Russia

Plane crash kills at least 29

A 1970s-era Russian turboprop airliner carrying oil workers slammed into the ground and caught fire Wednesday while trying to land near an oil port along the Arctic coast. At least 29 people were killed in the crash, which officials said came after the plane’s tail began to fall apart.

Some of the 24 survivors, shivering in temperatures of minus-11 Fahrenheit, used a satellite phone to call authorities from the wreckage near Varandei in the Nenets autonomous region, about 1,110 miles northeast of Moscow. Rescuers quickly reached the site, authorities said.

The passengers were employees and contract workers for affiliates of Russia’s largest oil company, Lukoil, who were on their way to begin work stints, company spokesman Mikhail Mikhailov told The Associated Press. He had no immediate information about their nationalities.

Iceland

Chess great likely to win citizenship

Lawmakers in Iceland are likely to grant citizenship to mercurial chess genius Bobby Fischer, who currently sits in a Japanese cell, a member of a parliamentary committee studying the issue said Wednesday.

Gudrun Ogmundsdottir told The Associated Press that a citizenship motion probably would be approved by the nine-member committee today. If it passes, it will go before Iceland’s 63-member parliament, the Althingi.

Fischer, 62, is in a Japanese detention cell awaiting deportation to the United States, where he is wanted for violating economic sanctions against the former Yugoslavia by playing a highly publicized chess match there in 1992.

There is widespread support for Fischer in Iceland, where he played the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky in a celebrated world championship match in 1972 that put the small country on the map.

Iran

Serial rapist, killer hanged in public

A young man convicted of raping and murdering 16 boys was lashed 100 times, and then hanged Wednesday in front of a large, angry crowd who pelted him with stones and scuffled with police.

Mohammed Bijeh, 23, confessed in court to raping and murdering the children, between March and September 2004. Iranian media have said Bijeh burned the bodies of his victims, all boys between 8 and 15.

Bijeh was sentenced to one death sentence for each murder he confessed to and 100 lashes of the whip for the rapes.

Bijeh’s verdict was carried out in Pakdasht, a small, impoverished town about 19 miles southeast of Tehran where the murders took place.

Approximately 5,000 spectators — including women and children — gathered to watch the flogging and hanging.

Convicts are hanged in public in Iran only if a court deems that their offenses deeply affected public sentiment.