A small group of protesters, most of them women, on Tuesday trashed an Iranian police post protecting the French embassy in Tehran and threw stones at visitors to the mission before being arrested, a diplomat inside told AFP.

The unannounced, violent demonstration lasted 90 minutes and involved around 15 people, the French diplomat said.

A photographer traveling with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the U.N. General Assembly last week stayed behind and has sought asylum in the United States, CNN reported.

His lawyer, Paul O'Dwyer, told CNN Monday that Hassan Golkanbhan feared persecution over his opposition to the Iranian government, and that his wife and two children had fled Iran for an undisclosed safe haven.

Bangladesh police said Tuesday they had arrested nearly 300 people after Muslim mobs attacked temples and houses in what Buddhist leaders described as the worst violence against the community since independence.

A total of 162 people were arrested in Cox's Bazaar, which bore the brunt of the attacks on Saturday and Sunday nights, according to Khorshed Alam, a senior police officer in the southeastern district.

Chinese government ships returned to waters off disputed Japanese-controlled islands Tuesday, the coastguard said, a week after they last left and days after heated exchanges at the U.N. General Assembly.

Four maritime surveillance ships entered the waters shortly after 12:30 pm (0330 GMT), where they remained for around six hours, ignoring demands from Japan's coastguard to leave.

Philippine officials and Muslim rebels resumed negotiations on Tuesday in the Malaysian capital in a bid to end a decades-old insurgency, amid hopes a roadmap for peace could be inked soon.

The four-day talks to halt the rebellion in the Philippines' troubled south, which has left more than 150,000 people dead since the 1970s, will discuss an accord outlining steps to finalize a peace pact, officials said.

A strong 6.2-magnitude quake struck off northern Japan on Tuesday, U.S. seismologists said, but there were no immediate reports of damage and no tsunami alert was issued.

It hit at 7:21 am (2221 GMT Monday) in waters 96 kilometers (60 miles) east of Miyako on the main island of Honshu at a depth of just 9.7 kilometers, according to the US Geological Survey.

Talks between Colombia's government and the leftist FARC rebels -- aimed at ending one of Latin America's oldest conflicts -- are set to begin on October 15, the group said Monday.

The statement sent to reporters in Havana, Cuba, where the parties met to negotiate the terms of the peace talks also said "the national government and the FARC ... will make a public announcement on October 17 in the city of Oslo, Norway."

An unidentified attacker stabbed and killed a Maldivian ruling party legislator Tuesday in the first assassination of a lawmaker in the Indian Ocean archipelago, police said.

Afrasheem Ali, 46, a lawmaker from the Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM), was attacked on the steps of his apartment in the capital island Male early Tuesday, police spokesman Hassan Haneef told AFP.

North Korea has dropped thousands of propaganda leaflets attacking South Korea across their heavily militarized border for the second time this year, the South's defense ministry said Tuesday.

South Korean soldiers have collected about 17,000 leaflets, which were floated by balloon over the frontier on Saturday, a ministry spokesman said.

Six crew members were arrested Tuesday over a collision between a ferry and a pleasure boat in Hong Kong that killed 37 people in the city's worst maritime disaster in decades, officials said.

More than 120 passengers and crew were on the Hong Kong Electric company's vessel to watch a huge National Day fireworks display in Victoria Harbor Monday evening when the collision occurred near Lamma island.