An Oklahoma man facing first-degree murder and hate crime charges in the fatal shooting of his Lebanese neighbor is set for trial this week.

Stanley Vernon Majors is accused in the killing of 37-year-old Khalid Jabara in August 2016. Prosecutors say Majors, who is now 63, killed Jabara after bombarding him with racial insults in a feud with Jabara's family that lasted several years.

Vice President Mike Pence has kicked off a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

Pence placed his right hand over his heart as an honor guard greeted him with the American national anthem.

Lebanon is campaigning to get at least five times more women elected to parliament this spring in its first vote in nearly 10 years, the country's first women's affairs minister says.

Germany said Friday it is making progress in talks with Lebanon on facilitating deportations to the Middle Eastern country.

A spokesman for the German Interior Ministry said negotiations between the two countries began last March and had already "led to a greatly increased willingness to cooperate by the other side."

Vice President Mike Pence is making his fifth visit to Israel, returning to a region he's visited "a million times" in his heart.

An evangelical Christian with strong ties to the Holy Land, Pence this time comes packing two key policy decisions in his bags that have long been top priorities for him: designating Jerusalem as Israel's capital and curtailing aid for Palestinians.

A major hacking operation tied to Lebanon's main intelligence agency has been exposed after careless spies left hundreds of gigabytes of intercepted data exposed to the open internet, according to a report published Thursday.

Mobile security firm Lookout, Inc. and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said the haul, which includes nearly half a million intercepted text messages, had simply been left online by hackers linked to Lebanon's General Directorate of General Security.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's upcoming visit to the Middle East comes at a time of intensely publicized friction between his administration and the Palestinian leadership, posing a dilemma for his Arab hosts — Egypt's president and Jordan's king — on how to safeguard their vital ties with Washington without appearing to ignore Palestinian misgivings.

Both countries are heavily dependent on U.S. military and economic aid, and talks with a senior Trump administration official like Pence offer them an opportunity to strengthen those ties.

A 17-year-old girl called police after escaping from her family's home where she and her 12 brothers and sisters were locked up in filthy conditions, some so malnourished officers at first believed all were children even though seven are adults.

The girl, who was so small officers initially believed she was only 10, called 911 and was met by police who interviewed her and then went to the family home in Perris, about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles. They found several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark, foul-smelling surroundings, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

Pope Francis begged for forgiveness Tuesday for the "irreparable damage" done to children who were raped and molested by priests, opening his visit to Chile by diving head-first into a scandal that has greatly hurt the Catholic Church's credibility here and cast a cloud over his visit.

Speaking to Chile's president, lawmakers, judges and other authorities, Francis said he felt "bound to express my pain and shame" that some of Chile's pastors had sexually abused children in their care. He was interrupted by applause from the dignitaries at La Moneda palace when he pronounced the words.

An official in the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas was wounded in a car bomb blast in the southern city of Sidon on Sunday, military and medical sources told French news agency AFP.