Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has banned settler housing tenders being issued for the West Bank and east Jerusalem when U.S. President Barack Obama visits this month, a daily said Friday.

Netanyahu had told officials the "suspension" did not amount to a freeze in settlement construction, and that it would only be in place up until the end of Obama's trip to avoid "embarrassing" leaders, Maariv newspaper reported.

Japan said a Chinese government ship briefly entered its territorial waters off disputed islands on Saturday, as the Japanese premier vowed he would not tolerate Beijing's incursions into the area.

The fisheries patrol boat entered the waters in the East China Sea at 4:48 pm (07:48 GMT) and was sailing some 19 kilometers northwest of Uotsuri, one of the Senkaku islands, Japan's coastguard said in a statement.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday pledged with Japan's new leader to take a firm line on a defiant North Korea but the two sides also tried to calm rising tensions between Tokyo and China.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe carefully avoided disagreements with Obama after previous Japanese governments' rifts and declared: "The alliance between Japan and the United States is back now. It's completely back."

Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe headed to the White House Friday on a mission to send a strong signal to China, which has stepped up pressure on the conservative leader over a tense territorial row.

Two months after his right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party swept back into power, Abe opened his first meeting with President Barack Obama in hopes of showing the region that there is no daylight between the two allies.

Japan's new premier Shinzo Abe will meet U.S. President Barack Obama this week for the first time since taking power, seeking to breathe new life into a key alliance at a time of heightened tensions across Asia.

Abe will be keen to get the reassurance of strong U.S. support on a visit to Washington that comes amid an escalating row with China over disputed islands, and in the same month that North Korea carried out its third nuclear test.

North Korea has released a new propaganda video showing U.S. soldiers and President Barack Obama burning in the flames of a nuclear blast.

The footage was uploaded on YouTube on Monday, two weeks after a separate video that showed New York city in flames after an apparent missile attack.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that General John Allen will retire instead of accepting the top job at NATO, as he seeks to take care of his family after a 19-month tour in Afghanistan.

Speculation had been rife for weeks that Allen, who led the war effort in Afghanistan for 19 months, would not take up Obama's offer to serve as the alliance's supreme commander, even after he was cleared of wrongdoing in a drama over emails to a Florida socialite.

Barack Obama will become the first serving U.S. president to receive Israel's presidential medal, from his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres on a visit to the Jewish state next month, Peres's office said on Monday.

"President Obama has made a unique and meaningful contribution to strengthening the state of Israel and the security of its people," it said in a statement.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's office is asking the public to choose an official logo for next month's state visit of U.S. President Barack Obama by voting for one of three proposed designs on Facebook.

Participants have until 1400 GMT on Tuesday to choose their favorite design by clicking "like' on Netanyahu's Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/HEBPMO), a statement from the prime minister's office said.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Washington Sunday for a rally to press President Barack Obama to take concrete measures to help fight global warming.

The protesters want Obama to reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from Canada's tar sands to Texas and order the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set carbon standards for power plants, among other things.