Colombia: Plane wreckage found
Troops and peasant farmers trekking on foot discovered the wreckage of an Ecuadorean airliner Tuesday on a glacier-capped volcano but found no survivors among the 92 passengers and crew.
"The plane is destroyed. There are no survivors," said Alvaro Bucheli, the mayor of Cumbal, a Colombian town in the shadow of Nevado de Cumbal, a 15,721-foot-high volcano.
The TAME airlines Boeing 727-100 took off Monday morning from Quito, Ecuador, but lost radio contact as it approached its first stop, the Ecuadorean town of Tulcan, near the Colombian border.
Europe: Storm toll hits 18
Northern Europe struggled Tuesday to repair the damage from hurricane-force winds that swept over the continent, as the death toll from the vicious storm rose to 18.
The storm ripped roofs off building, disrupted traffic and shipping and left thousands of homes without power. It tore through Britain and Ireland before lashing Scandinavia, Germany, Poland and Russia.
Flood warnings from the storm's heavy rains remained in force throughout England and Wales.
Japan: Foreign minister fired
Makiko Tanaka, Japan's popular but unpredictable foreign minister, was summoned to a midnight meeting and fired by the prime minister Tuesday for feuding with her deputy and stalling legislation to lift the economy.
The deputy, Yoshiji Nogami, who is Tanaka's main rival, also was fired.
With her fiery promises to fight bureaucratic incompetence and corruption, Tanaka, 58, has been a key reason Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has enjoyed high public approval ratings since he swept to power last April.
But the first woman to serve as Japan's top diplomat has also been a polarizing force snubbing meetings with foreign dignitaries, squabbling with bureaucrats over personnel choices and belittling deputies in public.
Most recently, she had engaged in a public squabble with top aides that held up legislation including a crucial supplementary budget to lift Japan's moribund economy.
Australia: Illegal immigrants end hunger strike
A hunger strike at a detention center filled with illegal immigrants ended today after negotiations with government officials, the immigration minister said.
Further details were not immediately available but the announcement by Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock signaled the end of a two-week crisis at the Woomera detention center, where more than 250 illegal immigrants had refused food to protest conditions at the camp and the length of time their asylum applications take to be processed. Some had sewn their lips together.
About 3,000 illegal immigrants, mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and southern Asia, are being detained in five camps across Australia.
Pakistan: Troop withdrawals in Kashmir proposed
Pakistan called for talks with India on a mutual reduction of troops along their tense border and offered on Tuesday to restore transport links cut last month because of the crisis over Kashmir.
However, India repeated its demand that Pakistan halt what the Indians call "cross-border terrorism," meaning attacks by Pakistani-based militants against Indian rule in Kashmir.
India said Tuesday that six suspected Islamic militants and a paramilitary trooper were killed during gunbattles within Indian Kashmir. There was no comment from Pakistan.
In a statement read by Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan, Pakistan said it was willing to begin talks with India "over a phased withdrawal of troops on both sides from their forward positions to their peacetime locations."
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