Nineteen coal miners were pulled to safety Tuesday after being trapped underground for a week in northeastern China, while rescuers searched for their three missing colleagues.

Twenty-six miners were trapped in galleries relatively close to the surface when water poured into a shaft on Aug. 23 from an adjacent mine that had flooded. Three were pulled out alive Saturday and one body was recovered.

Japan's parliament elected former Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda as the new prime minister on Tuesday — the country's sixth leader in five years.

A fiscal conservative, Noda faces a host of daunting problems, including the post-tsunami recovery and nuclear crisis, and a sluggish economy and the yen's surge, which hurts Japan's exporters.

Iran will no longer negotiate a nuclear fuel swap with some of the world powers, its atomic chief said on Monday, adding however that it is ready for closer cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

"We will no longer negotiate a fuel swap and a halt to our production of (nuclear) fuel," Iran Atomic Energy Organization chief Fereydoun Abbasi Davani said in an interview with the official IRNA news agency.

The state of Vermont on Monday battled historic flooding that swamped town centers as the United States limped back to normal from Hurricane Irene, blamed for at least 29 deaths.

Major cities including New York took unprecedented evacuation measures and were largely spared the full wrath of Hurricane Irene, which was downgraded on Sunday to a tropical storm as it drenched a vast stretch of the U.S. East Coast.

Japan's Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda is set to become prime minister after winning a party vote Monday, taking on responsibility for rebuilding after the quake, tsunami and nuclear disasters.

Noda is expected to be confirmed in parliament Tuesday as the nation's sixth new premier in five years, replacing outgoing Naoto Kan who quit last Friday after his approval rating tumbled over his handling of the triple crisis.

A major fire broke out Monday at a refinery in northeast China owned by state-owned oil giant PetroChina, the official Xinhua news agency reported, in the latest disaster to hit the country's oil industry.

It took nearly 300 firefighters several hours to put out the blaze, which broke out when an oil storage facility caught light at at around 10:00 am (02:00 GMT), Xinhua said, adding that no casualties had been reported.

Terrified passengers jumped out of a plane in India on Monday after it skidded to halt on landing, trying to escape before emergency ladders were put in place, officials said.

Seven passengers were injured in the pre-dawn incident when the Gulf Air flight from Bahrain to Kochi in the southern Indian state of Kerala landed badly in wet weather conditions and veered onto muddy grassland.

A team of Taliban suicide attackers struck at a U.S.-led NATO reconstruction team in unstable south Afghanistan Sunday, officials said.

The attack hit the provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in Qalat, the capital of Zabul province. Initial reports suggested that a couple of people were injured.

Heavy rains that caused a dam to overflow in southwestern Nigeria and led to houses being submerged has killed 20 people and displaced thousands, an emergency management agency spokesman said on Sunday.

"Twenty confirmed dead," said Yushau Shuaib of the flooding in the city of Ibadan. "A dam overflowed its boundary ... It's a very serious situation."

Indian anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare ended his 13-day hunger strike on Sunday triggering wild celebrations among supporters after parliament agreed to consider his demands.

Hazare's fast at an open-air venue in New Delhi attracted tens of thousands of people every day as a nationwide protest movement emerged to back his cause, leaving the government appearing badly out of touch with public opinion.