Turkish police on Tuesday fired tear gas to disperse people protesting against the seizure of a conglomerate linked to a U.S.-exiled preacher regarded as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's nemesis.

An Ankara court on Monday appointed a board of trustees to manage the Koza-Ipek Group, effectively seizing its 21 companies, including its media operations, as part of a crackdown on followers of Fethullah Gulen, who is accused of plotting to overthrow the government. 

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy vowed Tuesday to use "all political and legal means" to block a Catalan independence bid after separatist parties submitted a bill on secession to the regional Catalan parliament.

In a rare televised address to the nation, Rajoy slammed the bill as an "act of provocation" which would "have no effect."

CIA chief John Brennan said Tuesday he was "outraged" that hackers broke into his personal email account, and faulted the media for its coverage of the incident.

WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group, began releasing documents from Brennan's private AOL account last week, days after a teenage hacker was reported to have claimed he had gained access to the account.

Ben Carson has edged ahead of Donald Trump nationally in the U.S. battle for the Republican presidential nomination, a new poll showed Tuesday, the latest sign of slippage for the brash billionaire.

The results mark the first time Trump has been dislodged from the top of the broad Republican field in months, and reflect continued preference for outsider candidates more than 13 months before the 2016 presidential election.

The European Union signed a long-awaited accord with Kosovo on Tuesday that will lead to closer ties and could open the way to EU membership for the small Balkan country.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 after years of tensions following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and has made EU membership a key objective.

Azerbaijan on Tuesday sentenced two men to 14 years in jail for fighting alongside Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, authorities in the ex-Soviet republic said.

The energy-rich Caucasus nation's security ministry "arrested the two Azerbaijani nationals in April over fighting in Syria and Iraq," a Baku court spokesman told AFP.

Britain will keep its current level of 450 troops on non-combat missions in Afghanistan into 2016, Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said in a written statement to parliament on Tuesday.

The announcement comes after the United States earlier this month announced that thousands of its troops would stay in Afghanistan longer than promised following intense recent fighting.

The massive earthquake that hit Pakistan and Afghanistan Monday caused panic among survivors of a 2005 quake disaster, with parents describing frantic efforts to reach their children for fear "doomsday" had come again.

On October 8, 2005 a 7.6 magnitude quake ripped through the region, killing an estimated 75,000, wounding 128,000 and displacing another 3.5 million.

Bavaria's state premier Tuesday blasted Austria for waving on thousands of migrants to Germany without informing local authorities and called on Chancellor Angela Merkel to intervene.

"Austria's behavior is hurting our neighborly relations. We cannot and should not deal with each other this way," Horst Seehofer told the Passauer Neue Presse in an interview.

Selahattin Demirtas shared a cup of tea at dawn on Sunday with a few workers on a Turkish building site, joined students for a simple omelet at noon and then made a speech to just a few hundred party members in a dimly-lit Istanbul conference room.

While his rivals stage colorful mass rallies, where the flags fly and the rhetoric flows, the leader of Turkey's main pro-Kurdish party has been forced into running a very low-key campaign for the weekend election.