The United Nations and the United States condemned Tuesday a mortar attack on the Russian embassy in Damascus that did not, however, cause any known injuries.

Lithuanian Ambassador Raimonda Murmokaite, whose country holds the rotating U.N. Security council presidency this month, said the "terrorist" attack caused "serious damage."

Former Guantanamo inmates who have been resettled in Uruguay ended a three-week protest outside the U.S. embassy Tuesday after reaching a deal with the South American country's government for economic support.

Six ex-detainees were released from the U.S. military prison last December and sent to Uruguay as refugees, but four of them launched a protest in April, complaining they were suffering severe financial hardship.

South Korea's military said it was holding live-fire drills on Tuesday off its country's east coast involving anti-ship missiles and jet fighters after North Korea conducted a submarine-launched ballistic missile test condemned by Seoul and Washington.

The joint naval and air force exercise involves some 20 warships as well as an unspecified number of jet fighters, Seoul's defence ministry deputy spokesman Na Seung-Yong told reporters.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry took a risky gamble facing derision and much skepticism when he flew to Russia last week for the first time in two years to meet President Vladimir Putin.

But his bet may be beginning to pay off, as two top American diplomats were welcomed in Moscow on Monday for top-level talks for the first time in months on two crises bedeviling global affairs -- Ukraine and Syria.

Fourteen people, including several airport baggage handlers, have been charged in a scheme to transport drugs across the United States using carry-on luggage, the Justice Department announced Monday.

Three baggage handlers at the Oakland International Airport in California who were able to bypass security checkpoints as employees, are accused of entering the airport with baggage containing marijuana.

U.S. prosecutors are investigating several senior Venezuelan officials over alleged involvement in large-scale cocaine trafficking, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing more than a dozen people with knowledge of the case.

The Journal report said Drug Enforcement Administration investigators and federal prosecutors in New York and Miami were building cases based on evidence supplied by former cocaine traffickers, informants with close ties to Venezuelan officials and defectors from the Venezuelan military.

The United States on Monday voiced its concerns over a political crisis in Macedonia and called on the government to probe opposition claims of corruption.

"We remain in close consultation with the Macedonian government and with political leaders to convey our concerns about the current political crisis," the State Department's press office director Jeff Rathke told reporters.

President Barack Obama plans to bar police from using tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers and large-caliber firearms, in response to accusations that U.S. law enforcement has become too militarized.

After controversy over the policing of high-profile protests in Baltimore, Maryland and Ferguson, Missouri, the White House said Monday that Obama will limit police access to military equipment.

Shiite militias converged on Ramadi Monday to try to recapture it from jihadists who dealt the Iraqi government a stinging blow by overrunning the city in a deadly three-day blitz.

The loss of the capital of Iraq's largest province was Baghdad's worst military setback since it started clawing back territory from the Islamic State (IS) group late last year.

The United States on Sunday helped evacuate American, Canadian and other foreign citizens from Burundi, rocked by weeks of deadly street protests and an attempted coup, a State Department spokesman said. 

Burundi's streets have been mired in violence since the announcement by President Pierre Nkurunziza that he would stand for a third term in office.