TEHRAN, Nov. 27--Iraqi President Jalal Talabani arrived in Tehran on Monday and was welcomed by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and Energy Minister Parviz Fattah at Tehran’s International Mehrabad Airport.
The Iraqi president was welcomed by his Iranian counterpart, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the Presidential Office, IRNA reported.
Talabani is being accompanied by an Iraqi delegation, including ministers of foreign affairs, oil, education, industry and minerals, science and technology as well as two members of Iraq’s National Assembly.
During his stay in Iran, Talabani is scheduled to discuss bilateral relations, regional and international developments with Iranian officials.
After the formal reception, the two presidents will attend a joint press conference to brief reporters on the objectives of the visit.

TEHRAN, Nov. 27--Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyyed Mohammad Ali Hosseini said on Sunday UAE officials should not let the US use their country as a base for hostile activities against Iran.
Speaking to domestic and foreign reporters at this week’s press briefing, Hosseini said Iran is not setting a security model for Iraq, IRNA reported.
The spokesman added that the Iraqi nation and government have sufficient capacity to manage their affairs themselves.
“If we are asked o cooperate in this respect, we will do our best to assist them,“ he said.
Turning to close relations between the two nations, he said the issue will be discussed at length during the upcoming visit of President Jalal Talabani to Tehran.
On the suspension of Iran’s Football Federation by FIFA, he said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is intent on solving the issue and will pursue it through other institutions.
Asked about the claim of US Ambassador to UN John Bolton concerning attempts of Iran and Syria to launch a coup in Lebanon, he said, “What mainly accounts for the insecurity in Lebanon, Iraq and the entire region is the presence of foreign troops and their interference.“
He pointed to US support for the Zionist Israeli regime’s 33-day war waged against Lebanon, he said while Iran and Syria attempted to achieve ceasefire and stop Zionist aggressions, the US did not take any measure to this end.
Commenting on the rumor of delivering the Tor M-1 anti-aircraft missile systems to Iran by Russia, Hosseini said that the two countries cooperate in the defense sector within the framework of international laws.

Picture shows debris of the crashed military plane at TehranÕs International Mehrabad Airport, Nov. 27. (IRNA Photo)

TEHRAN, Nov. 27--Islamic Revolution’s Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi said a thorough investigation into the reasons behind Monday’s Antonov-74 plane crash will take time.
“Based on initial information obtained and investigation carried out by IRGC experts, one of the plane’s engines was not functioning at the time of takeoff. The plane may probably have caught fire after one of its wings, which stores fuel, hit an object on the runway,“ he told reporters.
He said the cause of the crash has not been determined and the IRGC team is conducting a thorough investigation, IRNA reported.
Safavi expressed his condolences to the families of the more than 30 passengers and crew who have been martyred.
According to the officials in charge, in addition to those who lost their lives, three people were wounded in the crash.
Two of the wounded were taken to Baqiatollah (AS) Hospital and the third one, who was seriously injured, passed away.
The physician of Qadr Air Base, Dr. Se’adatollah Hadi, told IRNA that two wounded passengers, namely Shahram Rouzbehi and Ali Jahan, are undergoing treatment.
“Three of the passengers on board Antonov-74 belonging to the IRGC were wounded in the plane crash. One of them, Nader Imani Saber, passed away on the way to the hospital,“ he said.
IRGC’s Antonov-74 plane heading towards the southern Iranian city of Shiraz on a military mission early Monday crashed at Tehran’s International Mehrabad Airport.
The plane crashed at 7:20 a.m. (0350 GMT).
US sanctions against Iran have prevented it from buying new aircraft or spares from the West, forcing it to supplement its ageing fleet of Boeing and Airbus planes with aircraft from the former Soviet Union.
A military plane crashed in January, killing at least 11 people and another military plane hit a Tehran tower block in December last year, killing 94 people on board and at least 22 on the ground.
The last civilian aviation disaster was in September, when an Iranian airliner caught fire after landing in the northeastern city of Mashhad, killing 28 people.

WASHINGTON,
Nov. 27--A draft report prepared for an influential panel considering US alternatives for Iraq urges direct talks with Iran and Syria, but sets no schedule for troop withdrawal, The New York Times reported on Monday.
The bipartisan commission, known as the Iraq Study Group, is likely to accept the report’s diplomatic recommendations for US dialogue with Iraq’s neighbors, Iran and Syria, the Times said, citing interviews with unidentified officials, Reuters reported.
But the group may be split over setting timetables for American troop withdrawal, the newspaper said.
The draft will serve as a basis for discussions by the panel’s 10 members, led by former Secretary of State James Baker and Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, when they convene in Washington on Monday. The meeting could extend beyond its two scheduled days, the Times said.
The group’s long-anticipated report, preparation of which was reported well before Democrats’ congressional election victories Nov. 7, is expected to be presented to President George W. Bush next month.
“They are not sharing with us what their recommendations may or may not be,“ Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, told reporters in Estonia, where Bush is to arrive later on Monday.
“As far as Iran and Syria are concerned, we’ve expressed a number of times that Iran and Syria know the steps they can take to improve the situation in Iraq,“ Johndroe said.
Bush is not required to accept the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Security Council are also working on similar studies.
But the panel is likely to command significant influence because of its bipartisan makeup and its co-chairmanship by Baker, a Republican who is very close to Bush’s father and served in the elder Bush’s administration.
Some Baker-Hamilton commission members are considering proposals to withdraw a significant number of US forces from Iraq as quickly as a year from now even if Iraq’s own military is not ready to defend the country, the Times said.

