Ukraine's pro-Russian insurgents agreed for the first time on Monday to a temporary ceasefire and talks with the new Western-backed president on ending 10 weeks of fighting that have threatened the very survival of the ex-Soviet state.

The surprise announcement from the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly threw his weight behind Kiev's peace overtures and urged the separatists to halt fire.

A South Korean military conscript who shot dead five members of his unit near the border with North Korea was captured Monday after wounding himself following a 24-hour standoff with thousands of troops.

The 22-year-old sergeant, who was cornered in a small forested area 10 kilometers (six miles) south of the heavily militarized border, had shot himself and had been taken to hospital, said Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-Seok.

China has arrested more than 380 suspects in the first month of a year-long crackdown on "terrorism", media said Monday as authorities grapple to curb rising violence stemming from mainly Muslim Xinjiang.

A total of 32 "violent terrorist" gangs were broken up as part of the campaign launched after a deadly attack on a market in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said.

A populist Canada-based cleric returned to Pakistan on Monday to try to start what he has called a "peaceful revolution" against the government, as his supporters engaged in violent clashes with police.

Tahir-ul-Qadri touched down in the eastern city of Lahore after his flight was diverted from Islamabad following violence at the capital's airport that police said left more than 70 of their officers injured.

An Afghan official says the Taliban have released 33 university professors and students abducted nearly two weeks ago in the country's east.

Mohammad Ali Ahmadi, the deputy governor of Ghazni province, says the hostages were released overnight and early on Monday, following mediation by tribal elders in the region and the staff from the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Ghazni.

South Korea said Monday it had granted a defection request from a North Korean fisherman rescued a week ago by the coastguard, in a move guaranteed to anger Pyongyang.

The Unification Ministry said the fisherman had been rescued June 16 while drifting in a damaged squid boat in South Korean waters.

Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier freed in a swap with the Afghan Taliban, has been released from a Texas medical center and is now in outpatient care, the U.S. Army said Sunday.

Bergdahl spent nearly five years in captivity at the hands of Taliban-linked Haqqani insurgents after he went missing from his post in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.

Four people have been killed and two others injured in an explosion at a copper mine in southeast Russia, a Russian news agency reported on Sunday. 

The incident in the town of Gai, in the Orenburg region, occurred during the laying of explosives to extract copper, according to the report.  

A suicide bomber on Sunday rammed his car into a military checkpoint in northeast Nigeria's Borno state near the border with Cameroon killing three soldiers in an attack blamed on Boko Haram Islamists, residents said.

Three other soldiers were also injured in the early morning attack in Gwoza town, a resident, Dahiru Yunusa, told Agence France Presse.

Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan and his embattled ruling party have wrested a key state from the opposition ahead of general polls next year, results showed Sunday.

Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate Peter Ayodele Fayose was elected governor in southwestern Ekiti state, beating the incumbent John Kayode Fayemi by a two-to-one margin, the electoral commission said.