Afghan intelligence agents freed eight kidnap victims Tuesday, the country's spy agency said, with authorities saying at least some of the hostages were among the 31 Shiite Hazaras abducted by masked gunmen earlier this year.

The National Directorate of Security (NDS) said in a statement that five men, two women and a teenager were freed in the province of Ghazni, but did not provide further details.

Germany's foreign minister said Tuesday the refugee crisis had put Europe "at a crossroads" and urged member states to show "solidarity" by taking in more asylum-seekers.

"The European Union is facing its most severe endurance test in 60 years of European integration," Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Berlin.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday she was "reasonably confident" that a deal could be found with London to avert the possibility of Britain leaving the European Union.

"What is on the table is no surprise, we want to work on the proposals with a solution-oriented attitude," she said after Prime Minister David Cameron laid out his demands for EU reforms.

Turkey on Tuesday rejected as "unfair" a European Union report criticizing the state of the rule of law, human rights and media freedom in the EU candidate country.

Some of the report's observations are "unfair and even partly disproportionate, and ignore the freedom-security balance required in a democratic country governed by the rule of law", the ministry responsible for EU affairs said in a statement.

The Maldives government announced Tuesday an end to a state of emergency, which was imposed last week after an alleged attempt to assassinate President Abdulla Yameen.

"Maldives lifts State of Emergency with immediate effect," the foreign ministry said on Twitter.

Polish media on Tuesday warned of the dangers of coupling a weak premier with a cabinet of hawks a day after prime-minister-in-waiting Beata Szydlo unveiled her new conservative cabinet.

Szydlo is seen as the political protégé of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of Poland's Law and Justice (PiS) conservatives who is widely accepted as the mastermind of all the party's moves in the runup to and following its landmark election victory on October 25. 

Pope Francis has denounced the "cancer" of abusive labor practices during a visit to the Italian industrial city of Prato, where a 2013 garment factory fire killed seven Chinese workers.

Francis recalled the "tragedy" of the deaths in off-the-cuff comments Tuesday to Prato residents gathered in the piazza outside the city's cathedral. Prato is home to some 40,000 Chinese immigrants, nearly half of them in Italy illegally, and is a major producer of cheap clothes.

The leader of Cambodia's main opposition on Tuesday called for a peaceful transfer of power in elections in 2018, encouraged by a historic vote in nearby Myanmar.

Sam Rainsy, president of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), also called for major donor Japan and the rest of the international community to pressure strongman Prime Minister Hun Sen to move towards a peaceful exit from office.

Investigators in South Sudan have found the two black boxes from a Soviet-era Antonov plane which crashed last week killing at least 36 people, state radio said Tuesday.

Minster of Transport Kuong Danhier Gatluak "admitted the country is not well equipped to handle certain disasters", state-run Radio Juba said, but added that search teams had recovered the two black boxes from the plane, which smashed into a river bank just after take-off from the capital Juba on November 4.

The air campaign against the Islamic State group has made progress in degrading the jihadist organisation but will not be enough without local boots on the ground, the U.S. air force secretary said on Tuesday.

The comments from Deborah Lee James come just days after Pentagon chief Ashton Carter raised the possibility of deploying additional U.S. special forces personnel to Syria if more partners can be found among local forces on the ground.