Los Angeles on Sunday announced a $1 million reward for information leading to the capture of an ex-cop accused of "domestic terrorism" in a murder spree that has claimed three lives.

Investigators have been combing the snow-blanketed California mountains for Christopher Dorner, 33, a disgruntled former LA Police Department (LAPD) officer who had threatened to murder police in a chilling online manifesto.

A Republican lawmaker threatened Sunday to block the confirmations of President Barack Obama's nominees for defense secretary and CIA director over the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.

Senator Lindsay Graham said he would put a "hold" on the nominations of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan until the White House provided more information about the president's actions during the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Former U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates on Sunday endorsed the idea of having a special court review drone strikes as a check against a president's power to, in effect, execute Americans.

The issue came to the fore last week during a Senate hearing to confirm John Brennan, President Barack Obama's counter-terrorism chief, as director of the CIA.

He's hardly best buddies with Benjamin Netanyahu and his drive for a Palestinian state is comatose, so why did Barack Obama pick Israel to fire up his legacy-boosting second term diplomacy?

The U.S. president sprung a surprise last week by announcing he would pick the turmoil-laced Middle East for the first trip since re-election.

A British man was remanded in custody on Saturday after being charged with threatening to kill 200 U.S. schoolchildren.

Reece Elliott, 24, appeared at South Tyneside Magistrates' Court, in the Newcastle conurbation in northeast England.

U.S. President Barack Obama urged Congress Saturday to find a balanced approach to deficit reduction, warning that steep budget cuts known as "the sequester" would hurt the economy and threaten thousands of American jobs.

"If the sequester is allowed to go forward, thousands of Americans who work in fields like national security, education or clean energy are likely to be laid off," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

Snow began to fall as a massive blizzard headed for the American Northeast on Friday, sending residents scurrying to stock up on food and supplies ahead of a storm poised to dump up to 3 feet (nearly a meter) of snow from New York City to Boston and beyond.

Even before the first snowflake had fallen, airlines scratched more than 3,700 flights through Saturday. Boston and other towns and cities in New England and upstate New York canceled school.

A U.N. committee has expressed "alarm" over reports that hundreds of children have been killed by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan in the past five years.

The Geneva-based Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) said the deaths were "due notably to reported lack of precautionary measures and indiscriminate use of force".

A radical Turkish Marxist group which claimed the suicide bombing at the U.S. embassy in Ankara last week has offered an apology to a journalist wounded in the attack, according to an online statement.

Television journalist Didem Tuncay, 38, was seriously wounded in the attack last Friday, which also killed a Turkish security guard at the embassy.

Police in the Los Angeles area searched Friday for an ex-cop accused of killing three people, including another officer, focusing their attention on a California ski resort where his burnt-out truck was found.

Some 125 officers were deployed in and around Big Bear, east of Los Angeles, where police found the pickup truck belonging to Christopher Dorner, 33, who had posted a chilling online manifesto.