Cambodian riot police on Monday used electrified batons and clubs to beat demonstrators demanding a licence for an independent television station for defying a ban on unauthorized rallies in the capital, rights groups said.

Scores of armed police violently dispersed more than 100 protesters who tried to rally in a Phnom Penh park, activists and witnesses told Agence France Presse.

The mayor of a Belgian industrial town cut off ties with a sister city in southern France on Monday after the far right won its city hall in weekend local elections.

The far-right National Front will take control of about a dozen French towns after elections Sunday, including Beaucaire, a sun-soaked bullfighting town where 30-year-old Julien Sanchez, a party official, is to become the next mayor.

Government-level talks between Japan and North Korea ended Monday in Beijing on a positive note, with Pyongyang apparently prepared to discuss the Japanese citizens kidnapped by its spies decades ago.

At their first formal meeting in 16 months, diplomats from the two countries spoke on a range of issues over two days, including North Korea's nuclear weapons program, officials said.

Nigeria's secret police faced questions Monday about how 21 detainees were killed during an attempted jailbreak from their headquarters, with claims of a cover-up about exactly what happened.

The detainees, reportedly suspected Boko Haram insurgents, died Sunday after the Department of State Services said that one inmate overpowered a guard and seized his weapon.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak will travel to an Australian air force base near Perth to observe the multi-nation search for missing flight MH370, his government said on Monday.

Transport and Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Najib would make the trip on Wednesday.

Taliban gunmen abducted a provincial election candidate in northern Afghanistan, officials said on Monday, five days ahead of national polls the Islamist militants have vowed to target.

Afghanistan will vote on Saturday to choose a successor to President Hamid Karzai and to decide the make-up of 34 provincial councils in elections seen as a benchmark of progress since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001.

South African President Jacob Zuma will miss a controversy-tinged EU-Africa summit in Brussels this week because of "other commitments", the country's foreign ministry said on Monday.

Pretoria would not say if Zuma's decision was taken in solidarity with long-time Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, whose government called for a boycott of the meeting after his wife, Grace, was refused a visa to attend.

Ukraine's defense ministry said on Monday it has noticed a gradual withdrawal of Russian troops from its border that may be linked to Washington's latest push for a diplomatic solution to the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War.

"In recent days, the Russian forces have been gradually withdrawing from the border," the Ukrainian defense ministry's general staff spokesman Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskiy told Agence France Presse in a telephone interview.

Two detainees at an immigration center in Japan died over the weekend, an official said Monday, just months after the death of another man at the same facility.

An Iranian man in his 30s choked on his dinner on Friday, a spokeswoman at the immigration center in Ushiku, northeast of Tokyo, told Agence France Presse, adding that he was taken to hospital but died on Saturday afternoon.

At least 16 people were killed in rain and hailstorms that triggered flooding and landslides in southern China, officials said Monday.

The severe weather, which began last Friday, has affected seven provinces and municipalities, China's ministry of civil affairs said in a statement, leaving 16 people dead and two missing.