AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EDT

Hamas surprise attack out of Gaza stuns Israel and leaves hundreds dead in fighting, retaliation

JERUSALEM (AP) — Backed by a barrage of rockets, Hamas militants stormed from the blockaded Gaza Strip into nearby Israeli towns, killing dozens and abducting others in an unprecedented surprise attack during a major Jewish holiday Saturday. A stunned Israel launched airstrikes in Gaza, with its prime minister saying the country is now at war with Hamas and vowing to inflict an “unprecedented price.”

In an assault of startling breadth, Hamas gunmen rolled into as many as 22 locations outside the Gaza Strip, including towns and other communities as far as 15 miles (24 kilometers) from the Gaza border. In some places they gunned down civilians and soldiers as Israel’s military scrambled to muster a response.

Gunbattles continued well after nightfall, and militants held hostages in standoffs in two towns. Militants occupied a police station in a third town, where Israeli forces struggled until Sunday morning to finally reclaim the building.

Before daybreak Sunday, militants fired more rockets from Gaza, hitting a hospital in the Israeli coastal town of Ashkelon. The hospital sustained damage, said senior hospital official Tal Bergman. Video provided by Barzilai Medical Center showed a large hole punched into a wall and chunks of debris scattered on the ground of what appeared to an empty rooms and a hallway. There was no report of casualties.

Israeli media, citing rescue service officials, said at least 250 people were killed and 1,500 wounded in Saturday’s attack, making it the deadliest in Israel in decades. At least 232 people in the Gaza Strip were killed and 1,700 wounded in Israeli strikes, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. Hamas fighters took an unknown number of civilians and soldiers captive into Gaza.

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Powerful earthquake and aftershocks kill dozens and injure many more in western Afghanistan

ISLAMABAD (AP) — A powerful magnitude-6.3 earthquake followed by strong aftershocks killed dozens of people in western Afghanistan on Saturday, the country’s national disaster authority said.

The United Nations gave a preliminary figure of 320 dead, but later said the figure was still being verified. Local authorities gave an estimate of 100 people killed and 500 injured, according to the same update from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The update also said 465 houses had been reported destroyed and a further 135 were damaged.

“Partners and local authorities anticipate the number of casualties to increase as search and rescue efforts continue amid reports that some people may be trapped under collapsed buildings,” the U.N. said.

Disaster authority spokesperson Mohammad Abdullah Jan said four villages in the Zenda Jan district in Herat province bore the brunt of the quake and aftershocks.

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Trump is inserting himself into the messy race to become the next House speaker. Will it matter?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump is again testing the power of his endorsement.

With an early morning social media post on Friday, Trump inserted himself into the chaotic race to replace Kevin McCarthy as House speaker by backing Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan for the post. The move was the latest example of Trump attempting to flex his influence within a Republican Party he has already fundamentally reshaped in the eight years since his first White House bid.

“I think he does well. I hope he does well,” Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination, said of Jordan in a Friday interview with Real America’s Voice. “He’s got competition, as you understand. And they’re friendly with me, too. Very nice people and good people. We’ll see what happens.”

With Trump’s firm grip on the GOP base, his endorsement can effectively clear the field in many congressional primaries. But the speaker’s race is more complex, an intraparty fight that will play out in secret at points and in a tense environment with many Republicans furious about McCarthy’s ouster. Jordan is facing at least one other candidate — House Majority Leader Steve Scalise — who is also on good terms with Trump. It’s unclear whether anyone has enough votes to win the gavel and if Jordan were to lose, another Trump ally could emerge.

Taken together, the dynamics mean that Trump’s backing of Jordan may do little to sway the results. And that may not ultimately matter much.

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Biden faces more criticism about the US-Mexico border, one of his biggest problems heading into 2024

MIAMI (AP) — The ad sounds like something out of the GOP 2024 playbook, trumpeting a senator’s work with Republicans to crack down on the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs into the U.S., getting tough on Chinese interests helping smugglers, and noting how he “wrote a bill signed by Donald Trump to increase funding for Border Patrol.”

It’s actually a commercial for Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat facing a tough reelection fight that will help decide control of the Senate.

“Ohioans trust Sherrod Brown to keep us safe,” says the narrator of the ad, sponsored by the Democrat-aligned Duty and Country PAC. His campaign declined to comment.

The message is one more indication of the political and security challenges the U.S.-Mexico border has presented for President Joe Biden. Some Democrats across the country are distancing themselves from the White House, and polls indicate widespread frustration with Biden’s handling of immigration and the border, creating a major liability for the president’s re-election next year.

The Biden administration this week took two actions seen by many as moving to the right on immigration.

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Days after deadly missile strike on Ukrainian cafe, grief and a search for answers

HROZA, Ukraine (AP) — U.N. and local investigators searched for answers on Saturday at the site of a Russian missile strike on a small Ukrainian village that days earlier turned its sole cafe to rubble and killed nearly 52 people gathered for a dead soldier’s wake, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other top officials in Kyiv. Local residents that same day began laying their lost friends to rest.

Representatives from the United Nations Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) spent much of the day speaking with local residents and survivors in Hroza, in the northeastern Kharkiv region, according to a statement shared with the Associated Press.

“My initial conversations with local residents and survivors indicate that virtually all those killed were civilians and that the target itself, a busy village cafe and store, was also clearly civilian,” Danielle Bell, who led the team that visited Hroza on Saturday, was cited as saying in the U.N. statement.

“What happened here is yet another tragic reminder of the deadly impact Russia’s invasion has had on Ukraine’s civilians,” Bell added.

