United Arab Emirates

Plane crash kills 43

An Iranian plane carrying migrant workers back from a visa-renewing journey to a Gulf island crashed Tuesday while approaching the airport, killing 43 of the 46 people aboard and narrowly missing nearby homes.

Three survivors of Kish Air’s Flight IRK1770 were hospitalized, two in critical condition with burns and fractures.

Authorities recovered the Fokker-50’s cockpit voice and data recorders and hoped they would reveal why the plane — which had not reported any trouble on its final approach — crashed two miles from Sharjah airport.

It was returning from the Iranian island of Kish, a favorite destination of foreign workers who must exit the Emirates and return to meet their visa requirements.

Libya

Diplomatic overtures made with West

Libya took additional steps toward normalizing relations with the West on Tuesday, sending its highest diplomatic mission to Britain in more than 20 years and discussing a meeting “as soon as convenient” between Prime Minister Tony Blair and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said rapprochement had taken place slowly during the past decade and reached a stage in which Britain would encourage other countries to tear down remaining sanctions against Gadhafi’s regime.

The London talks came as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi met with Gadhafi in Libya, the first Western leader to do so since Libya’s Dec. 19 announcement that it was opening its weapons files to the world for inspection and verification.

In addition, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed Tuesday that the United States now had a diplomat in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, for the first time in decades. Boucher said he expected Libya soon would send a diplomat to Washington. The U.S. diplomat is working in an interests section in the Belgian Embassy.

Moscow

Nuclear forces included in military exercises

Russia is in the midst of a strategic military exercise motivated in part by Moscow’s concerns about U.S. plans to develop new types of nuclear weapons, a top general said Tuesday.

The exercise, which began in late January on the headquarters level, later will involve the launch of several ballistic missiles and flights by strategic bombers, said Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces.

Baluyevsky said the exercise reflected Russia’s concern about the development of low-yield nuclear weapons in the United States, which he described as destabilizing. “Shouldn’t we react to that?” he said. “I’m sure that we should and we are doing that.”

Russia

Group of teenagers beats girl to death

A group of drunken teenagers beat and stabbed a 9-year-old Tajik girl to death and severely wounded her father and 11-year-old cousin in St. Petersburg, prosecutors said Tuesday.

The attackers, about 10 to 12 youths armed with knifes, brass knuckles, chains and bats, assaulted the three Central Asians Monday night in a courtyard in the city center, said Yelena Ordynskaya, spokeswoman for the city’s prosecution office.

Many Tajiks and nations of other impoverished former Soviet republics come to Russia in hopes of making a living, and are often targeted in such attacks.

Police said they did not know whether the teenagers belonged to a nationalist group. But St. Petersburg Gov. Valentina Matviyenko told a city government meeting that “We must fight any manifestations of nationalism in our city,” the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.