World datelines

Afghanistan

KABUL — Militants based in Pakistan are planning to infiltrate relief organizations and companies in Afghanistan as part of a plot to abduct U.S. citizens, the American Embassy warned Wednesday.

KABUL — Search teams have recovered the bodies of six Americans who died when their plane crashed high in Afghanistan's snow-covered mountains, U.S. military officials said Wednesday.

Britain

LONDON — A mutilated body found in Iraq is not that of kidnapped aid worker Margaret Hassan, the British government said Wednesday. But the Foreign Office said it continued to believe Hassan had been murdered, although the evidence was not conclusive.

China

BEIJING — The death toll in a huge coal mine explosion in central China rose to 166 on Wednesday, government radio reported, making it the deadliest accident in the country's disaster-plagued mining industry in years. The report on the Web site of China National Radio came after officials said rescue efforts were blocked by fires and toxic fumes in the Chenjiashan coal mine, which was hit by an explosion Sunday.

Colombia

BOGOTA — Colombia's Congress gave final approval to a bill to allow President Alvaro Uribe to run for re-election, a move aimed at giving the hard-line leader more time to fight a leftist insurgency and drug trafficking.

Congo

GOMA — U.N. observers encountered what they believed to be about 100 Rwandan troops in eastern Congo, a U.N. official said Wednesday, marking the first reported U.N. sightings since Rwanda threatened to send in its forces against Rwanda Hutu rebels sheltering here.

Cuba

HAVANA — As many as 18 jailed dissidents have been transferred from provincial penitentiaries to the main prison hospital in Havana, raising hopes that they will soon be freed, relatives of the dissidents said Wednesday.

Egypt

CAIRO — Fathi Arafat, the brother of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and founder of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, died Wednesday. He was 67.

France