Afghanistan

Tribal leaders back partnership with U.S.

Hundreds of tribal leaders backed President Hamid Karzai’s plan for a “strategic partnership” with the United States on Sunday, a government spokesman said, a pact that could cement a long-term U.S. military presence in Central Asia.

More than 1,000 elders and officials from across Afghanistan met with Karzai in the presidential palace in Kabul on Sunday for consultations on the plan, spokesman Jawed Ludin said.

“Our finding from today’s discussion was that people are, on the whole, very positive about this,” Ludin said at a news conference, adding that only one person had spoken against the plan. Ludin didn’t describe the man’s objections.

Karzai will likely talk about the partnership, which Afghan officials say must cover economic and political links as well as military aid, in a meeting with President Bush in Washington later this month, the spokesman said.

Also Sunday, officials in Kabul said that a U.N. engineer from Myanmar was among three people killed Saturday when a suicide attacker walked into an Internet cafe and blew himself up. It was the first fatal attack on a U.N. staffer in the capital since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

Brazil

S. Americans, Arabs prepare for summit

Ministers from 33 South American and Middle Eastern nations on Sunday began preparing the groundwork for the first-ever summit of leaders from the two regions.

Their talks could lead to a commitment to negotiations for a South American-Arab free trade zone — part of an effort to counter U.S. political and economic influence.

Brazilian media stressed Sunday that the leaders of key U.S. allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be absent. But Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is scheduled to attend. The United States’ request to observe the event was denied.

While the stated goal of the gathering is to boost economic ties, the summit will bring together leaders from countries that resent America’s forceful hand in everything from regime changes to globalization that critics say benefits only large multinational corporations.

“It’s important for these countries to not be seen as being bullied by the West,” said Amany Jamal, a Middle East political development expert at Princeton University. “What better way to do that than re-establish dominance on another front?”

The two-day summit opens on Tuesday.

Australia

Flight recorder, bodies recovered at crash site

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 Lockhart River, 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 Canberra laboratory for analysis. Authorities began recovering bodies from the remote crash site today.

The crash was Australia’s worst civil aviation accident since 1968, when an MMA Viscount crashed near Port Hedland in Western Australia state, killing 26.