Deadlocked international talks aimed at defusing a 12-year standoff with Iran over its nuclear ambitions entered their cliffhanger final weekend Saturday, days before a deadline.

In a sign of the high stakes involved, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Mohammed Javad Zarif stayed overnight Friday in the Austrian capital Vienna in a bid to break the deadlock in a year-long round of rollercoaster negotiations.

Leon Panetta and Robert Gates, two former directors of the CIA and Defense Department, on Saturday criticized President Barack Obama's "micromanagement" of the military.

"For the past 25 to 30 years, there has been a centralization of power in the White House," Panetta said during a panel discussion at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.

An internal review of the security lapses that allowed an intruder to scale a fence and enter the White House has revealed a string of Secret Service blunders, reports said Thursday.

The New York Times cited a Department of Homeland Security review which said "performance, organizational and technical" failures had allowed Iraq war veteran Omar Gonzalez to evade security and make his way into the building in September.

Let the campaign begin. 

Fresh off the resounding Republican win in midterm elections, all eyes -- and political minds -- in Washington are now narrowing in on the 2016 presidential election.

A man who jumped the White House fence was charged Thursday with two felony counts for allegedly kicking and punching two guard dogs that were hailed for their bravery in tackling him.

Dominic Adesanya, 23, scaled the north fence of the presidential mansion on Wednesday evening in yet another security breach, before lashing out at the animals when they ran to intercept him.

An unarmed man arrested for climbing over the White House fence has been charged with assaulting a Secret Service officer after he attacked police dogs.

The Secret Service said 23-year-old Dominic Adesanya climbed over the north fence of the White House at 7:16 pm Wednesday and was quickly taken into custody by K-9 police teams and officers.

A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday ordered a full psychiatric evaluation for the man accused of jumping the fence outside the White House and bursting into the president's home.

Omar Gonzalez, 42, pleaded not guilty October 1 to three counts stemming from the September 19 incident, when he is alleged to have sprinted across the White House lawn before entering the building with a knife in his pocket.

Hillary Clinton hit the campaign trail Wednesday in support of a Democratic Senate hopeful, but she sounded every inch like the prospective frontrunner for the 2016 presidential race.

The White House Monday praised Vice President Joe Biden for being big enough to admit his mistakes, after he apologized to two key allies over an embarrassing diplomatic gaffe on the Middle East.

Biden called leaders in the two states, key members of the U.S. coalition taking on the Islamic State group, after he was quoted as saying that they had financed and armed the Sunni jihadists.

The head of the U.S. Secret Service pledged to revamp her elite agency Tuesday as she was subjected to withering criticism from angry lawmakers outraged over White House security breaches.

Julia Pierson's grilling before a House of Representatives panel came as a federal grand jury indicted a U.S. Army veteran over a September 19 incident at the White House when he allegedly scaled a fence and made it deep into the presidential mansion armed with a knife.