Heavy rains battering the southern Philippines left at least six people dead and eight others missing, authorities said Sunday, sparking fears for typhoon survivors still living in makeshift shelters.

Four people were crushed to death in their homes on the southern island of Mindanao after landslides struck the mountain town of Tarragona on Saturday, local police said.

Four people were killed and two seriously injured in a clash between national park rangers and suspected Rwandan rebels in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, the park said Sunday.

The Virunga national park, home to DR Congo's only population of endangered mountain gorillas, said one of its rangers died in a battle on Saturday morning that also claimed the lives of three rebel fighters.

An estimated 50,000 pro-Western Ukrainians massed on Sunday in the heart of Kiev amid swelling anger over the bloody beating of prominent former minister turned opposition leader Yuriy Lutsenko.

The 49-year-old member of jailed ex-Premier Yulia Tymoshenko's cabinet was transferred out of intensive care on Saturday evening after being attacked by truncheon-wielding police during a small protest the night before.

Unknown gunmen shot dead a senior opposition leader along with two others in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar on Sunday, police said, hours after a bomb attack in another part of the region killed five.

Mian Mushtaq, a former high-ranking member of the secular Awami National Party (ANP) that ruled the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province until last year, was in his car when he was attacked, senior police official Rahim Shah told Agence France Presse.

The United States called Sunday for Sri Lanka to investigate rights abuses by security forces after a top envoy completed a fact-finding mission to the island, the U.S. embassy in Colombo said.

U.S. State Department war crimes investigator Stephen Rapp "listened to eyewitness accounts about serious human rights abuses" during his five-day mission to the island that ended on Saturday, the embassy said.

Sri Lanka on Sunday called snap local elections seen as a gauge of President Mahinda Rajapakse's popularity ahead of national polls expected to be held later this year, officials said.

The southern and western provincial councils, the highest level of local government, have been dissolved, clearing the way for local elections almost a year before they were due, officials said.

Thai anti-government protesters began mobilizing in Bangkok Sunday, a day ahead of their planned "shutdown" of the capital as they step up efforts to topple the government and halt upcoming elections.

The politically-turbulent country has been shaken by weeks of opposition rallies against Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her divisive former premier brother Thaksin, which have caused the government to call snap February 2 polls.

Mediators pushed for a ceasefire in South Sudan as fighting raged Sunday for the last rebel-held town and the full extent of the destruction wrought began to emerge.

Envoys from the United States and South Sudan's neighbors met Saturday with Riek Machar, who heads the rebel forces that have been fighting government troops for the past month, the rebels said.

Sheikh Hasina was sworn in for a third spell as Bangladesh's prime minister on Sunday after a deadly general election boycotted by the opposition amid an ongoing political crisis.

President Abdul Hamid led the oath at the presidential palace in the capital Dhaka in a ceremony broadcast live on television channels, one week after the polls which were condemned by the opposition as a farce.

North Korea on Sunday lashed out at Japan's hawkish prime minister for seeking to revise Tokyo's pacifist post-World War II constitution, calling Shinzo Abe a "militarist maniac".

In a New Year comment Abe said the country's constitution -- which limits its military to self-defense -- could be amended by 2020, days after his visit to a controversial war shrine in Tokyo enraged Asian neighbors.