Crash site yields flight recorder
Canberra, Australia Police recovered the flight recorder and began removing bodies today from a plane that went down in a rain forest, killing all 15 aboard in Australia’s worst civil aviation accident in almost four decades.
The twin-propeller plane, with two pilots and 13 passengers, was heading to a remote Aboriginal community and artist colony in Queensland when it crashed Saturday in the rain and burst into flames about seven miles from its destination, police said.
The plane’s flight recorder, recovered Sunday, was sent to a lab for analysis.
U.N. worker among victims at Kabul cafe
Kabul, Afghanistan A U.N. engineer from Myanmar was among three people killed when a suicide attacker walked into a Kabul Internet cafe and blew himself up, officials said Sunday, in the first fatal attack on a U.N. staffer in the capital since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
The bombing Saturday followed a series of kidnap attempts on foreigners and the killing of a British development worker, deepening insecurity in the city as a Taliban-led insurgency revives in the south.
The 3,000-strong expatriate community in Kabul already was on edge over warnings that criminals might kidnap foreigners to exchange for six men recently arrested over the kidnapping of three U.N. workers last year.
Freeing of prisoners on hold, Sharon says
Jerusalem Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Sunday that Israel will not release more Palestinian prisoners until the Palestinian Authority takes tougher action against militants – the latest sign of trouble for a strained cease-fire.
Israeli and Palestinian officials discussed the prisoner issue Sunday, but their meeting ended in disagreement.
Palestinians charged Israel is breaking a truce that has reduced violence, endangering its continuation and weakening Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
The Israelis repeated Sharon’s statement from a Cabinet meeting a few hours earlier, where he said he would instruct negotiators to make it clear that no more prisoners will be released until the Palestinians rein in militants, meeting participants said.
Japan leader will visit divisive war shrine
Tokyo Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will again pay respects this year at a Tokyo war shrine honoring the country’s war dead, a senior ruling party lawmaker said Sunday.
The Yasukuni Shrine honors 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including convicted war criminals, among them wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.
Koizumi has visited the shrine four times since becoming prime minister in April 2001, angering China, South Korea and other Asian countries, who say the shrine glorifies the Japanese military’s brutal wartime invasions.
On Saturday, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing reiterated Beijing’s displeasure over the Japanese prime minister’s annual shrine visits.