U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will not visit Lebanon soon as he is occupied with addressing the crises in Syria and North Korea and several other international matters, media reports said on Tuesday.

According to As Safir newspaper, Kerry wasn't scheduled to head to Lebanon anytime soon.

The White House said Monday it was appalled by "horrific" reports of a new massacre in Syria after a watchdog group said over 100 people, many of them civilians, were killed in a town near Damascus.

"We are appalled by horrific reports that hundreds of Syrians were killed over the weekend in a Damascus suburb," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

Turkey expressed its dismay on Monday with the way U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry asked Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to delay a visit to the Gaza Strip planned for next month, saying that an experienced diplomat would not do so.

Kerry's statement "is not correct diplomatically", Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told reporters. "It is up to our government to decide where our prime minister or a Turkish official will go and when."

Serbia's government on Monday approved an EU-brokered deal to normalize ties with breakaway Kosovo, a historic agreement aimed at turning the page on the Balkans' last simmering trouble-spot 14 years after the end of hostilities.

Police were seeking answers Sunday from the seriously wounded surviving Boston bombing suspect, amid reports he was responding in writing to questions due to throat injuries.

Investigators who had been waiting to interrogate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, since his capture on Friday are trying to determine whether his neck wound was self-inflicted in a suicide attempt, USA Today quoted a federal law enforcement official as saying.

With the hospitalized Boston bombing suspect unable to speak, attention shifted Sunday to his dead brother, who may have been radicalized or even trained in the Caucasus last year.

U.S. lawmakers questioned why Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, killed in a shootout, did not raise more red flags despite being questioned at the request of a foreign government in 2011 and spending six months in the volatile region in 2012.

The two brothers suspected of the Boston bombings, Chechens who grew up in America, fit the profile of a new generation of jihadists who are radicalized online and strike in their home countries.

The motivations of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, killed early Friday, and brother Dzhokhar, 19, who is wounded and in police custody, remain unclear, President Barack Obama said shortly after the second brother was captured on Friday.

Five snowboarders were killed Saturday afternoon in a backcountry avalanche on Colorado's Loveland Pass, authorities said.

Clear Creek County Sheriff Don Krueger said in a statement that six snowboarders were caught in the slide. The condition of the lone survivor was not released.

Attacks by Afghanistan's Taliban and other insurgents soared in the first quarter of 2013, raising the grim prospect of an unusually violent year, a study by an independent group showed Saturday.

The violence overwhelmingly targets Afghan troops and police as foreign combat forces step back from the frontline in preparation for withdrawal from the country next year, according to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO).

Global hopes that democracy could replace dictatorships in Arab Spring nations risk being crushed by repressive regimes, the United States warned Friday in its annual human rights report.

"The hope of the early days of the Arab Awakening has run up against the harsh realities of incomplete and contested transitions," the State Department said in its assessment of the global situation of human rights in 2012.