Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday he planned to discuss defense aid with President Barack Obama as he left for his first meeting with the U.S. leader in over a year.

Netanyahu is due to meet Obama on Monday in Washington as the two leaders seek to set aside their testy personal relationship and turn the page after a sharp disagreement over the July nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.

Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu will hold a post-row summit Monday, hoping a massive 10 year defense deal will help them move beyond a bitter public fight that shook a decades-old alliance.

After acerbic clashes over the U.S.-backed nuclear deal with Iran, the two leaders will discuss a deal expected to be worth more than $30 billion which will include a string of advanced weaponry systems, officials said.

President Barack Obama plans to visit Laos next year to attend a regional economic summit, making him the first U.S. president to visit that country, an advisor said Wednesday.

Obama will make history when he attends an ASEAN conference in the poor but economically growing country, which was massively bombed by the United States during the Vietnam War, National Security aide Ben Rhodes said.

Barack Obama says the plethora of candidates vying to succeed him as U.S. president will be forced to exit "silly season" and be "more serious" as the 2016 general election nears.

During an interview broadcast by NBC television Tuesday, Obama said that -- a year from election day -- media-savvy candidates were still playing outsized roles.

President Barack Obama will travel to Turkey for a G20 summit, followed by stops in the Philippines and Malaysia for meetings with world leaders next month, the White House said Monday.

At the G20 summit, leaders from the world's major economies are due to give final approval to a new plan to crack down on tax evasion by multinational corporations that costs countries at least $100 billion a year.

Canada's prime minister-elect Justin Trudeau said Tuesday he told U.S. President Barack Obama that Canadian fighter jets would withdraw from fighting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

But he gave no timeline.

President Barack Obama on Thursday announced thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan past 2016, retreating from a major campaign pledge as he admitted Afghan forces are not ready to stand alone.

Calling his decision to keep a 9,800-strong U.S. force in Afghanistan through much of next year "the right thing to do," the president acknowledged "Afghan forces are still not as strong as they need to be."

President Barack Obama said Saturday that the Republican Party has "gone off the deep end" with its messy failure to elect a new speaker of the House of Representatives.

The Republican-controlled House was left in shock and disarray this week when Kevin McCarthy, the frontrunner to replace John Boehner, who has announced his resignation, suddenly withdrew from the race because of a revolt by conservatives.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Pope Francis I had reportedly discussed the developments in Lebanon during their meeting during the pontiff's visit to the United States, reported the Kuwaiti daily al-Anba on Friday.

Informed sources from the Vatican told the daily that pledges were made by “influential international forces” to exert serious efforts to end the presidential vacuum in Lebanon “before the end of the year.”

The Iranian foreign minister's reported handshake with U.S. President Barack Obama triggered chants of "Death to America" in Tehran's parliament Wednesday and a warning against "another kind of spying."

The foreign ministry has confirmed a "completely accidental" encounter between Obama and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Monday, without denying there was a handshake as reported by Iran's semi-official ISNA news agency.