The village cafe was obliterated and whole families perished after the missile strike on Thursday cut short a wake for Andriy Kozyr, a soldier from Hroza who died last winter fighting Russia’s invading forces in eastern Ukraine.

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Drop boxes have become key to election conspiracy theories. Two Democrats just fueled those claims

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — A woman approaches a drop box in the dark with what appears to be handfuls of ballots. At a different drop box, someone else is seen making multiple trips to insert ballots. At yet another, the same car stops on at least three separate occasions, with different people stepping out and heading to the box.

It’s not a trailer for the latest conspiracy movie about rigged elections. Instead, the video footage has become central to a real-world controversy over potential fraud involving ballot drop boxes, a favorite target of right-wing conspiracy theorists since former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

The accusations of drop box fraud are not coming from those pushing fringe election claims or from skeptical Republicans who have long favored eliminating or severely restricting use of the boxes. They are being made by Democrats — two candidates vying for mayor in Connecticut’s largest city, in a heavily Democratic state that began allowing drop boxes to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Republicans have seized on the spat, which is now headed to a legal showdown that could result in a new election, to say it validates their concerns that drop boxes are ripe for fraud.

State Rep. Doug Dubitsky, a Republican, evoked the widely debunked movie “2000 Mules” during a legislative debate over the controversy surrounding the Bridgeport mayor’s race.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs law requiring big businesses to disclose emissions

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Large businesses in California will have to disclose a wide range of planet-warming emissions under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Saturday — the most sweeping mandate of its kind in the nation.

The law requires more than 5,300 companies that operate in California and make more than $1 billion in annual revenues to report both their direct and indirect emissions. That includes things like emissions from operating a building or store as well as those from activities like employee business travel and transporting their products.

The law, SB 253, will bring more transparency to the public about how big businesses contribute to climate change, and it could nudge them to evaluate how they can reduce their emissions, advocates say. They argue many businesses already disclose some of their emissions to the state.

But the California Chamber of Commerce, agricultural groups and oil giants that oppose the law say it will create new mandates for companies that don’t have the experience or expertise to accurately report their indirect emissions. They also say it is too soon to implement the requirements at a time when the federal government is weighing emissions disclosure rules for public companies.

The measure could create “duplicative” work if the federal standards are adopted, the chamber and other groups wrote in an alert opposing the bill.

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Six Colombians held in assassination of Ecuador presidential candidate reported slain inside prison

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Six Colombians arrested as the alleged assassins of a candidate in Ecuador’s August presidential election were slain Friday inside a prison in Guayaquil, officials announced, without providing details on what happened.

The prison authority said only that six prisoners killed inside Litoral Penitentiary were the men “charged with the murder of former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.” It identified them as Jhon Gregore R., Andrés Manuel M., Adey Fernando G., Camilo Andrés R., Sules Osmini C. and José Neyder L.

Earlier, the agency had reported that “an event occurred inside” the prison and six people were dead. Litoral is Ecuador’s biggest prison and is considered one of its most dangerous, being the scene of several riots with deaths the past three years.

The killings came as the Prosecutor’s Office was near the conclusion of the investigation stage into the killing of Villavicencio, who was gunned down Aug. 9 while leaving a political rally.

The 59-year-old politician had not been considered among the front-runners, but the assassination in broad daylight less than two weeks before the vote was a shocking reminder of the surge in crime besetting Ecuador. He had reported being threatened by affiliates of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the many international organized crime groups operating in Ecuador.

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Witnesses to FBI hunt for Civil War gold describe heavily loaded armored truck, signs of a night dig

PENFIELD, Pa. (AP) — In the heart of Pennsylvania elk country, Eric McCarthy and his client, Don Reichel, got up before sunrise to scour the forest floor for so-called “brown gold” — a rack of freshly shed antlers to add to Reichel’s collection back home.

One hill over, a team of FBI agents was also hunting for gold. The metallic yellow kind.

The FBI’s highly unusual search for buried Civil War-era treasure more than five years ago set in motion a dispute over what, if anything, the agency unearthed and an ongoing legal battle over key records. There’s so much intrigue that even a federal judge felt compelled to note in a ruling last week: “The FBI may have found the gold — or maybe not.”

Now, two witnesses have come forward to share with The Associated Press what they heard and saw in the woods that late-winter morning, raising questions about the FBI’s timeline and adding plot twists to a saga that blends elements of legend, fact and science – and a heavy dose of government secrecy.

The FBI insists nothing came of the March 2018 excavation in Dents Run, a remote wooded valley about 110 miles (177 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh. But a treasure hunter who led FBI agents to the hillside where an 1863 gold shipment might have been buried is challenging the government’s denials. How could the dig have come up empty, he asks, when the FBI’s own scans showed the likelihood of a buried metal mass equaling hundreds of millions of dollars in gold?

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Boomer Sooner: Gabriel late TD pass as No. 12 Oklahoma beats No. 3 Texas in Red River rivalry

DALLAS (AP) — Dillon Gabriel knew he couldn’t take a sack as the pocket collapsed around him in the closing seconds of his Red River rivalry debut, the kind of big game he went to Oklahoma to play.

Then he saw Nic Anderson in the back of the end zone.

“The rest is history,” Gabriel said.

Gabriel appeared to do a jump step and connected with Anderson for a 3-yard touchdown with 15 seconds left as 12th-ranked Oklahoma won a battle of unbeatens 34-30 over No. 3 Texas on Saturday in their last matchup at the State Fair of Texas as Big 12 members before moving to the Southeastern Conference.

“Just proud of everyone coming together, controlling the chaos,” Gabriel said. “It’s something you dream of as a little kid.”