Venezuela gave three U.S. diplomats 48 hours to leave the country on Monday, accusing them of conspiring against the government to incite protests that were the OPEC nation's most serious violence since President Nicolas Maduro's April election.

Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said the three consular staff used visa visits to universities as cover for promoting student-lead protests.

The demonstrations, which have energized the opposition but show few signs they can oust Maduro, continued on Monday with rowdy protests around Caracas and various provincial cities. On Wednesday, the protests turned deadly and three people were fatally shot.

"They have been visiting universities with the pretext of granting visas," said Jaua, who often faced off against police during his own days as a student demonstrator.

"But that is a cover for making contacts with (student) leaders to offer them training and financing to create youth groups that generate violence," he told reporters.

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee lambasted the nation's top intelligence chiefs on Wednesday, complaining of lies about gathering the phone records of Americans and failing to cooperate with Congress in an investigation of the CIA's controversial interrogation programs.

Committee members grilled Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan at the first intelligence committee hearing since President Barack Obama proposed reforms to the spy program.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told them an ongoing "culture of misinformation" has undermined the public's trust in America's intelligence leadership.

"That trust has been seriously undermined by senior officials' reckless reliance on secret interpretations of the law and battered by years of misleading and deceptive statements senior officials made to the American people," Wyden said.

He said the deception didn't help the fight against terror, but instead hid bad policy choices and violations of civil liberties. Wyden singled out Clapper's testimony to Congress last March that the National Security Agency does not collect data on millions of Americans, an assertion proved false by leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Clapper has since apologized, suggesting he misspoke. But five members of Congress, led by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., called this week for the White House to fire Clapper for misleading Congress.

Mining giant Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) is losing about R100-million a day because of a strike by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu), which entered its fourth week on Monday.

"The company is losing 4 000oz, amounting to R100-million in revenue daily," said Amplats spokesperson Mpumi Sithole.

Amplats on Saturday said it was suing Amcu for damages and losses suffered over their work stoppage.

Amplats was seeking R591-million but this could rise if damages continued, said Sithole.

"The provisional quantum of the damages claim is about R591-million, although as Amcu's wrongful conduct is continuing, the damages will continue to accrue," she said.

Despite efforts by the Obama administration to ease shortages of critical drugs, shortfalls have persisted, forcing doctors to resort to rationing in some cases or to scramble for alternatives, a government watchdog agency said on Monday. The number of annual drug shortages - both new and continuing ones - nearly tripled from 2007 to 2012.

In recent years, drug shortages have become an all but permanent part of the American medical landscape. The most common ones are for generic versions of sterile injectable drugs, partly because factories that make them are aging and prone to quality problems, causing temporary closings of production lines or even entire factories.

The analysis by the United States Government Accountability Office, released Monday, was required by a 2012 law that gave the Food and Drug Administration more power to manage shortages. The watchdog agency was designated to evaluate whether the F.D.A. had improved its response to the problem, among other things.

The accountability office concluded that the F.D.A. was preventing many more shortages now than in the past - 154 potential shortages in 2012 compared with just 35 in 2010 - but that the total number of shortages has continued to grow. In 2012, the number of drugs in short supply, both new and long-term, was 456, the report said, up from 154 in 2007. Such drugs now include the heart medicine nitroglycerin, and cisatracurium, which is used to paralyze muscles during surgery and for patients on ventilators.

The online mega-retailer has a little-known $600-million contract with the CIA.

President Obama is now considering whether to order the Central Intelligence Agency to kill a U.S. citizen in Pakistan. That's big news this week. But hidden in plain sight is the fact that Amazon would be an accessory to the assassination.

Amazon has a $600 million contract with the CIA to provide the agency with "cloud" computing services. After final confirmation of the deal several months ago, Amazon declared: "We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA."

The relationship means that Amazon -- logoed with a smiley-face arrow from A to Z, selling products to millions of people every week -- is responsible for keeping the CIA's secrets and aggregating data to help the agency do its work. Including drone strikes.

Drone attacks in Pakistan are "an entirely CIA operation," New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti said Tuesday night in an interview on the PBS NewsHour. He added that "the Pakistani government will not allow the [U.S.] military to take over the mission because they want to still have the sort of veneer of secrecy that the CIA provides."

