Quebec voters head to the polls Monday to pick a new government to lead Canada's French-speaking province, after a campaign that saw the separatist ruling party renew calls for independence.

But the Parti Quebecois's renewed talk of having the province break away from Canada could prove costly, with Premier Pauline Marois's party trailing in the polls behind the pro-unity Quebec Liberals.

President Barack Obama will travel on Wednesday to a Texas military base to honor the victims of a deadly shooting by a troubled U.S. soldier, the White House said.

Presidential adviser Dan Pfeiffer told CBS television on Sunday that president and First Lady Michelle Obama will attend a memorial service at the Fort Hood army base for three soldiers who died last week when Army specialist Ivan Lopez, 34, opened fire at the sprawling military facility.

Two Cuban spies who recently completed prison terms in the United States told state-run television that their mission monitoring anti-Castro groups there had been worth their lengthy incarceration.

"I don't view it as a sacrifice, I look at it as something that I simply had to do," Fernando Gonzalez, who was released in February after 15 years in U.S. prison, said in a broadcast that aired late Saturday.

Hungary's strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orban looked to have won a clear victory in elections on Sunday, with exit polls giving his Fidesz party a wide lead over the opposition.

Fidesz won 48 percent of the vote, well ahead of the left-wing opposition alliance on 27 percent, with the far-right Jobbik winning 18 percent, the exit polls showed.

Turkey's opposition called Sunday for an annulment of last weekend's mayoral vote in the capital Ankara, alleging fraud by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

The Ankara electoral board had on Friday rejected a bid for a recount by the Republican People's Party (CHP) of last Sunday's poll, which was narrowly won by the AKP incumbent.

Boko Haram militants attacked a village in restive northern Nigeria, killing 17 people and setting houses and cars alight, the local government said Sunday.

Among the dead were Muslim worshipers shot as they prayed in the village mosque, said Abdullahi Bego, spokesman for the governor of the troubled state of Yobe.

One person was killed and 14 wounded Sunday in a series of apparently co-ordinated blasts -- including a car bomb -- in a major town in Thailand's insurgency-hit south, the army said.

Four explosions rocked Yala, a provincial capital, on Sunday afternoon including a device hidden in a car which destroyed the vehicle and damaged several nearby buildings.

Activists chanting "Russia!" broke through police lines Sunday and stormed several government buildings in eastern Ukrainian regions seeking independence from Kiev following last month's fall of a Kremlin regime.

Clashes in Donetsk and similar rallies in the heavily Russified cities such of Lugansk and Kharkiv provided another reminder to the untested pro-Western leaders in Kiev of the monumental task facing them after their February 22 overthrow of president Viktor Yanukovych.

Gunmen believed to be Fulani herdsmen stormed a meeting in northern Nigeria's Zamfara state and killed 30 people, police said Sunday.

"Thirty people were killed and several others injured," Zamfara state police spokesman Lawal Abdullahi told Agence France Presse.

Voting was under way in Costa Rica on Sunday, where historian and former diplomat Luis Guillermo Solis faced no opposition in the country's presidential run-off election.

His lone rival in the race, Johnny Araya, dropped out last month after polls showed he would be soundly defeated, giving Solis a glide path towards victory in the election to lead this country of some five million people.