The United States says North Korea has agreed to a moratorium on long-range missile launches, nuclear testing and uranium enrichment activities.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Congressional committee Wednesday that Pyongyang has also agreed to allow international inspectors to verify and monitor the enrichment moratorium, and to confirm that a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon has been disabled.

A Mogadishu radio-station director has became the third Somali journalist killed in as many months. The death underscores the constant threat against journalists working in the war-torn country.

Abukar Hassan Mohamoud is the latest journalist to be killed in the bullet-ridden Somali capital, Mogadishu. Witnesses say unidentified gunmen assassinated the Somaliweyn radio station director late Tuesday at his home in the Wadajir district.

Radio Somaliweyn is an independent radio station operating in northern Mogadishu.

Gunmen in Somalia's capital have shot and killed the director of a radio station that was shut down by militant group al-Shabab in 2010.

Witnesses tell VOA that Abukar Hassan Kadaf was attacked by two men with pistols late Tuesday as he returned to his Mogadishu home. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Pakistani officials say gunmen disguised in military uniforms stopped a passenger bus in the northern part of the country and shot dead 18 Shi'ite passengers.

Police said the gunmen ambushed the bus en route to the northern town of Gilgit early Tuesday as it traveled through the mountainous district of Kohistan. The attackers boarded the bus, checked the identity of the passengers and opened fire on the Shi'ite passengers.

The Danish Navy says it has freed 16 hostages held by Somali pirates, but two other hostages were apparently killed during the rescue operation.

The warship Absalon fired on and intercepted a pirate mother ship as it tried to sneak away from the Somali coast Monday, according to a Danish Navy statement.

It says Absalon crew members boarded the ship and found 17 suspected pirates along with 18 hostages from the ship's original crew. It says two of the hostages were found badly injured and died, despite medical attention.

A bomb has exploded outside the offices of Nepal's state-run oil company, killing three people.

Monday's attack was the first blast in the capital, Kathmandu, since 2009.

Police say a remote-control bomb was detonated in front of the Nepal Oil Corporation during lunchtime.

Nepal's Home Minister Bijaya Gachchedar said a little-known group calling itself United Ethnic Liberation Front took responsibility for the bombing.

The minister ordered that security be tightened in Kathmandu following the blast.

The radical Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram says it bombed a Christian church Sunday in Jos, killing three people and wounding dozens more.

The suicide bombing was one in a series of recent attacks by the group on Christian targets in northern Nigeria, including a Christmas day bombing of a Catholic church near Abuja that killed at least 37 people.

Following Sunday's attack, Christian youths seeking revenge beat to death two Muslim men in Jos.

Russia's state television says Russian and Ukrainian authorities have arrested a group of suspects accused of attempting to assassinate Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

The Channel One station said Monday the suspects were plotting to kill Mr. Putin in Moscow immediately after Russia's March 4 presidential election. The report said the suspects were arrested in Ukraine's Black Sea port city of Odessa.

Al-Qaida is claiming responsibility for a suicide-bombing Saturday in the southern Yemeni port city of Mukalla, which left at least 26 people dead and at least 20 others wounded. The bombing came just hours after a speech by Yemen's new President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who is originally from the south of the country.

Witnesses say the suicide car-bomber broke through an outer barrier at a presidential compound in Mukalla blowing up himself and his vehicle, near a group of soldiers who were eating, causing dozens of casualties.