Youths smashed their way into stores and torched cars in central England on Tuesday, police said, as Britain's worst riots for decades entered a fourth night.

A gang of about 200 hurled missiles at police in riot gear, set vehicles alight and smashed shops in the town of West Bromwich, near Birmingham, Britain's second-biggest city, according to police and a BBC report.

A federal appeals court has cleared the way for a civil suit against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld by two Americans who allege they were tortured while being held by the U.S. military in Iraq.

The three-judge panel upheld a ruling by a lower court judge who denied a Justice Department motion to drop the suit brought by Donald Vance and Nathan Ertell against Rumsfeld in 2006.

British Prime Minister David Cameron recalled parliament Tuesday and ordered thousands of extra police onto the streets after Britain's worst rioting in decades left parts of London and other cities in flames.

As the disorder claimed its first fatality with the death of a man found shot during looting in south London, Cameron vowed to do "everything necessary to restore order to the streets" after three nights of violence.

Sudan has granted a petroleum exploration license to China, Foreign Minister Ali Ahmed Karti said after his visiting Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi and President Omar al-Bashir held talks in Khartoum.

"President Bashir has granted the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) three promising new petroleum blocs and offered a partnership with the national petroleum company Sudapet in the fields where it operates," Karti said late Monday.

Somalia's embattled government offered an open amnesty on Tuesday to Islamist Shebab fighters after the rebels made a surprise withdrawal from the famine-struck capital over the weekend.

The al-Qaida affiliated insurgents have waged a bloody war since 2007 to topple the Western-backed transitional government, which they had hemmed in to a portion of Mogadishu.

Around 200 Afghans burned tyres and blocked key roads near the presidential palace Tuesday in angry protest after bodyguards of a lawmaker allegedly killed at least one person over a land dispute.

The unrest flared just southeast of the Afghan capital Kabul when members of the Kuchi nomadic tribe clashed with guards working for the lawmaker.

A Russian cargo plane crashed on Tuesday in the remote Far East after reporting engine trouble and disappearing off radars, apparently killing all 11 on board in the latest in a spate of air accidents.

Transport prosecutors said in a statement that the ageing Soviet jet came down in a hard-to-reach area of the Magadan region, hundreds of kilometers even from the nearest village.

Three people have been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a police officer was hit by a car during rioting in north London overnight, police said Tuesday.

A male officer was hospitalized after being hit by a car in Brent, northwest London, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, although he is now in a stable condition. A second male officer received a minor injury in the incident.

Guatemala's Constitutional Court has rejected a bid by the country's former first lady to run for president, leaving the ruling party without a candidate.

Sandra Torres, 55, divorced President Alvaro Colom in April in order to sidestep a constitutional prohibition for a president to run for re-election or be succeeded by a member of his own family.

Violence escalated across London and at least three other cities Tuesday as police fought thousands of rioters and looters and Prime Minister David Cameron headed back to Britain to face the crisis.

In unprecedented scenes of rioting in the capital, buildings were in flames in Croydon, Peckham and Lewisham in the city's south, while gangs of looters roamed the streets of Hackney in the east, Clapham in the south, Camden in the north and Ealing in the west.