President Barack Obama will invite 47 leaders to a landmark U.S.-Africa summit in August, seeking to widen U.S. trade, development and security ties with an increasingly dynamic continent to which he traces part of his ancestry.

Obama will send out invites to all African nations that are currently in good standing with the United States or are not suspended from the African Union -- meaning there will be no place for states like Egypt or Zimbabwe.

Reforms to U.S. surveillance announced by President Barack Obama have failed to reassure most Americans, with three-quarters saying their privacy will not be be better protected under the changes, according to a new poll.

By a margin of 73-21 percent, Americans who followed Obama's speech last week on the National Security Agency say his proposals will not make much difference when it comes to safeguarding privacy rights, said the Pew Research Center/USA Today poll published on Tuesday.

President Barack Obama will visit Vatican City in March to meet Pope Francis, whom he has praised as an "eloquent" spokesman on the scourge of inequality -- a key issue in his own political agenda.

The White House said Obama would travel to see the pontiff on March 27, following stops in the Netherlands for a nuclear security summit and talks with European Union leaders in Brussels.

President Barack Obama says smoking pot is no more dangerous than drinking but calls it a "bad idea," amid a push for legalization in several states.

In comments to The New Yorker magazine published Sunday, the U.S. leader also noted that poor minority youths are more likely to get prison time for using marijuana than their richer counterparts.

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Saturday that he would not let intrusive surveillance undermine his relationship of "friendship and trust" with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"I don't need and I don't want to harm that relationship by a surveillance mechanism that somehow would impede the kind of communication and trust that we have," Obama told German television ZDF, according to excerpts of an interview to be aired Saturday evening.

U.S. President Barack Obama signed a $1.1 trillion dollar spending bill Friday that effectively ends the threat of a repeat government shutdown.

Obama signed the massive bill, passed by Congress this week in a rare budget truce, in front of officials from his Office of Management and Budget.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Friday dismissed President Barack Obama's proposals to curb the reach of the National Security Agency (NSA), saying they would change very little.

In a speech intended to quell the furor over surveillance programs leaked by Edward Snowden, Obama said spy taps on friendly world leaders would be halted while foreigners caught in U.S. data mining would be given new protections.

President Barack Obama trimmed the powers of the secretive U.S. eavesdropping agency Friday by calling for new privacy safeguards, but allowed bulk phone data sweeps to continue as an anti-terror tool.

In a long-awaited speech outlining changes to programs exposed by Edward Snowden, Obama also said he had halted National Security Agency (NSA) spy taps targeting friendly world leaders.

President Barack Obama will meet Pope Francis "in the near future," the White House said Tuesday, although it did not specify a date for their much-anticipated first encounter.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the president "looks forward" to the meeting with the pontiff, of whom he has spoken with admiration.

Germany and the United States said Tuesday that their negotiations on forging a "no-spying" agreement in the wake of the NSA espionage scandal were still ongoing.

The comments came hard on the heels of German media reports that the discussions on a pact with Washington to formally block U.S. snooping within its borders were set to fail.