Pre-election violence kills more than two dozen people in Iraq;  Syria isn’t helping its own citizens in need of humanitarian aid as the civil war grinds on;  And you may not know the name Storm Thorgerson, but you probably know his work, and it made your life a little more fun.

27 people are dead and dozens more are wounded after a suicide attack on a Baghdad Cafe.  A suicide bomber reportedly walked into the popular Dubai Cafe crowded with young people late on Thursday and detonated explosives.  It’s the latest attack in advance of this weekend’s elections.

Nearly seven million people need humanitarian assistance in Syria, and a senior United Nations official told the Security Council that Damascus for hampering aid distribution.  The Security Council responded by urging both the Bashar al-Assad regime and the rebels to allow aid to pass. 

The head of the World Bank wants to end poverty by the year 2030.  Jim Yong Kim is expected to use the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meetings this weekend to push his agenda on poverty reduction.  He says world poverty can be eradicated completely by 2030, and apparently the details are yet to come for this ambitious goal. 

Storm Thorgerson died at age 69 after a long battle with cancer.  You know his work.  With the English art design group Hipgnosis, Thorgerson designed some of the most distinctive album covers in all of rock and roll:  Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon” and “Wish You Were Here”, all of the Michael Schenker-era covers for UFO, “Venus and Mars for Paul McCartney and Wings, and the list goes on.  In later years, acts such as Biffy Clyro and Muse were introduced to new generations of music lovers with his graphic arts genius.

An Air Show in Dayton, Ohio has cancelled plans to reenact the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima.  Seems some people think that reliving the incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians who didn’t get to choose their government’s actions wasn’t suitable family entertainment.  Dayton is also the home of the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the Balkans War, and town leaders wanted to maintain the image of a city of peace.

Does it sometimes seem like China is a chemical and biological disaster waiting to happen?  Officials shut down the chemical plants in Yanshi City, Henan Province after hundreds of pigs and dogs just up and died.  Local residents say there was an extremely strong odor in the air on Monday morning.  This is hundreds of miles away from Shanghai where 16,000 dead pigs turned up in the river that supplies the city’s water, and where the H7N9 Bird Flu crossed over from birds to humans in the last few weeks.

For the first time in more than 300 years, a herd of European Bison is wandering Germany.  The beasts, also known as Wisent, were released in a wildlife preserve in the Rothaar Mountains in the west-central part of the country.  Bison once roamed across Asia and Europe, but were also considered delicious and were pretty much hunted down to fewer than 2,000 individuals in the wild.  They’ve been reintroduced in Eastern Europe since the 1950s, but Germany is the first Western European country to bring them back.