South Korea and the United States are to go ahead with a joint military exercise on the west coast of the Korean Peninsula, officials say.

According to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US military in Seoul, the drills, scheduled to begin on Sunday, will involve over 17,000 American and South Korean troops.

A shootout between army troops and suspected drug dealers in northeast Mexico has left at least 25 purported drug cartel gunmen, Mexican authorities said.

The killings happened on Thursday in the border state of Tamaulipas, just south of Texas, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Fourteen police officers have been killed and seven others wounded by explosion of a mine allegedly laid by leftist rebels in southern Colombia, said a police commander.

The police officers were killed when their vehicle was blown up the mine on a road in southern Caqueta department late Wednesday, the AFP reported.

Some 50,000 Argentinean healthcare workers have staged a 24-hour strike across the country demanding better job security and higher salaries.

"Some 1,500 hospitals and 6,000 healthcare centers have to deal with poor conditions, low salaries and lack of job security and staff shortages," said Chairman of the Healthcare Federation Jorge Yablowsky, who took part in the strike.

A former Argentine navy lieutenant who is now in the US has been ordered for prosecution in his homeland for his alleged role in a 1972 massacre of leftist guerrillas.

US Magistrate Judge Robert Dube said he would issue a written decision in a few weeks on whether Roberto Guillermo Bravo, 68, should be returned to the South American country.

In a sign of the widening violence in Mexico, eight people have been killed in Cancun after suspected drug gang members threw bombs into a bar on the city's outskirts, according to the local attorney-general's office.

The attack in the Caribbean beach resort, in southeastern Mexico, took place early on Tuesday.

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro has spoken of his illness, which forced him to leave power, for the first time, saying he "was at death's door."

"Several times I asked myself if [doctors] were going to let me live in those conditions or if they'd let me die,'' he told Mexico's La Jornada newspaper during a five-hour interview published on Monday, The Miami Herald reported.

Mexican officials have announced the arrest of a US-born suspected drug trafficker nicknamed "the Barbie" in a major victory for the government amid spiralling drug violence.

Edgar Valdez Villareal, a Mexican-American, who faces trafficking charges in the US, has been blamed for a vicious turf war that has included bodies hung from bridges and shootouts in central Mexico.

Amid efforts to crackdown on drug smugglers, the Mexican police have taken into custody a major drug lord who is the alleged head of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel.

The 37-year-old Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as the Barbie, was captured by federal police close to the border between the southern Mexican states of Morelos and Guerrero following a shootout, Xinhua news agency reported on Monday.

Violent clashes between government security forces and demonstrators continue unabated in the Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Several people have been wounded on Tuesday after police opened fire to disperse the protesters in the capital city of Srinagar, AFP reported.