LONDON, Nov. 27--British Prime Minister Tony Blair voiced “deep sorrow“ on Monday for the country’s historic role in the slave trade, but stopped short of a full apology sought by some critics.
Writing in a newspaper which serves Britain’s African and Caribbean communities, Blair expressed regret for Britain’s involvement, nearly 200 years on from the legislation which led to the abolition of the trade, AFP reported.
“It is hard to believe what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time,“ he wrote, in comments that drew a cautious welcome from the New Nation newspaper which published the article.
“I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was--how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition--but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever could have happened and rejoice at the better times we live in today.“
British merchants are believed to have transported nearly three million black Africans across the North Atlantic Ocean between 1700 and the early 19th century.
Overall, there were some 21 million black Africans transported by Europeans in the Atlantic slave trade from 1450 until 1850, according to historians.
British merchants were the biggest participants, followed by French and Dutch.
Blair’s comments take him further than any previous leader in seeking to distance himself from past British actions, according to the Observer newspaper, which trailed the interview on Sunday.
However, some critics said Blair was not going far enough.
“It’s adding insult to the lingering injuries of the enslavement of African people by the European ruling classes,“ said Kofi Mawuli Klu, the joint leader of the Rendezvous of Victory movement, an African rights lobby group.
“It’s totally unacceptable. The message is that if you commit crimes against African people you cannot be held responsible: even when you acknowledge that you have done wrong, you do not feel it necessary to apologize but make only a token gesture,“ he told Observer.
Events are being planned to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. It was passed on March 25, 1807, imposing a 100-pound fine for every slave found aboard a British ship.
The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act outlawed slavery itself throughout the British Empire, but slaves did not gain their final freedom until 1838.

MADRID, Spain,
Nov. 27--Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Monday opened a Council of Europe-spearheaded campaign against domestic violence, stressing it had no place in a “decent society“.
“Fear, pain and humiliation are incompatible with a project for a decent society,“ said Zapatero, a self-declared ’feminist’ whose government last year passed pioneering legislation designed to declare war on a problem that costs dozens of lives every year in Spain, AFP reported.
“Violence against women is one of the worst forms of human rights violations. (Women) must feel society is with them,“ Zapatero told 300 delegates from the organization’s 46 member-states.
According to the Council of Europe, one quarter of women in Europe have been subjected to physical sexist aggression at least once.
The council chose to launch its yearlong campaign in Madrid as Spain’s government has adopted a high-profile approach in trying to change attitudes towards a deep-seated problem.
Despite the recent legislation, more than 60 women have been killed in Spain at their partner’s hands this year, already reaching the toll for 2005.
The legislation beefed up sentences for the instigators of the violence and set up special tribunals to hear the cases while offering victims legal, medical, financial and psychological aid.
First Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega admitted last week that many of those affected remained reluctant to step forward.

BEIT-UL-MOQADDAS, Nov. 27--Israel is prepared to release many jailed Palestinians, including long-serving prisoners, in return for a soldier militants seized in June, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.
In a major policy speech, Olmert said he was reaching out to the Palestinians for peace--offering a series of humanitarian and economic incentives if violence against Israel ceased, Reuters reported.
In his speech, Olmert repeated that he was willing to dismantle many of the settlements Israel has built in the West Bank, which it captured in the 1967 Middle East war, to get “real peace“.
Olmert did not give details or mention a unilateral “realignment plan“ shelved after the recent Lebanon war.
“With Gilad Shalit’s release and his return safe and sound to his family, the Israeli government will be willing to release many Palestinian prisoners, even those who have been sentenced to lengthy terms,“ Olmert said.
It was the first time he had offered to exchange prisoners for Shalit, whose capture in a cross-border raid by Palestinian militants triggered an Israeli offensive into the Gaza Strip.
The governing Hamas movement said Olmert’s offer “was not enough“, alluding to its demand for a simultaneous exchange of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Shalit.
The Islamist militant group called Olmert’s proposal a retreat.
The Gaza ceasefire, designed to halt rocket attacks and an Israeli offensive in the territory, is seen as a step to reviving peace talks that collapsed in 2000 before the start of a Palestinian uprising.
But Olmert listed a string of conditions for peace talks with moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
He said Palestinians must first form a unity government that met western demands to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept existing interim peace accords, and Shalit must be freed.
“We, Israel, will agree to the evacuation of many territories and communities we have created,“ Olmert said, referring to Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Commenting on Olmert’s speech, senior Hamas legislator Mushir Al-Masri said the group would continue to reject “conditions that contradict the rights of our people“.