Justin Trudeau, the first-born son of late Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, won his first mandate Monday as his Liberals -- who governed most of the last century -- rebounded from a major defeat at the polls in 2011.

The former French teacher overcame campaign attack ads claiming he was "just not ready" to lead, winning the election by a landslide.

As the thermometer dips towards zero in Germany, thousands of asylum seekers spending their nights in tents are pleading for authorities to find them alternative housing.

"They say they are going to do something, but they are not telling us what. Maybe we are all going to turn to ice," said a 25-year-old Afghan who went by the name Hussein, and who has been living in one of several tent cities set up by authorities in the northern city of Hamburg.

Ahmed Aboutaleb knows what it's like to arrive as a child destitute in a strange land. Now with Europe bitterly divided over the refugee crisis, Holland's first Muslim immigrant mayor is offering asylum-seekers shelter and hope.

Four decades after leaving Morocco with his family, Aboutaleb, mayor of Rotterdam since 2009, connects more intimately than most with the complex issues at the heart of Europe's worst migrant crisis since World War II.

Head-high floodwaters churned across vast farming regions of the northern Philippines on Tuesday as heavy rain compounded the misery of a typhoon that killed at least 22 people and displaced thousands.

Koppu weakened into a tropical storm and moved into the South China Sea by Tuesday morning, but its huge rain band ensured more downpours while flooding swept within 40 kilometers (25 miles) of Manila, the capital.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo took office last year on hopes that an outsider and "man of the people" would swiftly usher in a new era of cleaner, more effective governance.

Twelve months on, critics say those hopes have come to nought.

Violent clashes in Niger Monday between police and students protesting for better study conditions left at least seven injured and led to 79 arrests, the governor of the capital Niamey said.

Hundreds of college and high school students demonstrated in the city and clashed with police in the afternoon, an AFP journalist said.

The Muslim teenager who was detained when his teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb visited the White House Monday, after a receiving a very public invite from President Barack Obama.

Ahmed Mohamed joined a group of students, teachers, scientists, astronauts and celebrities -- including the "Myth Busters" and Bill Nye -- for White House Astronomy Night.

Nearly 400 mostly elderly and frail South Koreans began a tearful, emotionally fraught reunion Thursday with family members in North Korea, more than 60 years after they were separated by the Korean War.

After crossing the heavily militarized border into North Korea in a convoy of buses, the families from the South finally met their relatives in a mountain resort that has hosted similar reunions in the past.

Slovenia on Tuesday called in the army to help manage a surge of asylum seekers desperately trying to reach northern Europe ahead of winter, as the tiny EU state became the latest hotspot on the migrant trail.

"The inflow of migrants over the last three days has exceeded all manageable possibilities," a government statement said, adding that parliament would be asked to approve legislation allowing soldiers to help border police in the crisis "under very specific circumstances".

Canada's Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, son of a popular former prime minister, won Monday's general election in a landslide that ended nine years of Stephen Harper's Tory rule.

For many Canadians the vote was a referendum on Harper's management style, criticized as autocratic, and on who was better placed to put a struggling economy back on track.