By JULIA FRANKEL, Associated Press

TEL AVIV (AP) — Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme. Get on up, Israel, it’s bobsled time!

FILE- Adam Edelman and Regnars Kirejevs, of Israel, compete in their second run during the two-man bobsled at the bobsledding world championships, Saturday, March 8, 2025, in Lake Placid, N.Y. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

A handful of diverse athletes — a pole-vaulter, sprinter, shot-putter, rugby player, and former Olympian in skeleton — will compete as Israel’s first bobsled team during this year’s Milan Cortina Winter Games, unlikely ambassadors of their diplomatically isolated nation.

Most of these guys had never touched a sled before this season. Their leader, AJ Edelman, is believed to be the first Orthodox Jew to ever compete in a Winter Games. Another founding member of the team, Ward Farwaseh, will likely to be the first Druze Olympian.

Their participation comes at a time when Israel’s presence in international sports has been met with boycotts, bans and backlash over the humanitarian toll of the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 71,800 Palestinians, according to the territory’s health ministry, and devastated the strip.

The athletes say they are proud to represent Israel. They hope to be role models for young Israeli athletes and lay the groundwork for future gold in the sport.

“I used to be at the bottom of the pack athletically, and I made it here to the Olympics, so there must be some self-selection process,” said Edelman, speaking to AP from Italy. “I’m very sure that with this program now — with the infrastructure that has been set up — Israel will become a force in bobsled.”

As for how Edelman describes his long journey to Italy?

He puts his own spin on the 1993 movie “Cool Runnings,” based somewhat on the Jamaican bobsled team’s Olympic team from 1988. Using the Yiddish word for synagogue, he says he is thinking of this one as “Shul Runnings.”

Told he’d never make it, he’s now a two-time Olympian

In 2014, a skeleton scout told Edelman, an American-Israeli from Brookline, Massachusetts with scoliosis and poor balance, that he was “no Tom Brady.” Defiant, the young Edelman took to YouTube, watching hours of tutorials and managing to qualify for the 2018 Olympics. He finished 28th of 30. Then began his headlong effort to bring a bobsled team together for the 2022 Games.

“It’s very tough for me to understand what would compel anyone else to want to get inside of basically a trash can and get kicked off the side of a mountain. Who does that?” he said.

He spammed the roster of Israel’s rugby team with Instagram messages. He eventually reached Fawarseh, from the Druze city of Majhar in northern Israel. There are just one million Druze, including 115,000 in Israel and 25,000 in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981.

Fawarseh had initially ignored Edelman’s message, thinking it had to be a scam. Eventually he relented, joining with four others.

“I didn’t believe it. I didn’t even know that there was a Winter Olympics before, until I met AJ,” he said.

The team fell apart after Oct. 7, 2023

The team fell 0.1 second short of qualifying for Beijing so they set their sights on 2026.

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Then, a week before the team was supposed to kick off its qualification run, Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and dragging some 250 hostages to Gaza. Israel vowed retaliation, drafting most of Edelman’s teammates.

Fawarseh and Edelman put out a new call for athletes, pulling in Israeli shot-putter Menachem Chen, sprinter Omer Katz, pole vaulter Uri Zisman and Itamar Shprinz, a crossfit athlete, as coach.

Shprinz needed one important clarification before agreeing: What exactly was bobsledding?

“I knew in the back of my head it was something about sleds and winter sports, but not what you needed to do in the sport,” he said.

Two days later, Shprinz had a ticket to Europe, then Canada, where he first rode in the sled : “It was terrible, I passed out. It’s a hard sport.”

The team clinched an Olympic spot at Lake Placid last month.

Israel’s participation in the Games comes amid backlash and boycotts

Israel is sending five other athletes to the Games, with figure skater Maria Seniuk, skiers Noa Szollos and Barnabas Szollos, cross-country skier Atila Mihaly Kertesz and skeleton athlete Jared Firestone joining the bobsledders.

