Aside from listening in on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's phone calls, U.S. spies also targeted top political and financial officials, according to new information released by WikiLeaks on Saturday. 

The whistle-blowing website published a National Security Agency list of 29 Brazilian government phone numbers that the American spy group monitored.

Influential Senator John McCain said Saturday the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016 would be a "serious mistake", as stretched local forces battle a resurgent Taliban.

"I think the most serious mistake the U.S. could make... would be to have a calendar-based withdrawal," McCain told a press conference at the NATO headquarters in Kabul. 

The head of Vietnam's Communist Party will make a first-ever visit to the White House next week, meeting President Barack Obama on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war between the two nations.

The landmark trip underscores strengthening ties between the former wartime enemies amid regional maritime tensions involving China.

President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that the United States and Cuba will re-establish full diplomatic relations, severed 54 years ago in the angry heat of the Cold War.

The U.S. president and Cuban state television simultaneously announced the landmark agreement, aimed at easing decades of enmity across the narrow Straits of Florida. 

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said Tuesday she had confidence in her U.S. counterpart Barack Obama, laying to rest a scandal over U.S. intelligence monitoring of her telephone calls and those of millions of other Brazilians.

"Since then, some things have changed and the change is particularly due to the fact that President Obama and the U.S. government have stated on several occasions that they would no longer engage in intrusive acts of spying on friendly countries," Rousseff told a joint press conference. 

President Barack Obama and Brazil's Dilma Rousseff paid a surprise joint visit Monday to Washington's Martin Luther King Memorial, part of efforts to mend fences after a spying row.

Obama hosted the Brazilian president at the memorial to the civil rights icon -- one of his personal heroes --  after a "turbulent patch" between the two countries caused by revelations that U.S. spies had listened in on Rousseff's phone calls.

U.S. President Barack Obama recently sent a private message to Iran's leadership via Iraq's prime minister, an Iranian newspaper reported Monday on the eve of a deadline for a nuclear deal.

Hamshahri, Iran's highest-circulation daily, citing a lawmaker, said "one of the leaders of a neighboring country" took the message from Obama to officials in Tehran.

U.S. President Barack Obama made a fresh pitch for tighter gun controls Friday as he eulogized the pastor killed in the Charleston church shootings, saying Americans had ignored the toll of gun violence for too long.

"We've been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation," Obama said at the funeral in the South Carolina city. 

U.S. President Barack Obama will welcome his Nigerian counterpart to Washington next month, the White House announced Thursday, a symbolic show of solidarity after the country's first ever democratic transition.

"President Obama will host Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari at the White House," on July 20, the White House said.

President Barack Obama urged Beijing to take "concrete steps" to ease tensions over cyber hacking and its wide-ranging maritime claims, as the United States and China ended three days of candid talks.

American officials have voiced deep concerns about both issues at the annual strategic and economic dialogue aimed at setting guidelines to steer future ties between the world's two leading economies.