Flood defenses protecting the Thai capital held up Sunday, but the advancing waters that have swamped inland regions still threaten to engulf Bangkok and escalate a disaster that has claimed 300 lives.

Thailand's worst floods in decades have inundated huge swathes of the kingdom, swallowing homes and businesses, shutting down industry, and forcing tens of thousands of people to seek refuge in shelters.

A Russian ship has found debris from the Japanese tsunami, including a fishing boat, floating adrift in the Pacific thousands of kilometers from the disaster zone, a Hawaiian research group said.

The Russian training ship STS Pallada found the debris in late September after passing the central Pacific island of Midway, said the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii.

Twenty inmates died and 12 others were wounded during a fight Saturday at a northeastern Mexico prison near the U.S. border, state officials said.

"There was a fight between prisoners that resulted in the deaths of 20 inmates and injuries to 12 others at the penal center in Matamoros," the Tamaulipas public security secretariat said in a statement.

The French left votes Sunday in the second round of France's first U.S.-style primary, called to decide who will take on Nicolas Sarkozy as the Socialist candidate in next year's presidential election.

Facing off for the prize are 57-year-old lawmaker and former Socialist Party chief Francois Hollande, the frontrunner, and Martine Aubry, another party leader who gave France the 35-hour working week when labor minister.

A truck carrying copper collided with a bus in Zambia on Saturday, killing 18 people, police said.

The accident took place north of Lusaka in Kapiri Mposhi, police spokeswoman Ndandula Siamana told Agence France Presse. The bus was on its way to the capital.

Seventy people were injured in violent clashes in Rome on Saturday that broke out at an anti-capitalist protest, with three in a serious condition, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Twenty-five were treated at a field clinic near St John Lateran square where most of the clashes between protesters and police occurred. The 45 others were taken to other emergency wards in Rome, the report said.

Opposition parties in Liberia on Saturday said they were pulling out of the elections, claiming fraud, as vote-counting put incumbent President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in the lead.

"We are pulling out of the process because it is not democratic and there is a lot of fraud," an opposition source said in the wake of the October 11 elections which also included parliamentary and senatorial polls.

President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday denied that Vladimir Putin's expected return to the Kremlin would throw Russia back to its past but admitted the decision disappointed some of his supporters.

Lampooned by liberals as a lame duck who had failed to change Russia in his presidency, Medvedev sought to regain the initiative in a town hall-style meeting with supporters at the trendy Red October complex in central Moscow.

Russia's ruling party on Friday formally confirmed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as its candidate for the March 2012 presidential election.

"United Russia proposes its leader, the party leader, Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin, for the post of president of Russia," the party said in an address published on its website.

Militants tried to blast their way into an American base in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, striking before dawn with rocket-propelled grenades and a vehicle packed with explosives.

The attackers failed to breach the gate of the base in Panjshir province's Rakha district, though they did hit a security tower with a rocket-propelled grenade, said provincial Police Chief Gen. Mohammad Qasim Jangalbagh.