The huge gains made by the opposition in Turkey's local elections are raising the possibility that the long-serving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling party could step back from some of the populist leader's more polarizing policies ahead of the next round of voting in four years' time.

There is no doubt that Sunday's local polls were a blow to both Erdogan and his Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which won last year's presidential and parliamentary elections.

A 12-year-old student opened fire at a secondary school in southern Finland on Tuesday morning, killing one and seriously wounded two other students, police said. The suspect was later arrested.

Heavily armed police cordoned off the lower secondary school, with some 800 students, in the city of Vantaa, just outside the capital, Helsinki, after receiving a call about a shooting incident at 09:08 a.m.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will hold talks with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Tuesday on supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia and the Israel-Hamas conflict.

France is among major military suppliers to Ukraine, which has faced critical shortages of arms and troops as it holds off an onslaught of Russian attacks.

Two industrial sites in the central Russian region of Tatarstan, around 1,100 kilometres (690 miles) from the Russian-Ukrainian border, were hit in a drone attack on Tuesday morning, Russian officials said.

A defense source in Kyiv told AFP that Ukraine's GUR military intelligence agency was behind the strikes, which it said hit facilities assembling Iranian-designed Shahed explosive drones.

Turkey was at a "turning point" Monday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said after the opposition fighting his two-decade rule swept municipal elections in Istanbul, the country's emblematic megapolis, and other major cities.

Near-final results showed the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) wresting the main cities and Anatolian provinces that were strongholds for Erdogan's Islamic conservative AKP party.

Donald Trump and fellow Republicans assailed President Joe Biden on Saturday for what they called an assault on Christianity, after the US leader highlighted the Transgender Day of Visibility that this year coincides with Easter.

Turks were voting on Sunday in municipal elections, with all eyes on Istanbul, the national "jewel" that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hopes to pry away from the opposition.

But there appeared no excess of enthusiasm at polling stations, AFP correspondents reported, to a backdrop of raging inflation and massive devaluation.

The French parliament's lower house on Thursday approved a resolution condemning as "bloody and murderous repression" the killing by Paris police of dozens of Algerians in a crackdown on a 1961 protest to support Algerian independence.

In recent years France has made a series of efforts to come to terms with its colonial past in Algeria.

The Philippine president said Thursday that his government would enforce a "countermeasure package" in response to "aggressive and dangerous attacks" by the Chinese coast guard and suspected militia ships in the disputed South China Sea, saying "Filipinos do not yield."

Ferdinand Marcos Jr. did not provide details of the actions his government would take in the succeeding weeks but said these would be "proportionate, deliberate and reasonable in the face of the open, unabating, and illegal, coercive, aggressive and dangerous attacks by agents of the China coast guard and Chinese maritime militia."

Four people were killed and seven were hurt when a man went on a stabbing rampage across multiple locations in a northern Illinois community, authorities said.

A 22-year-old man is in police custody and was being questioned Wednesday, according to Rockford Police Chief Carla Redd. She said one of the people who was wounded remained in critical condition.