfar, managing director of Al-Jazeera Arabic, confirmed al-Haj was on a plane heading to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, after being released from the U.S. detention center in Cuba earlier on Thursday.

"We are in a state of high expectation and we are overwhelmed with joy," he said.

Khanfar added that al-Haj's wife and child were flying from Doha, Qatar, to Khartoum immediately to see him.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, declined to comment on the report.

HAVANA -- Hundreds of thousands of Cubans marched through Revolution Plaza for May Day festivities Thursday, many hoping the island's new leadership would use the occasion to announce additional measures to improve their daily lives.

But no announcement came.

Raul Castro, marking his first May Day appearance as Cuba's president, smiled and waved from a parade stand high above the vast square but did not address the sea of flag-waving, red-shirted marchers.

Instead, Salvador Valdes Mesa, secretary-general of communist Cuba's powerful labor union, made an appeal for more efficiency and productivity as a way of improving the economy and advancing the work of ailing revolutionary Fidel Castro.

"We Cubans have important challenges before us," Valdes said. The labor leader said there had been "modest advances" in production and services, but that Cuba must "reduce costs and achieve the economic efficiency we need."

KUMHARPADA, India -- Hundreds of barefoot villagers left their chores and ran toward the giant cloud of dust blown by a descending helicopter. When the dust settled, a young bespectacled man with dimples and a shy smile stepped out in crisp white tunic and pants, waving to the people. The excited villagers immediately rushed to touch him, creating a near-stampede and sending his security team into a tizzy.

"Long live Rahul Gandhi!" they chanted in the scorching heat, clapping as he made his way to talk to lower-caste potters.

Rahul Gandhi, 37, general secretary of India's ruling Congress party, is used to such frenzied welcomes when he shows up at far-flung, impoverished villages across India. He is, after all, the newest heir apparent of a political dynasty that ranks as India's most powerful -- one that has produced three generations of prime ministers, including Indira Gandhi, his late grandmother.

But these days, Rahul Gandhi wants to turn privilege and pedigree into an opportunity to learn. Over the past few months, he has traveled the country to see its myriad problems firsthand, from grinding poverty to social inequality.

"There are two parts of India. One part is the urban India that is growing very fast, and everybody knows that," Gandhi said recently at a crowded news conference in the rural town of Kanker in the central part of the country. "The other is the forgotten part of India. Their voices must not be brushed aside. As a politician, my responsibility is to come and listen to them."

The Indian media call this Gandhi's "Discovery of India" tour. His political allies, for their part, say his travels are a window into the shaping of India's future leader. And political pundits say his journeys are an acknowledgment that mere lineage is no longer enough in India's 21st-century political landscape.

BAGHDAD -- In an unusual initiative, five Iraqi lawmakers on Thursday presented intelligence photos and other evidence to the Iranian government that Tehran is arming and training Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq, and they demanded that it stop, senior Iraqi government officials said.

U.S. officials hailed the meeting at the Iranian foreign ministry as a sign that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-led government was standing up to Iran, its powerful Shiite neighbor. The American military says Iran is the key sponsor of militias battling U.S. and Iraqi troops.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Iraqi government is forcing the Iranians to make a choice: "Do they want to work with the government of Iraq or are they going to subvert the government of Iraq?"

The Pentagon accuses Iran of supporting the Mahdi Army, the militia of hardline cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has urged his followers to work to end the American occupation of Iraq. Al-Maliki launched an offensive against Shiite militias in the southern port city of Basra in March. Iran's point man for Iraq, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, intervened to reduce the violence, but clashes have escalated in Baghdad between al-Sadr supporters and Iraqi security forces backed by the U.S. military.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- The ship was laden with tons of copper ingots, elephant tusks, gold coins -- and cannons to fend off pirates.

But it had nothing to protect it from the fierce weather off a particularly bleak stretch of inhospitable African coast, and it sank 500 years ago.

Now it has been found, stumbled upon by De Beers geologists prospecting for diamonds off Namibia.

"If you're mining on the coast, sooner or later you'll find a wreck," archaeologist Dieter Noli said in an interview Thursday.

Namdeb Diamond Corp., a joint venture of the government of Namibia and De Beers, first reported the April 1 find in a statement Wednesday, and planned a news conference in the Namibian capital next week.

The company had cleared and drained a stretch of seabed, building an earthen wall to keep the water out so geologists could work. Noli said one of the geologists saw a few ingots, but had no idea what they were. Then the team found what looked like cannon barrels.