The U.S. Congress extended a ban Tuesday on the transfer of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to the United States, in a bid to block any attempt by President Barack Obama to close the military prison.

The Senate voted 91 to 3 to approve the 2016 defense budget bill, which contained the measure extending the ban. The House of Representatives passed the bill last week 370-58.

President Barack Obama's administration on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to uphold White House measures shielding up to four million undocumented migrants from deportation.

Thrusting the country's top court into the role of arbiter in a emotionally charged political debate, the Justice Department said it would challenge lower court rulings that blocked Obama's efforts to reform immigration policy.

British police arrested a former soldier Tuesday on suspicion of murdering three people on Bloody Sunday in 1972, one of the most notorious incidents of Northern Ireland's troubled past. 

It was the first arrest since a murder investigation was opened in 2012 into the killings of 13 Catholic civil rights protesters on the streets of Londonderry that day, and another victim who died months later of his injuries.

Austria's far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) on Tuesday brought charges against top government officials, accusing them of abusing their office by allowing tens of thousands of migrants to enter the country unrestricted.

Riding high in opinion polls, the populist party filed a 16-page claim against Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner of the conservative OeVP party, as well as against Chancellor Werner Faymann and Defense Minister Gerald Klug, who belong to the Social Democrats (SPOe).

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday pledged Russia would build weapons that could pierce any anti-missile shield as he accused the United States and its allies of looking to shackle Moscow's nuclear capabilities. 

"As we have repeatedly said, we will focus... on offensive systems capable of overcoming any anti-missile defense systems," Putin said at a government meeting on the defense industry in the Black Sea city of Sochi.

A one-year-old baby and a seven-year-old girl were among six people shot dead in another day of violence in Mexico's troubled southern state of Guerrero, authorities said Tuesday.

At least one of the six victims in Monday's killing in the municipality of Chilapa was related to the town's former police chief, the state prosecutor's office said in a statement.

Tajik authorities have arrested a Russian soldier over the murder of a young woman at a Russian military base in the Central Asian nation, a police source said Tuesday.  

The 26-year-old officer, Ivan Sherbakov, stationed at Russia's huge military base near Tajikistan's capital Dushanbe, is currently being held by Tajik authorities in connection to the killing of Shoira Jabborova.

The head of Colombia's FARC rebels said Tuesday he has ordered the guerrilla army to stop buying weapons, as a goodwill gesture to accelerate peace talks with the government.

"On September 30 I gave the order to all FARC command structures to suspend arms and munitions purchases," commander Timoleon "Timochenko" Jimenez wrote on Twitter.

Senegal's President Macky Sall has called for African countries to promote a "tolerant Islam" and share intelligence to combat jihadist groups, while acknowledging recent arrests of preachers.

"We must develop a philosophical and theological discourse, training imams with a sense of a tolerant Islam," he said, speaking late Monday at the Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security in the Senegalese capital.

Police in Nigeria's oil hub of Port Harcourt on Tuesday fired shots and teargas to disperse hundreds of pro-Biafra supporters as they marched for the release of a key activist, residents said.

Shots were fired into the air to scare away the protesters in the southern city, while air force helicopters were deployed for surveillance, they added.