Demonstrators and security forces clashed for a second day in Congo's capital Wednesday in unrest triggered by the president's bid to extend his three-decade term in office, an AFP correspondent said.

After a day in which four people were killed and 10 hurt in clashes, dozens of youths took to the streets in western Brazzaville in an apparent bid to throw up barricades as security forces fired rounds of tear gas grenades to disperse them.

A New York police officer died after being shot in the head during a shootout in Harlem, the fourth killed in the line of duty in less than a year, officials said Wednesday.

Randolph Holder, a 33-year-old Guyanese immigrant who had been on the force for five years, was pronounced dead in hospital at 10:22 pm on Tuesday (0222 GMT Wednesday), police commissioner Bill Bratton said. 

A Romanian court has launched a probe into former president Ion Iliescu for alleged crimes against humanity over the violent suppression of protests in 1990, months after the fall of the Communist regime, prosecutors said Wednesday.

"Mr. Iliescu has been informed that legal proceedings have been initiated against him," a spokesman for prosecutors told AFP.

The Vatican on Wednesday dismissed a report that Pope Francis has a brain tumor as baseless, with a spokesman challenging anyone who thinks the pontiff is seriously ill to try keeping up with him.

Quotidiano Nazionale (QN), the newspaper which made the claim, said it stood by its story that a "small dark spot" had been detected on the 78-year-old pontiff's brain several months ago.

China's consul general in the Philippines' second biggest city was wounded and two of his staff members were killed on Wednesday during a lunchtime gun attack at a restaurant, police said.

Two other Chinese at the lunch, a consular officer and her husband, were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the shootings, national police spokesman Wilben Mayor told Agence France Presse.

Some 120 migrants crowded in two boats landed at a British airbase on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus Wednesday, their legal fates unclear as the base is British sovereign soil.

Personnel at the Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri, near the island's second city Limassol, said those who came ashore included women and children and all were in good health.

The European Union on Wednesday announced a mini-summit with Balkan countries on the migrant crisis, as small Slovenia became the latest bloc member to buckle under a surge of refugees desperate to reach northern Europe ahead of winter.

The leaders of Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia will meet their counterparts from non-EU states Macedonia and Serbia on Sunday, the office of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said.

Former U.N. General Assembly president John Ashe was indicted Tuesday by U.S. authorities on charges of accepting more than a million dollars in bribes from Chinese real estate developers.

Ashe, from Antigua and Barbuda, president of the assembly from September 2013 to September 2014, is accused of accepting money to promote the construction of a U.N. conference center in Macau.

The Netherlands said Wednesday it registered a record number of asylum seekers in September as the flow of migrants to Europe, mainly Syrians fleeing war, continues to surge.

"The number of asylum seekers registered in the country reached a record number of 8,400 last month," the Central Statistics Office (CBS) said, adding that it was the highest number ever recorded since authorities started counting in 1975.

Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders was Wednesday shouted down by protesters as he helped launch a new political party in Perth, the anti-Islam Australian Liberty Alliance.

The Dutch firebrand and euroskeptic, who was controversially granted a visa, said the new party was modeled on his own Freedom Party in opposing "the Islamisation process".