In brief: Cargo plane crashes into peak

Kabul, Afghanistan – A cargo plane crashed into a mountain in eastern Afghanistan late Tuesday, Afghan officials said.

Sayed Aleem Agha, the top official in Sayagred district of Parwan province, said today that the plane hit a mountain peak at about 11 p.m. Tuesday. He said officials had not yet reached the remote crash site.

British Maj. Tim James, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, said the plane was not a coalition aircraft and there was no insurgent activity in the area.

American artist Twombly dies

Rome – Celebrated American painter Cy Twombly, whose large-scale paintings featuring scribbles, graffiti and references to ancient empires fetched millions at auction, died Tuesday. He was 83.

Twombly, who had cancer, died in Rome, said Eric Mezil, director of the Lambert Collection in Avignon, France, where the artist opened a show in June. Twombly had lived in Italy since 1957.

Twombly is often linked to the legendary American artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whom he met as a student in New York in the early 1950s.

Though recognition came late for his work – and he was often overshadowed by the famous company he kept, like Johns and Rauschenberg – Twombly was asked to paint a ceiling of the Louvre museum in Paris in 2010, the first artist given the honor since Georges Braque in the 1950s.