NEW YORK (AP) — Jewish Americans feel they have a lot at stake in this month's contentious elections in Israel as three years of Mideast conflicts rile up emotions across the United States, from street protests to the midterm races. But they are sharply divided along political, religious and often generational lines on the preferred outcome in a vote that’s perceived as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and held against the backdrop of the enduring trauma of the Oct. 7, the...

BANGOR, Maine (AP) — Ever the optimist, Speaker Mike Johnson said he believes Republicans will hold on to their U. S. House majority, defying a surge of Democratic momentum in the final stretch of the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. It's the crowds he says he’s seeing as he crosses the country campaigning for GOP candidates. The caliber of recruits and incumbents he calls workhorses, not show horses. And the nearly half a billion he has raised for House He also a...

NEW YORK (AP) — Manhattan's Upper West Side has been reveling in the company of its latest celebrities: A family of barn owls nested in a water tower atop a building near Central Park. This is the first documented instance of barn owls nesting in Manhattan in modern history, according to one expert, and the owls have attracted nightly crowds of people in the street eager to get a glimpse of the elusive birds. “It was, like, totally shocking,” Andrew Farnsworth, a migration ecologist at a...