Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said he backed proposals for an amnesty for thousands of prisoners who, according to his rights advisor, could include ex-tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Pussy Riot punks.

"I agree... that such actions must be pacifying, must emphasize the humanity of our state," Putin said in televised comments.

Police in Spain arrested a man with one of the biggest collections of child pornography ever seized there, with more than 800,000 images of violent abuse including bestiality, authorities said Wednesday.

"It is one of the biggest known seizures in Spain and surrounding countries of pedophiliac material in the possession of one person who shared it," a spokesman for the Civil Guard told Agence France Presse.

Ukraine's three post-Soviet former presidents voiced support on Wednesday for mass protests raging in the capital Kiev against the government's decision to reject a historic pact with the European Union.

"We express solidarity with the peaceful civic actions of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians," said a statement from Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko, and posted on Yushchenko's party website.

Venezuela's embassy in Kenya used diplomatic bags to smuggle drugs, a witness in a trial over the murder of the mission's ambassador told a Nairobi court Wednesday.

"I am aware that the embassy was used to traffic drugs using the diplomatic bag," former embassy driver Kevin Lameck told the court in the Kenyan capital.

Looters ransacked shops and supermarkets in riots that left one dead late Tuesday after police demanding a pay rise refused to patrol Argentina's second largest city, Cordoba.

Provincial governor Jose Manuel de la Sota said 52 people were arrested, while medical sources said dozens were treated for injuries in local hospitals.

An Indonesian court Wednesday jailed 14 Muslim Rohingya men from Myanmar for nine months each for bludgeoning eight Buddhists from their country to death in an Indonesian detention center.

The Rohingya asylum-seekers in April killed the Buddhist men, who had been detained for illegally fishing in Indonesian waters, as sectarian tensions in their home country flared.

Nigeria said on Wednesday that 500 people who were arrested during security operations against Boko Haram militants in three northeast states should be put on trial for terror offences.

The 500 are among nearly 1,400 detained in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states between July and September, the country's defense spokesman, Chris Olukolade, said in a statement.

Sudan and Ethiopia on Wednesday were to inaugurate a cross-border electricity link which an analyst said aims to strengthen Khartoum-Addis Ababa ties as tensions persist with Egypt over a giant dam.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn would attend the ceremony in Sudan's eastern city of Gedaref, the official SUNA news agency reported.

Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter was Wednesday elected president of the Alpine country for 2014, taking over from Defense Minister Ueli Maurer.

The Swiss presidency rotates every year between the seven members of the country's cross-party cabinet, with the role of the head of state largely symbolic.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday accused NATO of interfering in Ukrainian affairs, saying he did not understand why it felt it had the right to do so.

"I do not understand why NATO adopts such statements," Lavrov said of a declaration Tuesday by the alliance calling for dialogue between the government and protesters angry at its decision to ditch an EU association accord.