Three days after his party's stinging midterm election defeat, President Barack Obama hosted congressional leaders at the White House Friday, vowing to embrace policies untainted by partisanship.

"The American people just want to see work done here in Washington. I think they're frustrated by the gridlock," Obama said in a White House dining room where more than a dozen congressional leaders were seated.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will meet U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Beijing on Saturday ahead of next week's APEC summit, Russian news agencies reported on Friday.

"The meeting between Lavrov and Kerry is planned for November 8 on the sidelines of the preparations for the APEC summit in Beijing," the agencies quoted a source at the foreign ministry as saying.

U.S. President Barack Obama has secretly written to Iran's supreme leader to discuss possible cooperation in the fight against Islamic militants providing there is a nuclear deal, a U.S. daily reported Thursday.

Obama sent the letter last month to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and described what he called a "shared fight" against the Sunni militant Islamic State group, the Wall Street Journal said, citing "people briefed on the correspondence."

U.S. commanders are weighing a delay in the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan after the country's protracted election set back preparations for the transition, Washington defense officials said Wednesday.

Under the current plan outlined by President Barack Obama, the U.S. force will dwindle to 9,800 troops by January along with roughly 2,000 allied forces, and all American soldiers will be out by the end of 2016.

U.S. President Barack Obama promised to work with his Republican opponents Wednesday after their midterm election victory and asked them to back his battles against Ebola and Islamic State jihadists.

"Obviously, Republicans had a good night," he admitted, after Republicans seized control of the Senate from Obama's Democrats and increased their majority in the House of Representatives.

China's state-run media on Wednesday decried Barack Obama as a banal leader who has done an "insipid job", days ahead of a visit by the U.S. president.

The editorial in the Global Times, which has close ties to China's ruling Communist Party, came as U.S. election results showed the Republicans taking control of the U.S. Senate away from Obama's Democrats.

Americans voted Tuesday in key midterm elections expected to hand control of the Senate to Republicans, an outcome that would dash Barack Obama's hopes for a productive final two years at the White House.

Many key races could go down to the wire, but polls suggest Republicans are on course to win the six Senate seats they would need to gain control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since 2006.

Republicans positioned themselves for a likely U.S. Senate takeover after Tuesday's elections, emboldened by polls that show them pulling ahead of President Barack Obama's Democrats in the battle for power in Washington.

Several battleground states like Alaska and North Carolina remained too close to call Monday, but with a number of factors tilting their way in recent days, Republicans were showing increased confidence in the home stretch of what could be one of the most consequential midterm elections in years.

The months-long, $4 billion U.S. midterm election battle comes to a head with Tuesday's vote, and President Barack Obama's bloodied Democrats face an uphill struggle to hold their ground in Congress.

Republicans have the momentum and are ideally positioned to snatch a Senate majority that would put Obama's rivals in charge of both chambers of Congress during his last two years in the White House.

Twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates are urging President Barack Obama to disclose the CIA's use of torture on terror suspects since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The potential release of a long-delayed Senate report about this "dark period" of American history has brought the country to a "crossroads," the Nobel laureates wrote in an open letter to Obama posted on the website TheCommunity.com.