Nearly 300,000 outraged Ukrainians braved freezing temperatures Sunday to demand closer Western integration after the European Union abruptly suspended historic partnership talks because of the government's continued courtship of Russia.

The ex-Soviet nation of 46 million has been at the heart of a furious diplomatic tug of war since President Viktor Yanukovych's shock decision last month to ditch a landmark EU association agreement and seek closer ties with its traditional masters at the Kremlin.

The eruption of the Mount Etna volcano in Sicily on Sunday forced the closure of nearby Catania airport because of the plumes of ash billowing into the sky, airport officials said.

Twenty-one scheduled departures from Catania had to be scrapped and 26 arrivals re-routed to alternative destinations. The smaller airport of Comiso in the area was also closed down.

Twenty-two people were killed when a commuter bus plunged from an elevated highway onto a van in Philippine capital Manila on Monday, police said, warning the death toll could rise.

Twenty of those who died in the accident in the sprawling city were on board the bus, with the other two fatalities from the van, traffic investigator Jose Abuyog said.

Socialist Michelle Bachelet was swept back into office Sunday as Chile's next president, on a platform of narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

"Chile, now, finally, the time has come to carry out the changes," Bachelet told cheering supporters in Santiago shortly after her landslide win, joined by her children and mother Angela Jeria.

A retired FBI agent who disappeared more than six years ago during a visit to an Iranian island in the Gulf is not incarcerated in Iran, the country's foreign minister said Sunday.

Robert Levinson was in the news here this week following reports by the Associated Press and the Washington Post that the CIA had been paying him to gather intelligence.

Three people were injured Sunday at a peaceful anti-Nazi demonstration outside Stockholm following an attack by a group of counter-demonstrators, Stockholm's police said.

"An authorized demonstration was attacked by some 30 people, who even attacked the police onsite," Stockholm police spokesman Kjell Lindgren said.

The execution of the North Korean leader's uncle is "an ominous sign" raising concerns about instability in a nation pursuing a nuclear arms drive, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Sunday.

Pyongyang on Thursday executed the uncle of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un charging him with corruption and plotting to overthrow the state.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday that her veteran finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who has managed her response to the eurozone crisis, would stay on in the job during her third term.

Unveiling the full list of her new cabinet with a left-right "grand coalition" government, Merkel said mother-of-seven Ursula von der Leyen would become Germany's first female defense minister.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday appeared to give Afghan President Hamid Karzai extra time to sign a bilateral security deal, saying the pact did not have to be concluded by January.

And while he said it must be signed as soon as possible, he raised the option for the first time that the deal governing the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 could even by inked by Karzai's successor, who will be chosen in April elections.

A roadside bomb ripped through a police vehicle in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing a district police chief and three policemen, an official said.

The police chief of Pachir Wa Agam district of Nangarhar province had escaped an ambush by militants and was on the way to his office when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb, provincial spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai told Agence France Presse.