Afghan plane, 44 aboard, missing

Dense fog hindered rescuers who fanned out Monday to search for the wreckage of an Afghan passenger plane that vanished with 44 people on board somewhere in the Hindu Kush mountains.

The plane, operated by Pamir Airways, a private Afghan airline, was traveling from Kunduz in northern Afghanistan to Kabul. Myar Rasooli, the head of the Kabul airport, said there was no distress call.

Six foreigners were reported aboard the plane, including one American. The rest of those aboard, including six crew, were Afghans, said Deputy Transportation Minister Raz Mohammad Alami.

The missing plane is a 37-year-old Soviet-made Antonov 24 twin-turboprop that Pamir Airways bought three months ago.

NATO forces were helping to search for the plane.

An Iraqi court on Monday upheld the appeals of nine winning parliamentary candidates who were barred from office because of their alleged ties to the former Baath Party.

The decision permits them to take their seats and removes the last obstacle to the final certification of March's inconclusive election results.

Officials with Allawi's Iraqiya coalition say most of those disqualified were Sunnis from his electoral list.

NATO must be willing to fight and operate far from its borders to defend its members in a new world of terrorism, piracy and cyber attacks, according to a proposed strategy for the alliance called "NATO 2020" that was released Monday.

"NATO must be versatile and efficient enough to operate far from home," former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who led a team of experts in writing the report, said at a news conference in Brussels, Belgium. "In order to sustain the political will for operations outside its area, NATO must see that all its members are reassured about the security of their home territories."

The report also says that NATO must not fail in its current battle against the Taliban and Al-Qaida in Afghanistan.