The sinister implications of Amazon's new CIA role have received scant public attention so far.

Twenty-two gold miners who came out of an abandoned Gold One mine shaft in Benoni on Gauteng's East Rand have been arrested.

Police say the gold miners who had temporarily blocked a shaft over the last two years will be charged with illegal mining. They say the miners were examined by paramedics before being taken away to the nearby police station.

Some of the illegal miners came to the surface earlier on Monday. Others were rescued on Sunday and have already been charged.

At least 200 illegal miners are believed to be trapped underground. Many of them are believed to be illegal migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho.

Emergency workers battled for most of the day trying to persuade illegal miners to vacate an abandoned mine shaft in Benoni. The miners want an assurance from police that they will not be arrested.

How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it

The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine - $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit - but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.

People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching­ sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated­ with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder - well, aiding and abetting it, anyway.

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years - people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."

That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. "Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized."

It was the dawn of a new era. In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life. But now, when you're Too Big to Jail, you can cop to laundering terrorist cash and violating the Trading With the Enemy Act, and not only will you not be prosecuted for it, but the government will go out of its way to make sure you won't lose your license. Some on the Hill put it to me this way: OK, fine, no jail time, but they can't even pull their charter? Are you kidding?

Belgian Minister for Foreign Affairs Didier Reynders said that over 20 of around 200 Belgian terrorists who went to fight in Syria were killed there.

Reynders told La Libre newspaper that the identities of over 200 Belgians people, who are fighting with the most extremist groups in Syria including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISI), have been established or being established, and that over 20 of these people have been killed in Syria.

He said that the most pressing concern is keeping track of these individuals to assess the threat they pose after they return to Belgium or go to other countries, noting that these individuals aren't just extremist in their mentality, but they would return possessing experience and knowledge that would allow them to do anything.

Reynders cited the case of two young women, ages 17 and 19, who went to Syria and were involved in relations with members of very extremist armed groups, but they disappeared and may have been abducted by a rival extremist group.

News reports have been revealing that European countries are growing concerned over the potential ramifications of supporting terrorism in Syria, as they are worried about what terrorists from these countries who went to Syria could do should they return to Europe.

German citizens have participated in the bloody expulsion of Christian villages in Syria, according to the German news magazine Focus. The incident is part of a larger problem involving German and other citizens from Western countries joining jihadist groups in Syria's brutal, multiparty civil war, raising Muslim terrorism concerns in Syria and beyond.

A radical Muslim militia conducted an "ethnic cleansing" of Syrian Christian villagers near the border with Turkey on Aug. 6. According to the Focus report, two unnamed Western intelligence services identified German Muslim converts and other Germans with an "immigration background" as militia members.

A recent propaganda video shows jihadists speaking in German praising the expulsions, during which several murders occurred. The video also shows jihadists desecrating the bodies of Syrian soldiers with kicks to the head.

Up to 4-5 thousand European jihadist militants with EU passports are fighting on the side of al-Qaeda in Syria, according to Belgium's state security structures. Meanwhile, battle-hardened jihadists are returning to Europe in increasing numbers, posing a real threat to EU security. Syrian rebels are often seen as heroes to a small section of youths upon return, making them ideal to further foster recruitment.

According to Belgian state security structures, 4-5 thousand jihadist militants with EU passports were fighting against the Assad regime in Syria, mass media of Belgium reported Friday.

There are up to twenty Chechens in the ranks of the Syrian radical Islamists; they went there from different regions of Belgium, a source in the state security agency says.

The counter-intelligence service and the police of Belgium believe that about 200 owners of Belgian passports are fighting in Syria on the side of the Islamists, and about 20 of them were killed.

It is also reported that a group of Belgian Dutch-speaking jihadists, trained in Syria, participated in at least one of the last acts of terrorism on the territory of Iraq. There is information that Belgian Islamic terrorists migrate from Syria into Turkey and Lebanon. The security services possess information about the plans of recruiters to take jihadists trained in Syria to Morocco and Tunisia. Somalia is not excluded either.