Taliban militants shot dead four tribesmen on Monday after accusing them of spying for the United States in Pakistan's lawless northwestern tribal belt, officials said.

Three bullet-riddled bodies were dumped on a roadside in Datta Khel village, 35 kilometers west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan tribal district, local administration official Wahab Khan told Agence France Presse.

Workers were temporarily evacuated from part of the quake-hit Fukushima nuclear plant in northeast Japan Monday when smoke rose from one of the reactors, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said.

At 3:55 pm (0655 GMT), a "light grey plume of smoke" rose from reactor number three, a TEPCO spokesman told reporters.

The death toll from a coal mine collapse in Pakistan has risen to 24 with another two dozen still missing, officials said Monday, fearing it will need a "miracle" to find any survivors.

"We have recovered 24 bodies -- 24 miners are still trapped inside," the secretary of mines and minerals for the insurgency-torn Baluchistan province, where the accident took place, told Agence France Presse.

The initial part of an international operation to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya "has been successful" and the government's offensive on Benghazi has been stopped, top U.S. military commander Michael Mullen said Sunday.

The initial part of an international operation to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya "has been successful," Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC's "This Week" program.

At least five miners were killed and 43 others trapped underground when explosions triggered a collapse in a coal mine in Pakistan's Baluchistan province on Sunday, officials said.

A total of 48 miners were working around 1,200 meters (1,300 yards) underground in the mine and the officials said hopes for the survival of the missing were slim.

Warren M. Christopher, the attorney turned envoy who tirelessly traveled to Bosnia and the Middle East on peace missions during his 1993-96 tenure as secretary of state in the Clinton administration, has died at age 85.

Late Friday, Christopher died at his home in Los Angeles of complications from bladder and kidney cancer, said Sonja Steptoe of the law firm O'Melveny & Myers, where Christopher was a senior partner

Japan announced the first signs that contamination from its tsunami-crippled nuclear complex has seeped into the food chain, saying that radiation levels in spinach and milk from farms near the facility exceeded government safety limits.

Japanese officials insisted that the small amounts of radiation — with traces also found in tap water in Tokyo — posed no immediate health threat, and said the situation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, while still unpredictable, appeared to be coming under control after near-constant dousing of water to prevent spent fuel rods from burning up.

Japan conducted new water cooling operations at a quake-hit nuclear plant Friday, using a fleet of fire trucks as workers racing to avert a catastrophe also ran a power cable to the site.

Tones of water were used to douse overheating fuel rods at the Fukushima No.1 power station, which suffered critical damage in the massive earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan a week ago.

Thousands of protesters occupied a central square in the Armenian capital on Thursday, forcing riot police to withdraw in a show of strength aimed at forcing the government to resign.

After holding a rally attended by more than 12,000 people, demonstrators marched through the city to Freedom Square -- the scene of mass protests in 2008 which ended in violence and left 10 people dead.

South Korea on Thursday rejected an offer from North Korea to discuss its new nuclear program and return to six-party disarmament talks, saying its neighbor must first show peaceful intentions.

Foreign Minister Kim Sung-Hwan said Pyongyang should demonstrate its commitment to denuclearization "not through words, but through action".