An ousted Venezuelan lawmaker hit back at President Nicolas Maduro on Monday, accusing the government of desperation after she was effectively fired for raising the country's deadly political crisis.

Maria Corina Machado has been placed under criminal investigation on the suspicion that she incited violence, terrorism and homicide by addressing a meeting of the Organization of American States.

President Barack Obama's administration is readying a legislative plan to end the National Security Agency's controversial bulk telephone data collection, U.S. media reported Monday.

The "NSA would end its systematic collection of data about Americans' calling habits," The New York Times reported online, citing unnamed senior administration officials.

The United States on Monday noted there have been more Turkish tweets since the prime minister controversially banned the micro-blogging service than before.

Turkey's telecommunications authority blocked local access to the U.S. social network Thursday under orders of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after opposition members used the social network to post telephone recordings implicating him in a major corruption scandal.

The death toll from a devastating landslide in the U.S. state of Washington rose to at least 14 Monday with over 150 more potentially missing, as the White House announced federal help.

The number of people unaccounted for after the killer mudslide, described as "like a small earthquake," rose to 176, although many of those could be double-counted, emergency managers said.

Japan is to give up to $1.5 billion in financial aid to Ukraine, the government in Tokyo confirmed Tuesday, as the club of rich nations booted Russia off the membership list.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced the figure as he and fellow world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, cancelled an upcoming G8 meeting in Sochi, and said it would be replaced by a G7 event that did not involve Moscow.

Scores of angry relatives of the Chinese passengers aboard Flight MH370 set out on a protest march to the Malaysian embassy in Beijing Tuesday to demand more answers about the crashed plane's fate.

Around 200 family members, some in tears, linked arms and shouted slogans including "The Malaysian government are murderers" and "We want our relatives back".

At least 30 people died and more than 20 were injured when a bus careered off a hillside road and into a ravine in northern Thailand, authorities said Tuesday, updating the official toll.

The accident took place at about 8:40 pm (13:40 GMT) on Monday in Tak, which borders Myanmar, as several buses ferried Thai local government workers for a field trip to Laos.

One policeman was killed and eight others, police and civilians, were wounded in an explosion in southwestern Colombia suspected to have been carried out by leftist rebels.

As police returned from responding to a fight Sunday night in the town of Guapi, they were attacked in the town's outskirts with an explosive device, sources confirmed Monday.

The G7 group of top economic powers on Monday scrapped a planned meeting to be hosted by Russia as they sought to deepen Moscow's isolation over the Ukraine crisis.

After emergency talks on the Ukraine crisis called by U.S. President Barack Obama, the G7 said they would hold a meeting in Brussels without Russia instead of the wider G8 summit that was to have taken place in Sochi.

U.S. prosecutors on Monday branded Suleiman Abu Ghaith an al-Qaida insider, a trusted co-conspirator of Osama bin Laden who conspired to kill Americans and inspired a new generation of terrorists after 9/11.

Assistant U.S. attorney John Cronan took more than two hours to sum up the government's case against the son-in-law of bin Laden, on trial in New York for conspiracy to kill Americans and supporting terrorists.