Police clashed with protesters outside parliament Wednesday, firing tear gas as they came under attack with firebombs during a massive demonstration against austerity.

An Agence France Presse reporter saw some 200 youths attacking a steel barricade erected outside the parliament building as the street protest of some 70,000 people converged on central Syntagma Square in Athens.

Pakistan's army chief of staff has played down the prospects of any "foolish" U.S. ground offensive in the militant-infested district of North Waziristan, lawmakers said Wednesday.

Any such attack by U.S. forces from across the Afghan border would prove 10 times harder than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, General Ashfaq Kayani was quoted as saying in a briefing Tuesday with the Pakistani lawmakers.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II arrived in Australia on Wednesday for her 16th tour Down Under, and one that may be her last.

The queen, who is traveling with her husband Prince Philip, arrived at Canberra's RAAF Fairbairn base, where hundreds of people were waiting for her, on a British Airways jet flying her personal Australian royal standard.

Kurdish rebels killed 26 Turkish soldiers and injured 16 Wednesday in simultaneous attacks in southeast Turkey, marking one of the deadliest days for the army in its fight against the separatists since 1984.

The attacks by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels on Turkish troops occurred in eight locations in Cukurca and Yuksekova in Hakkari province near the Iraqi border, during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, local security sources said.

The chance of finding any survivors from a military plane crash in a remote hunting reserve in mid-western Nepal is nil, the Nepal army said Wednesday after recovering four bodies.

The Britten-Norman Islander plane with six Nepalese nationals on board was returning to the capital Kathmandu from a rescue mission beside the Indian border when it lost contact with the ground on Tuesday.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday voiced deep concern over a U.S.-alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington and said the West should harden sanctions against Tehran.

"The Americans have given us extremely precise information which shows the credibility of this information and the drift of the Iranian leaders is extremely worrying," he said in an interview to Agence France Presse and French radio stations RCJ and Radio J.

Pakistan is willing to hold peace talks with Islamist militants if they surrender their weapons first, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Tuesday.

"We have received messages from banned outfits and militant organizations for reconciliation and we have conveyed these messages to our leadership," Malik told reporters in Quetta, the capital of troubled Baluchistan province.

France's opposition on Tuesday called for the resignation of the head of the country's domestic intelligence agency, a friend of President Nicolas Sarkozy, after he was charged over spying on a journalist.

DCRI spy agency boss Bernard Squarcini was charged Monday with violating confidential correspondence, illegally collecting data and violating the confidentiality of sources of a journalist with the daily Le Monde.

A car bomb exploded in Mogadishu Tuesday near a meeting involving two Kenyan ministers after Shebab rebels promised Nairobi all-out retaliation for its unprecedented military operation inside Somalia.

Two days after declaring war on Somalia's Islamist insurgency, which it blames for a string of kidnappings, Kenya's forces advanced on a strategic rebel-held town deep inside southern Somalia.

A Swedish court on Tuesday convicted 23 women of possessing child pornography in a case that has drawn widespread attention because child pornography perpetrators are usually men.

The Falun district court in central Sweden handed the women, who are aged between 38 and 70, suspended sentences and ordered them to pay fines ranging from 2,500 kronor to 18,000 kronor ($375 to $2,691, 273 to 1,965 Euros).