“Leave in peace and return in peace,” wrote Yael Arad, chair of the Israel Olympic Committee and member of the International Olympic Committee, in a letter to Israeli Olympians this year. “You are carrying the torch of generations of Jewish and Israeli sports tradition, and every time you wave the Israeli flag, do so in the name of those who dreamed and did not arrive, those who are in our hearts forever.”

There were calls for Israeli athletes to be treated like their Russian counterparts, made to compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes,” banned from wearing any national symbols or hearing anthems upon victory. The International Olympic Committee has said the legal reasons for acting against Russia have not been reached in Israel’s case, without explaining its reasoning.

“There was an athlete who told us in the summer that he would never represent Israel because ‘you don’t kill children.’ We’ve always known that those sentiments exist,” Edelman said. “On the team, we don’t modify the behavior too much. We’re proud.”

“My mom says to me, ‘Isn’t it dangerous that you’ll have a star of David on your back?’” Zisman added. “I say, no mom, that’s what we do. We do the best we can.”

By Kimberly Palmer, NerdWallet

A Redditor recently asked how to recover after their parents did a number on their credit score.

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The original poster shared that while on break from college, they discovered a letter from a collection agency addressed to them. It referenced an unfamiliar unpaid account.

They soon learned their parents had taken out multiple credit cards in their name without permission to help cover household expenses. Their parents had allegedly charged thousands of dollars in debt, left it unpaid, and now the collections agencies were calling.

The Redditor wanted to know: What’s the best way to rebuild and protect credit in the wake of this kind of experience?

Unfortunately, familial fraud — when one family member steals the identity of a child or other family member — is relatively common, even though actual numbers are hard to come by, says Axton Betz-Hamilton, who wrote a memoir about her own experience with familial fraud called “The Less People Know About Us.”

“It’s very under-reported due in part to the victim not wanting to get their family member in trouble,” says Betz-Hamilton, who is also an associate professor at South Dakota State University.

Victims often feel a heightened sense of shame and embarrassment, she adds.

The good news is you can recover from familial fraud, although it can take years. Here are five steps experts recommend.

1. Freeze your credit

Freezing your credit prevents anyone, including your parents, from taking out new accounts in your name. When your credit is frozen, lenders can’t access your credit report. Freezing your credit is a free process that can be done through the credit bureaus.

Betz-Hamilton suggests freezing your credit as soon as you realize your identity has been compromised. If you need to apply for a new credit account yourself, you can temporarily unfreeze it.

2. File a police report

In addition to freezing credit, filing a police report gives you evidence to share with lenders and the credit bureaus that your identity was stolen, which makes it easier to contest the fraudulent charges.

This part can be really hard, but it’s an important step in order to prove that you have been a victim, says John Ulzheimer, a credit expert.

“You have to rat out your parents,” he says. “It requires some courage on behalf of the victim.”

In addition to filing a police report, Ulzheimer recommends filing an identity theft report with the FTC to further document what happened.

3. Pull your credit report and dispute fraudulent accounts

The next step is to pull your credit report (you can do so for free using annualcreditreport.com) and dispute all of the fraudulent accounts listed.

From there, you contest the fraudulent accounts with both the credit bureaus and the lenders.

Doing so will initiate an investigation, Ulzheimer explains. Adding relevant evidence such as providing the police report will increase the chances that the fraudulent accounts will be removed from your account — but a positive outcome isn’t a given.

In some cases, the investigation might determine that you are responsible. That’s because there could be “credible connections” between your identity and the accounts, especially if they were used for household expenses at your address.

“All creditors have different policies and procedures in terms of how they investigate fraud claims,” he explains, and the investigation can result in either the debt being removed from your credit report or remaining in place.

4. Take out a secured credit card

Even with the fraud dispute ongoing, you can take steps to start to rebuild your credit.

Opening up a secured credit card, making on-time payments to existing accounts and keeping your credit utilization under 30% can all help.

However, collection accounts typically stay on your credit report for up to seven years.

“It can be a long and frustrating process,” Betz-Hamilton says.

5. Invest in your mental health

Betz-Hamilton recommends taking care of your well-being during the tough time. “The emotional effects of familial identity theft are often more profound than the financial effects,” she says.

A mental health counselor, social worker or therapist can aid the recovery process.

