Jacques Chirac's embezzlement trial opened Monday with the 78-year-old former French president absent after a medical report said he suffered from memory loss and was too unwell to attend.

"Absent," came the reply when the presiding judge called out his name at the start of a trial that should have seen the first French former head of state in the dock since World War II.

Monsoon rains in Pakistan have killed more than 100 people in a month and destroyed crops and houses in the flood-prone south of the country, provincial government officials said on Monday.

Some 2.2 million people have been affected and 300,000 displaced, said Sajjad Haider Shah, an official at the disaster management authority in the southern province of Sindh.

Famine spread to a sixth southern Somali region and will likely extend further in the coming four months with 750,000 people at risk of death, the United Nations said Monday.

"Tens of thousands of people have already died, over half of whom are children," according to a statement from the U.N.'s food security analysis team for Somalia, which said the Bay region was now declared a famine zone.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out at global powers Monday for interfering in domestic affairs of Asian and African countries as he unveiled a hydroelectric power station in Tajikistan.

"We are very concerned over interference of superpowers and strangers in the internal affairs and problems of our region and Africa," Ahmadinejad said at the opening ceremony of a hydro-power station built as a joint project with the fellow Persian-speaking country.

Rescuers and search parties scoured central Japan on Monday as the death toll from the worst typhoon to hit the country in seven years climbed to 26, adding more misery to a nation still reeling from its catastrophic tsunami six months ago.

Typhoon Talas, which was later downgraded to a tropical storm, lashed coastal areas with destructive winds and record-setting rains over the weekend before moving offshore into the Sea of Japan. In addition to the 26 dead and 52 missing, thousands were stranded as the typhoon washed out bridges, railways and roads.

Spain's King Juan Carlos was discharged from a Madrid health clinic Monday after undergoing a successful Achilles tendon operation on his left foot overnight, the palace said.

"The procedure went well and the king has already returned to Zarzuela Palace" on the outskirts of Madrid, a palace spokesman said.

Sudan has banned the main opposition party, closed its offices and made sweeping arrests across the country, its secretary general said on Sunday, as fighting continued in a key SPLM stronghold.

"The (ruling) National Congress Party has banned the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) in all states and arrested a large number of its members and seized property and documents belonging to it in different states and localities," Yasser Arman said in a statement.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, his hopes for the French presidency scuppered by a sensational New York sex scandal, returned to Paris Sunday to a media frenzy and an uneasy welcome from his Socialist allies.

The former IMF chief and his journalist wife Anne Sinclair arrived at dawn at Charles de Gaulle airport on an Air France flight and were whisked off in a black Peugeot to their apartment in the chic Place des Vosges.

Iran's first nuclear power plant has been hooked up to the national grid supplying 60 megawatts of its 1,000 megawatt capacity, the Atomic Energy Organization announced on Sunday.

"Last night at 11:29 pm (1859 GMT), the Bushehr power plant was connected with 60 megawatts to the national grid," the organization’s spokesman Hamid Khadem Qaemi, told Arabic-language television channel Al-Alam.

A typhoon that pummeled western Japan left at least 17 people dead and 43 missing on Sunday after swollen rivers swept away buildings and landslides crushed houses.

One of the victims drowned to death after flood waters gushed into his car, and streets were submerged in scenes that rekindled memories of the March 11 tsunami disaster.