A Vatican computer technician accused of helping the pope's former butler leak secret memos went on trial on Monday, in a case which could expose other whistleblowers within the Holy See.

Claudio Sciarpelletti was being tried in the tiny state's 19th-century courtroom in what is expected to be a lightning trial as the Vatican rushes to wind up the embarrassing and damaging months-long scandal.

After a grueling 18-month battle, the final U.S. campaign day arrived Monday for President Barack Obama and rival Mitt Romney, two men on a collision course for the world's top job.

The candidates have attended hundreds of rallies, fundraisers and town halls, spent literally billions on attack ads, ground games, and get out the vote efforts, and squared off in three intense debates.

Torrential rains in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh have killed at least 22 people and displaced tens of thousands of villagers over the past week, an official said Monday.

Downpours triggered by a cyclone that hit the coast near Chennai last week left hundreds of villages inundated and 60,000 people in relief camps, Karikal Valaven, a government officer overseeing emergency operations, told Agence France Presse.

The Philippine military said Monday communist rebels killed four unarmed soldiers in an ambush, further hurting efforts to revive stalled talks aimed at ending one of Asia's longest-running rebellions.

At least 10 New People's Army (NPA) rebels gunned down the soldiers as they were returning to their base from a trip to the local market near the southern city of Davao on Sunday, the military said.

A car exploded on Sunday in a town in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeast, killing an 11-year-old child and wounding 18 others, in an attack blamed on Kurdish rebels, officials and security sources said.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed the "heinous attack" which caused a civilian death as it happened close to a wedding gathering, reported the Anatolia news agency.

South Sudan said Sunday it has expelled a U.N. official who was carrying out a probe on the human rights situation in the fledgling state, accusing her of producing "unjustified" reports.

"It's the first person on human rights to be (declared) persona non grata," government spokesman Barnaba Marial Benjamin said.

With the specter of the 2000 presidential election as a backdrop, the campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have legions of lawyers ready to swamp polling stations Tuesday to make sure every vote counts for their respective candidate.

The main fear is a repeat of the election 12 years ago, when Republican George W. Bush lost the popular vote but won more electoral college votes than Democrat Al Gore after an acrimonious vote recount in Florida. The matter was resolved more than a month after the election by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gunmen with explosives attacked a police station, a primary school and two cellphone towers in a town in Nigeria's restive northeast early Sunday and set them ablaze, the military and residents said.

"We heard that there were some attacks in Fika by suspected Boko Haram terrorists. They attacked two telecommunication masts, a police station and a primary school," Lazarus Eli, military spokesman in Yobe State, told Agence France Presse.

Nigerian security forces stormed the hideout of the kidnappers of a Turkish national in oil-rich Rivers State and killed 14 of them in a shootout, police said Saturday.

"The hoodlums were shot dead during a gun battle with the security agents in their camp in Kaani community in Ogoni land," state police spokesman Ben Ugwuegbulam told Agence France Presse of the incident on Friday.

Several thousand Russian ultra-nationalists whose ranks included fierce Kremlin critics marched through central Moscow on Sunday calling for President Vladimir Putin's resignation and an end to illegal immigration.

Armed with anti-Putin slogans and black and yellow flags of pre-revolutionary Russia, the black-clad participants in the "Russian March" took to the streets as Putin is facing the most vocal opposition to his rule since he came to power 12 years ago.