JERUSALEM (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday lauded the White House's warm ties with Israel during a visit to the country and promised to step up pressure on Iran, giving a public boost to Israel's prime minister at the height of a tight re-election campaign.

A Syrian refugee and his son who fled the chaos of their homeland only to meet tragedy in New Zealand were buried on Wednesday in the first funerals of those killed in the mosque massacres. Hundreds of mostly Muslim mourners gathered at a cemetery in the southern city of Christchurch to lay to rest Khalid Mustafa and his 15-year-old son Hamza, who were among 50 people slaughtered at two mosques by an Australian white supremacist. The pair had fled to New Zealand seeking sanctuary from the Syrian maelstrom but died in last Friday's hail of bullets, a bitter irony that New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called "gutting".

Maduro's government has since 2014 used financial operations known as gold swaps to use its international reserves to gain access to cash after a slump in oil revenues left it struggling to obtain hard currency. Under the terms of the 2015 deal with Citigroup's Citibank, Venezuela was due to repay $1.1 billion of the loan on March 11, according to four sources familiar with the situation. Citibank plans to sell the gold held as a guarantee - which has a market value of roughly $1.358 billion - to recover the first tranche of the loan and will deposit the excess of roughly $258 million in a bank account in New York, two of the sources said.

The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General has launched an investigation into Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan.

A descendant of enslaved people has sued Harvard University, alleging that the Ivy League institution has “shamelessly” profited from photos of her ancestors. Tamara Lanier, of Norwich, Connecticut, claims that Harvard has ignored requests to surrender images of a man named Renty, whom she says is her great-great-great grandfather, and his daughter Delia. Lanier is suing Harvard for “wrongful seizure, possession and expropriation” of the images, asking the university to return the photos to her, pay unspecified damages, and recognise her ancestry.

Crash Tests Show Some Pickup Trucks Lag in Passenger Protection Most pickup trucks fall short when it comes to protecting passengers in certain types of crashes, according to new findings from t...

According to the report published on Wednesday, Finland has witnessed modest but steady gains since 2014, and the country is now “significantly ahead” of other countries in the top 10, the researchers said. The data “offer the world’s governments and individuals the opportunity to rethink public policies as well as individual life choices, to raise happiness and well-being,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Vice President Mike Pence in Nebraska on Tuesday took stock of the devastation unleashed across the U.S. Midwest by floods that have killed four people, left one missing and caused more than a billion dollars in damage to crops, livestock and roads. The way communities come together and people volunteer to put themselves in harm's way to help others," Pence said Tuesday in Omaha, according to an official statement. Pence also said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is working to expedite a request from Nebraska's governor for a federal emergency declaration, which will provide more aid to the state.

Lori Loughlin's USC student daughter, Olivia Jade Giannulli, has been swept up in the college admission scandal. Here's what you need to know.

* Israel captured Golan Heights from Syria after war in 1967 * Netanyahu responds on Twitter: ‘Thank you President Trump!’ * Follow today’s US politics newsDonald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018. Trump said the Golan Heights were of ‘critical strategic and security importance to the state of Israel and regional stability’. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty ImagesDonald Trump has announced that the US will recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967, in a dramatic move likely to bolster Benjamin Netanyahu’s hopes to win re-election, but which will also provoke international opposition.Previous US administrations have treated Golan Heights as occupied Syrian territory, in line with UN security council resolutions. Trump declared his break with that policy, in a tweet on Thursday.He said: “After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!”By defying a 52-year-old unanimously adopted UN resolution on “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, Trump has also broken the postwar norm of refusing to recognise the forcible annexation of territory – which has underpinned western and international opposition to the Russian annexation of Crimea.“The United States relies on these core principles regarding peaceful dispute resolution and rejecting acquisition of territory by force,” Tamara Cofman Wittes, the former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, wrote on Twitter. Wittes, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, added the move “yanks the rug out from under US policy opposing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, as well as US views on other disputed territories”.Netanyahu, the Israeli PM, quickly tweeted his gratitude for Trump’s gesture.“At a time when Iran seeks to use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel, President Trump boldly recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights,” the Israeli prime minister wrote. “Thank you President Trump!”The announcement came as Netanyahu was hosting the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, in Jerusalem.“President Trump has just made history,” Netanyahu said. “I called him. I thanked him on behalf of the people of Israel. The message that President Trump has given the world is that America stands by Israel.”Pompeo said: “President Trump tonight made the decision to recognise that hard-fought real estate, that important place is proper to be sovereign part of the state of Israel.”He added: “The people of Israel should know that the battles they fought, the lives that they lost on that very ground, were worthy, meaningful and important for all time.”The announcement marks a diplomatic coup for Netanyahu, less than three weeks before a close fought election, and four days before he is due to visit Washington.Trump denied his announcement was intended to help Netanyahu hold on to office, even suggesting he had been unaware the election was imminent.“I wouldn’t even know about that. I have no idea,” Trump told Fox News. He said he had been thinking about recognising the Israeli annexation “for a long time”.“This is sovereignty, this is security, this is about regional security,” he said.Administration officials had previously rebuffed Netanyahu’s pressure for recognition of Israel’s possession of the strategic border area, pointing out that Trump had already handed the Israeli leader a significant political gift by moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.Recognition of the Golan could pave the way for US recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Palestinian occupied territories. In a recent state department report on human rights, the administration changed its description of the West Bank and Gaza from “occupied territories” to “Israeli-controlled territories”.Robert Malley, a former Middle East adviser to Barack Obama and now head of the International Crisis Group, said: “This decision is intensely political – timed to boost Netanyahu’s electoral chances; gratuitous – it will not alter in any way Israel’s control of the Golan Heights; in disregard of international law; and an ominous step at a time when voices in Israel calling for the annexation of the West Bank are growing louder.”He added: “It is of a piece with the administration’s one-sided Mideast policy and confirms that its goal is not Arab-Israeli peace but a fundamental redrawing of the parameters that have governed its pursuit.”Israel advanced into the Golan Heights gradually in the years following the 1948 war Arab-Israeli war, and occupied it entirely in the 1967 war. That year, UN security council resolution 242 stressed the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in security”.A further resolution, supported by the Reagan administration in 1981, rejected as “null and void” a move to put the area under direct Israeli jurisdiction.Over the decades there have been a string of abortive attempts to negotiate a peaceful solution to the fate of the Golan Heights – most recently in 2010 when the Obama administration and Netanyahu engaged in secret talks with the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, on a peace treaty involving Israeli withdrawal.But that effort foundered with the spread of the Arab Spring revolt to Syria, and Assad’s decision to crush the rebellion by massacring protesters in 2011.Frederic Hof, a former senior state department official involved in those negotiations, told the Guardian on Thursday that annexation “would be an entirely gratuitous gesture with potential diplomatic downsides for Israel and for the security of Israelis”.Hof said: “It will be welcomed by Israel’s bitterest enemies – Iran and Hezbollah – who would see annexation as additional justification for terror operations. It would enable Syria’s Assad regime to change the subject from its war crimes and crimes against humanity to Israel’s formal acquisition of territory in violation of UN security council resolution 242. It would do nothing whatsoever positive for Israel’s security.”