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AP - Disagreements between Somali pirates holding a ship laden with tanks and heavy weapons escalated into a shootout and three pirates are believed dead, a U.S. defense official said Tuesday. The pirates denied the report.

AP - Pakistan named a new head of its main intelligence service, a change sure to be scrutinized by American officials who have questioned the powerful spy agency’s loyalties in the war on terror.

AP - A European tour group kidnapped in the Sahara Desert was abruptly freed after a phone call to one of the captors, and all 19 hostages piled into a single car, some clinging to the roof as they drove 200 miles to safety.

AP - Afghanistan’s president said Tuesday he has repeatedly asked Saudi Arabia’s king to facilitate peace talks with the Taliban.

AP - Thousands of pilgrims panicked by false rumors of a bomb stampeded at a Hindu temple in western India on Tuesday, killing at least 168 people in the crush to escape.

AFP - Shares in London closed higher on Tuesday, getting a boost from a rebound on Wall Street as investors hoped another vote on the US financial bailout package will see the plan passed.

AP - A parked car bomb targeted a restaurant in a mostly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing three people and injuring at least six others.

AP - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is calling the U.S. financial crisis a failure of free-market capitalism.

AFP - Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and opposition MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai met Tuesday but failed to agree on a share-out of ministries in a power-sharing government, the opposition said.

Reuters - Chinese President Hu Jintao lectured a dairy executive on food safety on Tuesday in a show of government resolve in the toxic milk scandal, even as another Western food brand, Lipton, was affected.

AP - A 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck near New Zealand’s remote and largely uninhabited Kermadec Islands early Tuesday, New Zealand’s GNS Science geological agency said.