Thousands of women refused Monday to bury victims of a bloody bombing and a strike shut down Pakistan's biggest city Karachi as protesters across the country demanded protection for Shiite Muslims.

Up to 4,000 women began their sit-in in Quetta Sunday evening, a day after a bomb in the city killed 81 members of the minority community including nine women and two girls aged seven and nine.

British Prime Minister David Cameron arrived in India's financial hub Mumbai on Monday on a three-day trade-focused visit clouded by a corruption scandal over British-made helicopters sold to New Delhi.

Cameron's trip comes amid a raging scandal over the procurement of 12 helicopters for use by VIPs in 2010, which were bought for $748 million (560 million euros) from Anglo-Italian firm AgustaWestland.

President Rafael Correa declared victory in the first-round of Ecuador's presidential vote Sunday as he celebrated with thousands of supporters in the South American country's Andean capital.

"Nobody is going to stop this revolution; we are making history," Correa said, echoing the rhetoric of his socialist ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will sign a regional agreement in Addis Ababa February 24 aimed at pacifying the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, his spokesman said Sunday.

Ban's spokesman, Martin Nesirky, told Agence France Presse that invitations to the signing ceremony went out on Friday.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Washington Sunday for a rally to press President Barack Obama to take concrete measures to help fight global warming.

The protesters want Obama to reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from Canada's tar sands to Texas and order the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set carbon standards for power plants, among other things.

The White House defended its behind-the-scenes work on immigration reform Sunday after a plan leaked to the U.S. media was panned by a key Republican as "half-baked and seriously flawed."

USA Today said the plan being drafted by administration and which is already circulating among various government agencies would allow illegal immigrants to become legal permanent U.S. residents within eight years.

Rightwing leader Nicos Anastasiades and communist-backed Stavros Malas are to contest a runoff poll in economic crisis-hit Cyprus, final results of a presidential election on Sunday showed.

Disy party head Anastasiades won 45 percent, ahead of Stavros Malas backed by the AKEL communist party, who clinched 27. Exit polls had shown the Disy leader with more than the 50 percent needed to avoid a February 24 second round.

Sri Lanka's nationalist Buddhist monks and their supporters launched a campaign Sunday to boycott Islamic halal-slaughtered meat amid mounting religious tensions in the ethnically divided nation.

Thousands of men and women led by hundreds of monks of the Bodu Bala Sena, or Buddhist Force, staged a rally outside Colombo to announce the boycott, demanding that shops clear their stocks of halal food by April.

Bangladesh's parliament Sunday amended a law to allow the prosecution of the country's largest Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami for war crimes, in a move that could pave the way to it being banned.

News of the move was greeted by loud cheers from thousands of protesters in central Dhaka who have been demanding a ban on Jamaat, whose leaders are on trial for war crimes allegedly committed in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.

The commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan said Sunday he would comply with President Hamid Karzai's order banning Afghan security forces from seeking NATO air support.

Karzai said on Saturday that he would issue a decree ordering an end to local security forces calling in NATO air strikes amid new tensions over civilian casualties caused by such attacks.