U.S. President Barack Obama would not say Friday whether the United States recognizes Nicolas Maduro as the winner of last month's Venezuelan presidential election.

Obama, in an interview with U.S. Spanish-language network Univision, said the entire region "has been watching the violence, the protests, the crackdowns on the opposition" following the controversial April 14 election.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday pledged to forge an equal partnership with Mexico as the neighbors battle powerful drug cartels, while admitting U.S. guns were partly to blame for deadly violence here.

Addressing a young audience in Mexico City's Anthropology Museum, Obama said he had come to visit the southern neighbor "because it is time to put old mindsets aside," acknowledging that a "new Mexico is emerging."

President Barack Obama vowed Tuesday to renew a push to close the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, amid a growing hunger strike by inmates at the controversial jail.

Calling the prison a legal "no man's land," Obama told a White House news conference he did not want any inmates to die and urged Congress to help him find a long-term solution that would allow for prosecuting terror suspects while shuttering Guantanamo.

U.S. President Barack Obama should address human rights violations related to Mexico's Washington-backed war on drugs when he visits the country this week, Human Rights Watch urged Monday.

Obama is slated to meet Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, who took office in December and inherited a drug war that had killed some 70,000 people in six years under his predecessor Felipe Calderon.

U.S. President Barack Obama stepped up pressure on Russia over Syria on Monday, telling his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of his concern about the reported use of chemical weapons by the Damascus regime.

Obama also thanked Putin in the telephone call for his help after the Boston marathon bombings, and expressed condolences over a fire that killed 36 patients in a Russian psychiatric facility on Friday, the White House said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will host his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama for a bilateral visit later this year as the two leaders pledged to intensify cooperation on Syria and counter- terrorism, a Kremlin aide said on Monday.

Putin's foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov said Obama had called Putin to discuss future contacts with the Russian leader including a bilateral visit just before the G20 summit that Russia hosts in Saint Petersburg in early September.

President Barack Obama joked Saturday that the years are catching up to him and he's not "the strapping young Muslim socialist" he used to be.

Obama poked fun at himself as well as some of his political adversaries during the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner attended by politicians, members of the media and Hollywood celebrities.

President Barack Obama poked fun at himself, his political opponents, the news media and even his wife's hairstyle late Saturday at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner.

The dinner, where around 3,000 guests dine in a massive hotel ballroom, is greeted with near hysteria in Washington, normally a strait-laced town where celebrity is calculated in degrees of political power rather than box office pulling power.

U.S. authorities said Saturday they have arrested a man as part of a probe into poison-laced letters sent to President Barack Obama and other public officials.

Special agents took James Everett Dutschke into custody "without incident" at his home in Tupelo, Mississippi, around 12:50 Saturday morning, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation told Agence France Presse.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his supermodel wife, Carla Bruni, were clearly taken with President Barack Obama and his family back in 2011.

The Sarkozys gave the Obamas more than $41,000 worth of presents that year, becoming the most prolific foreign gift-givers to the first family, documents released Friday show.