Brushing off refugee worries at home, President Barack Obama crouched alongside migrant children on Saturday and declared they are the opposite of terrorists wreaking havoc from Paris to Mali. Working to put a human face on the refugee crisis, he said, "They're just like our kids."

The refugees Obama encountered at a school for poor children in Malaysia were not from Syria, and unlike the flood of Syrians meeting steep resistance in the U.S., these migrants had already been cleared to resettle in America. Still, Obama said their faces could have been those of kids from Syria, Iraq and other war-torn regions whose pursuit of a life free from violence led them far from their native homes.

With its political infighting, tip-of-the-arrow diplomacy and climactic decapitation scene, the National Geographic Channel's film "Saints & Strangers" is the "Game of Thrones" version of the first Thanksgiving.

The four-hour movie will premiere Sunday and Monday on National Geographic (9 p.m. EST on both nights), following a rush to finish in time for the holiday. It tells the story of the religious pilgrims and thrill-seeking opportunists thrown together on the Mayflower and their efforts to build a settlement peacefully among the Native Americans they encounter.

A pair of stolen N.C. Wyeth paintings worth up to $500,000 apiece have been recovered and will be displayed in Maine along with four other stolen paintings recouped nearly a year ago in California, officials said Thursday.

The two paintings were recovered last month when a third party surrendered them to a retired FBI agent in the Boston area, Harold Shaw, special agent in charge of the bureau's Boston field office, told reporters at the Portland Museum of Art, where the paintings were on display. No additional arrests have been made, and the investigation is continuing, he said.

Much about Abdelhamid Abaaoud's path to armed Islamic radicalism remains mysterious.

In the words of Koen Geens, the Belgian justice minister, he mutated from a student at an upscale Brussels school into "an extremely professional commando," one seemingly able to slip across borders at will. Someone who openly mocked the inability of Western law enforcement agencies to catch him.

The tide of global rage against the Islamic State group lends greater urgency to ending the jihadis' ability to operate at will from a base in war-torn Syria. That momentum could also force a reevaluation of what to do about President Bashar Assad and puts a renewed focus on the position of his key patrons, Russia and Iran.

The Syrian leader has lost much of the country to IS and other groups in the four-year war; half the population has been displaced, many areas have been leveled, and masses of refugees are flooding Europe. Along the way, Assad's brutal military response has made him persona non grata in most of the world.

Islamic State militants are stiffening their defenses for a possible assault on their de facto capital of Raqa, as international airstrikes intensify on the Syrian city in retaliation for the Paris attacks. IS fighters are hiding in civilian neighborhoods and preventing anyone from fleeing, former residents say.

The northern Syrian city's estimated 350,000 people are gripped by fear, rattled by powerful Russian and French airstrikes that shake the city daily. They are also worried they would be trapped with nowhere to go amid signs of a looming ground invasion by U.S.-allied Kurdish and Arab forces in Syria, according to the former residents who have fled to Turkey and now report on events in Raqa through acquaintances and activists inside.

Jonah Lomu, who bulldozed opponents with his size and blistering speed only to be felled by a kidney illness that extinguished his meteoric All Blacks career, died suddenly at his home in Auckland. He was 40.

Nadene Lomu, the wife and manager of the rugby great, confirmed Lomu's death in a statement Wednesday. Lomu had struggled with a kidney illness for 20 years but former All Blacks doctor and family friend John Mayhew said the cause of death was cardiac arrest.

Police have detained four protesters who wanted to walk to the venue of the G-20 summit to deliver a letter to world leaders.

The state-run Anadolu Agency says police in the Mediterranean coastal city of Antalya on Sunday blocked the four protesters — belonging to left-wing groups opposed to the G-20 — from marching toward the secluded seaside resort of Belek, where the leaders are meeting.

Even as airlines operated a normal schedule of flights into and out of Paris on Saturday, travelers with future plans to visit the French capital reconsidered their options after a series of terror attacks. Some quickly canceled their tickets, a worrisome sign for the travel and tourism industries.

Joe Nardozzi, a 31-year-old New York investment banker, and his wife won't be taking the wedding-anniversary trip they planned later this month.

Iran will receive the bulk of the S-300 air defense missile systems it ordered from Russia by the end of the year, Tehran's defense minister has said.

"We signed a contract with Russia. It is being done. We will acquire a large portion of the systems by the end of this year," Hossein Dehghan told state television late Tuesday.