Iran is opposed to the deployment of the U.S. Navy in the Gulf although American soldiers rescued Iranian fishermen from pirates in its waters, Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said on Sunday.

"We do not deny that the action of this American warship was good," Vahidi told reporters after a cabinet session, the official IRNA news agency reported.

The United States has ordered the expulsion of Venezuela's consul general in Miami amid reports linking the diplomat to an alleged Iranian plot to target sensitive U.S. facilities with cyber attacks, the U.S. State Department said Sunday.

The U.S. action comes as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to kick off a Latin American tour in Caracas later Sunday.

The United States will respond if Iran tries to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Sunday, saying such a move would cross a "red line."

"We made very clear that the United States will not tolerate the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz," Panetta told CBS television. "That's another red line for us and that we will respond to them."

Suspected Islamists have shot dead three poker players near a church in the latest attacks targeting Christians in northeast Nigeria, residents said Sunday.

The killings took place late Saturday in Biu town of the northeast Nigerian state of Borno. The area is one of several placed under emergency rule by a presidential decree last week.

The Philippine president warned on Sunday of a possible terrorist attack, including bombings, during an annual Roman Catholic procession in Manila that draws millions of devotees.

President Benigno Aquino III, standing with top military, police and defense officials, told a hastily called news conference that several terrorists planning to disrupt Monday's religious procession have been sighted in the capital. Police are attempting to arrest the suspects and disrupt any planned attack, he said.

The Turkish ambassador to France, Tahsin Burcuoglu, has returned to Paris after consultations over French legislation that would outlaw denial of the Armenian genocide, an official said Sunday.

"The ambassador has finished the consultations for which he was recalled and returned to France on Saturday," Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Selcuk Unal told Agence France Presse.

Russians frustrated with both Vladimir Putin and the nascent opposition's inability to institute change staged a small protest in Moscow on Sunday under the slogan: "we have had enough".

The unusual counter-demonstration reflected the deep fissures threatening to emerge between the various groups opposed to Putin's 12-year domination of Russia and expected return to the Kremlin in March presidential polls.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad left on Sunday for a five-day Latin American tour that will let him tout some of Iran's few friendships while tensions grow over the country's threats to block oil shipments in retaliation for tighter U.S. sanctions.

His government finds itself largely isolated in the standoff over its nuclear program, and the new sanctions targeting Iran's Central Bank and oil industry have triggered an abrupt drop in the nation's currency.

A cargo ship grounded off the New Zealand coast since October has split in two, spilling sea containers and debris and sparking fears of a fresh oil spill, maritime officials said Sunday.

The wreck of the Greek-owned Rena was described as New Zealand's worst maritime environmental disaster even before the rear section of the ship, lashed by pounding seas, broke away overnight. The ship previously spilled heavy fuel oil that fouled pristine North Island beaches and killed up to 20,000 seabirds, and despite salvage efforts nearly 400 tons of oil remain onboard.

North Korea on Sunday praised its young new leader as "the genius among the geniuses" in military strategy in a film aired on his birthday, the first since he took command after his father's death.

In a documentary about Kim Jong-Un's virtues, state television showed the leader driving a tank and giving orders to troops in artillery, navy and air force units, lauding his "excellent military leadership.”