DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Normalizing ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be a key element of ending and a game-changer for the entire Middle East, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said Thursday at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in the Swiss town of Davos.

“It’s still delicate, it’s fragile, and it will take a long time, but I think that it is actually an opportunity to move forward in the world and ,” Herzog said.

It comes days after Saudi

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — In a state as solidly Republican as Indiana, the May primary is the real competition.

Four months out, five candidates are still jockeying for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in an unusually crowded field. Annual campaign finance reports filed Wednesday reflect a multimillion-dollar race that has become a competition of who can out-conservative the others for primary votes in a state with historically low turnout.

Two-term , a Republican, cannot run again because of term limits. Indiana’s primary is May 7

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s been nearly two years since the United States and its allies froze hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian foreign holdings in retaliation for . That roughly $300 billion in Russian Central Bank money has been sitting untapped as the war grinds on, while officials from multiple countries have debated the legality of sending the money to Ukraine.

The idea of using Russia’s frozen assets is gaining new traction lately as continued allied funding for Ukraine becomes more uncertain and the U.S.

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Fighting “human animals.” Making Gaza a “slaughterhouse.” “Erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

Such inflammatory rhetoric is a key component accusing Israel of genocide at the U.N. world court, a charge that . South Africa says the language — in comments by Israeli leaders, soldiers and entertainers about Palestinians in Gaza since sparked war — is proof of Israel’s intent to commit genocide.

Israeli leaders have downplayed the comments, and

Illinois is adding tens of thousands of people to its population total, and California is getting on an aircraft carrier put in the right location, after successfully asking for a review of their figures.

New York City also appears to have gotten an additional 1,090 people added to its population total recently after asking the Census Bureau to double-check the city’s numbers from the head count of every U.S. resident, city officials said.

The once-a-decade census produces population figures that

The police response to the Uvalde shooting was riddled with failures, a new DOJ report says

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Police officials who responded to the deadly Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting waited far too long to confront the gunman, acted with “no urgency” in establishing a command post and communicated inaccurate information to grieving families, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday that identifies “cascading failures” in law enforcement’s handling of the massacre.

The report, the most comprehensive federal accounting of the

WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) — The author of “Little Women” may have been even more productive and sensational than previously thought.

Max Chapnick, a postdoctoral teaching associate at Northeastern University, believes he found about 20 stories and poems written by Louisa May Alcott under her own name as well as pseudonyms for local newspapers in Massachusetts in the late 1850s and early 1860s.

One of the pseudonyms is believed to be E. H. Gould, including a story about her

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan launched airstrikes against alleged militant hideouts inside Iran on Thursday, killing at least nine people as it retaliated for a similar attack days earlier by Iran and as conflict across the region escalates.

The unprecedented attacks by both Pakistan and Iran on either side of their border appeared to target Baluch militant groups with similar separatist goals. The countries accuse each other of providing a haven to the groups in their respective territories.

The flare-up between Iran and Pakistan comes as the Middle East remains unsettled by in

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Palestinians are dying every day in Gaza’s overwhelmed remaining hospitals which can’t deal with the tens of thousands people hurt in Israeli’s military offensive, a U.N. health emergency expert said Wednesday, while a doctor with the International Rescue Committee called the situation in Gaza’s hospitals the most extreme she had ever seen.

The two health professionals, who recently left Gaza after weeks working in hospitals there, described overwhelmed doctors trying to save the lives of thousands of wounded