For the eighth and final time, I am presenting my annual Year in Photographs. By Pete Souza.

President Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday once again took shots at Barack Obama, dismissing the United States President as an "intellectual" who had no business being in politics. Current top breaking Philippine headlines regarding the nation, world, metro manila, regions and exclusive special investigative reports.

In the wake of cyberattacks linked to the US election, 35 Russian diplomats have been expelled from the United States. A Kremlin spokesperson has said Moscow was now considering retaliatory measures. US President Barack Obama announced Thursday that two Russian compounds in Maryland and New York, used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related activities, will be closed. Access to the compounds will be denied to all Russian diplomats as of noon on Friday, "The New York Times" reported.

President Obama on Friday signed the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, providing nearly $619 billion for war and military spending. The measure passed both houses of Congress with a veto-proof majority and will bring troops a modest pay raise while increasing the number of active-duty soldiers to more than 1.3 million. The NDAA also restricts transfers from the Guantánamo Bay detention center, guaranteeing that Obama will leave office without fulfilling his pledge to close the prison.

Wikileaks has offered to help US President Barack Obama authenticate spy agencies' assessment that Russia was behind the leak of hacked Democratic emails during the presidential election. The whistleblowing group, led by fugitive Julian Assange and which this summer published online the private medical files of mental health patients and teen rape victims, claimed on Twitter that only its authentication processes could render the conclusions credible.

On Monday, President Barack Obama pardoned 78 people and commuted the sentences of 153 others, setting a single-day record for the use of presidential clemency power. With 32 days left in his administration, he’s pardoned a total of 148 prisoners and commuted the sentences of 1,176 federal inmates. However, the president has not addressed a backlog of clemency cases at the Office of the Pardon Attorney where 1,937 pardon petitions remain pending...

What did he accomplish? And how much of it will survive in the age of Trump? Five historians and political observers weigh in. By Eric Bates.

In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat.

Fake news is an epidemic on social media. Even President Barack Obama is concerned about the effect this reckless spread of misinformation is going to have on our nation, and, as he revealed in a lengthy interview with The New Yorker, the effect it will have on our planet. Obama blamed fake news — and social media more broadly — for being a major reason why the country can’t come together to combat global climate change.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked an Obama administration rule to extend mandatory overtime pay to more than 4 million workers from taking effect, imperiling one of the outgoing president's signature achievements for boosting wages.

Even President Obama’s critics will soon have plenty of reasons to appreciate him. By Matt Taibbi.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a viable female presidential candidate who wasn’t a former first lady? By Christina Cauterucci.

President Obama has just 71 days until Donald Trump is inaugurated as our next commander-in-chief. That means he has a matter of weeks to do one thing that could help prevent the United States from veering into fascism: declassifying and dismantling as much of the federal government’s unaccountable, secretive, mass surveillance state as he can — before Trump is the one running it.

Barack Obama will be president for only two more months, and any judgment of his presidency will have to account for all he failed to accomplish. Consider this partial list of things Obama was supposed to do but never did:

Attention U.S. travelers going abroad: You now can bring home all the Cuban rum and cigars you want. The Obama administration announced Friday a new round of executive actions designed to increase trade and travel with the communist island. And this is the one many Americans have been waiting for — no more restrictions on the island's famed rum and cigars.

One of my earliest memories is sitting on my grandfather's shoulders, waving a flag as our astronauts returned to Hawaii. This was years before we'd set foot on the moon. Decades before we'd land a rover on Mars. A generation before photos from the International Space Station would show up in our social media feeds.

President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday hit out anew at the United States and the European Union in yet another tirade against criticisms of his administration's crime war. “Instead of helping us, ang unang tumira, itong [US] State Department. So, you can go to hell. Mr. Obama, you can go to hell," he said, referring to American president Barack Obama. "EU, better choose purgatory. Puno na ang impiyerno. Bakit ako matakot sa inyo?" he added.

On August 25, after a short trip to Baton Rouge to assess flooding in Louisiana and before what will likely be his last visit to China on Air Force One, Barack Obama sat down at the White House to reflect on the past eight years. He led America through a period of dramatic, convulsive change — an era that New York Magazine explores this week in its cover story. Before his conversation with Jonathan Chait, he chose five moments that, he believes, will have outsized historical impact. Here is their conversation in full.

Nearly two dozen members of Congress sent a letter to the White House on Thursday requesting that the Obama administration intervene to stop construction of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. The two-page letter, co-signed by 19 members, was a direct call to action to an administration that has been the most progressive in the nation's history in its efforts to address issues affecting Native Americans.

US film director Oliver Stone on Thursday accused President Barack Obama's administration of implementing a surveillance system worse than that of the feared Stasi secret police in East Germany. Speaking at the San Sebastian film festival in northern Spain, where he presented his film "Snowden," Stone said many in the US had grown disillusioned with a president they once saw as "a man of great integrity."