“Finding that supportive network of trusted others — friends and family that are not part of the identity theft, or professionals you can trust — that is critical,” she adds.

Reddit is an online forum where users share their thoughts in “threads” on various topics. The popular site includes plenty of discussion on financial subjects like identity theft, so we sifted through Reddit forums to get a pulse check. People post anonymously, so we cannot confirm their individual experiences or circumstances.

Kimberly Palmer writes for NerdWallet. Email: kpalmer@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @kimberlypalmer.

The article Asked on Reddit: My Parents Ruined My Credit. How Can I Fix It? originally appeared on NerdWallet.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — An Arizona Department of Public Safety helicopter responding to assist officers with an active shooter situation crashed, killing both the pilot and a trooper who was a paramedic on board, authorities said.

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A Ranger helicopter crew responded to assist the Flagstaff Police Department and other law enforcement agencies on Wednesday night, Sgt. Kameron Lee of the department said in a statement.

“Tragically, during the incident, the helicopter crashed, killing both the pilot and the trooper/paramedic on board,” Lee said.

The names of the trooper and pilot have not been released.

The Bell 407 helicopter crashed near Flagstaff about 10:15 p.m. and there was a fire afterward, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. A search of the registration number showed the helicopter was manufactured in 2004.

KTVK-TV showed a map indicating that the crash happened northeast of the shooting scene.

The FAA said it will assist the National Transportation Safety Board in the crash investigation. An email seeking information was sent to the NTSB early Thursday.

The state Department of Public Safety’s Air Rescue Unit is trained for various high-risk situations, including mountain and water rescues.

The suspect in the shooting suffered non-fatal gunshot wounds and was taken into custody, Lee said. No one else was injured.

By MATT OTT, Associated Press Business Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits jumped last week but remains in the same historically low range of the past few years.

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Applications for jobless aid for the week ending Jan. 31 rose by 22,000 to 231,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s significantly more than the 211,000 new applications that analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet had forecast.

Applications for unemployment benefits are seen as representative of U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.

A number of high-profile companies have announced job cuts in the past year, including UPS, Amazon and Dow just last week.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post laid off one-third of its staff, eliminating its sports section, several foreign bureaus and its books coverage in a widespread purge at the storied newspaper owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. A private company, the Post did not disclose how many people it has on staff, making it impossible to estimate how many people were laid off.

Mounting layoff announcements in the past year, combined with the government’s own sluggish labor market reports, has left Americans increasingly pessimistic about the economy.

Last month, the government reported that hiring remained subdued in December, capping a year of weak employment gains that have frustrated job seekers even though layoffs and unemployment remained historically low.

Employers added just 50,000 jobs last month, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, its first decline since June.

January’s jobs report, which was scheduled for release Friday, has been delayed due to the partial government shutdown earlier this week.

The U.S. economy gained just 584,000 jobs in 2025, an average of around 50,000 per month. That’s sharply lower than that more than 2 million added in 2024, which amounts to an average of nearly 170,000 per month.

The 2025 numbers represent the smallest annual job gains since the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the job market in 2020. Outside of recessions, it’s the slimmest annual increase since 2003.

The Labor Department also recently reported that businesses posted far fewer jobs in November than the previous month, a sign that employers aren’t yet ramping up hiring even as growth has picked up.

Businesses and government agencies posted 7.1 million open jobs at the end of November, down from 7.4 million in October.

The data has revealed a labor market in which hiring has clearly slowed, hobbled by uncertainty raised by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Fed engineered in 2022 and 2023 to tamp down a spike of pandemic-induced inflation.

The Federal Reserve, in an attempt to shore up a softening labor market, trimmed its benchmark lending rate by a quarter-point three straight times at the end of last year. However, last week the U.S. central bank left its benchmark lending rate unchanged in the midst of a broadly improving economic outlook and what officials called a stabilizing labor market.

Thursday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the four-week moving average of jobless claims, which balances out some of the week-to-week gyrations, rose by 6,000 to 212,250.

The total number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the previous week ending Jan. 24 grew by 25,000 to 1.84 million, the government said.