Iranian newspapers on Monday welcomed European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton's weekend visit to Tehran although her focus on human rights came under criticism.

Ashton met on Sunday with top Iranian officials, including President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Nepalese police arrested nine Tibetans on Monday after stepping up security on the streets of the capital for the anniversary of the 1959 rebellion against China's rule in Tibet.

About 30 police swooped on a handful of protesters, who waved Tibetan flags and chanted "we want a free Tibet", near the Chinese consular offices in Kathmandu, an Agence France Presse reporter said.

Nine members of the security forces and two communist insurgents were killed in a string of guerrilla attacks targeting Philippine police and military on Monday, officials said.

At least 50 New People's Army (NPA) rebels overwhelmed a small group of policemen at the police station in Matanao on the southern island of Mindanao at dawn, said local military spokesman Captain William Rodriguez.

The ousted president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, is to speak in southern Russia on Tuesday in his first public statement in over a week, Russian news agencies reported.

"The statement will be made in Rostov-on-Don. The exact time and place will be announced later," the agencies cited an unnamed source in his entourage as saying Monday.

The Supreme Court in the Maldives has sacked the country's elections chief and handed him a suspended jail term after he criticized judges during last year's chaotic contest to choose a president.

Less than a fortnight before parliamentary elections are due, Chief Commissioner Fuwad Thowfeek and his deputy Ahmed Fayaz were dismissed for "disobeying and challenging" orders issued by the court in its role as "guardian of the constitution".

Japan has no plan to revise a landmark 1993 apology over wartime sex slavery, the government's top spokesman said Monday, despite a controversial review of the statement which has sparked a backlash at home and abroad.

The landmark apology, known as the Kono statement, acknowledged official complicity in the coercion of women from across Asia into a system of wartime brothels, an issue that draws particular resentment in neighboring South Korea.

People in the western Venezuelan city of San Cristobal say National Guard troops have attacked and dismantled barricades that protesters had raised at key intersections.

Local TV journalist Beatriz Font and other witnesses say guardsmen fired a lot of tear gas, including at nearby residential buildings. They say the attack began before midnight and continued into early Monday.

A powerful 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck late Sunday off the coast of northern California, the U.S. Geological Survey said, but there were no immediate reports of damage or a tsunami threat.

The quake struck at 0518 GMT with an epicenter located 77 kilometers (48 miles) west-northwest of the town of Ferndale and at a depth of seven kilometers (4.3 miles), said the USGS, which monitors earthquakes worldwide.

The Taliban on Monday vowed to target Afghanistan's presidential election, urging their fighters to attack polling staff, voters and security forces before the April 5 vote to choose a successor to Hamid Karzai.

Previous Afghan elections have been badly marred by violence, with at least 31 civilians and 26 soldiers and police killed on polling day alone in 2009 as the Islamist militants displayed their opposition to the U.S.-backed polls.

Mystery deepened Monday over the fate of a Malaysian jet carrying 239 people, as tests on oil slicks scotched suspicions it was aircraft fuel while the search for debris failed to yield any trace of the missing aircraft.

Laboratory analysis of the oil samples showed they were not from the Malaysia Airlines jet but were a type of fuel used by ships, the Maritime Enforcement Agency said in Kuala Lumpur.