Italian clothing firm Benetton went ahead Saturday with a controversial ad campaign featuring key world figures kissing each other, despite outcry last week from the Vatican and the White House.

A photo-montage of an embrace between the Pope and a Muslim cleric was dropped after the Vatican threatened legal action but the rest of the campaign remains unchanged.

Premier Wen Jiabao told U.S. President Barack Obama that China would increase the flexibility of the yuan while stressing that reforms had already had an effect, state television reported Saturday.

"We are closely watching the changes to the yuan's exchange rate ... and will encourage the yuan's flexibility in both directions," CCTV quoted Wen as saying at a meeting with Obama on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Indonesia.

A 21-year-old Hispanic man arrested after shots were fired near the White House was charged Thursday with attempting to assassinate President Barack Obama, a justice department official said.

Oscar Ortega-Hernandez was arrested by Pennsylvania state police on Wednesday following last week's shooting incident. Obama and his wife Michelle were in California at the time of the incident, and no one was injured.

A bullet has struck the ballistic glass of an exterior window of the White House and another round has been found nearby, the Secret Service said Wednesday.

The bodyguard detail charged with protecting the U.S. president and other top officials began investigating after an incident on Friday when gunshots were heard near the White House, the service said in a statement.

President Barack Obama arrived Friday in his native Hawaii to host Asia-Pacific leaders, buoyed by Japan's decision to enter talks on a deal that could rewrite the rules of U.S.-Asia trade.

Launching a nine-day Pacific tour, Obama touched down in his birth city of Honolulu, where police had erected fences on laid-back Waikiki Beach and sniffer dogs scoped the palm tree-lined harbor.

President Barack Obama's key Middle East advisor Dennis Ross said Thursday he would resign after a period of turmoil in the Arab world and a difficult period in U.S. relations with Israel.

Ross, a veteran U.S. peace negotiator, said in a statement he had made a promise to his wife to return to private life after two years in the administration -- and had outstayed that promise by a year.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas hailed UNESCO's acceptance of Palestine as a full member on Monday as "a victory" for his people's rights, at the White House condemned the step describing it as "premature."

"Accepting Palestine into UNESCO is a victory for (our) rights, for justice and for freedom," his spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina quoted him as saying in a phone call from Amman.

The White House said the top U.S. and Iraqi national security chiefs discussed the future of their countries' ties on Saturday, two months before all U.S. troops are due to leave Iraq.

During their talks at the White House, U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and his Iraqi counterpart Falah al-Fayadh "reaffirmed the common vision of a broad, deep strategic partnership between the United States and Iraq as embodied in the Strategic Framework Agreement," spokesman Jay Carney said.

Condoleezza Rice says in a new book that she threatened to quit as president George W. Bush's national security advisor when she was cut out of a key decision on military trials for war-on-terror detainees, the New York Times wrote Sunday.

In her book "No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington," which arrives in bookstores next week, Rice describes a White House rife with discord, with repeated clashes between her and Vice President Dick Cheney over what to do about the detainees.

Exactly a month after a few hundred anti-capitalism activists set up camp in New York, the Occupy Wall Street movement has gone international and won the attention of the White House -- even if no one knows where it will go next.

Protesters sheltering under plastic tarps in the well organized camp at Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street, began their second month Monday with plans to follow up on big demonstrations that swept through the popular Times Square area over the weekend.