A man is charged with burglary after police say he returned to a Twin Falls, Idaho, home for his forgotten car keys and cellphone.

The Times-News reports (http://bit.ly/1W0jIri) a woman called police when she found her home ransacked on Saturday, with a stranger's cellphone on the bed and a strange car parked behind the property.

Space station astronaut Scott Kelly is halfway home.

Kelly marked the midway point of his yearlong space mission Tuesday. He's sharing the voyage with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko; the two experienced fliers arrived at the International Space Station in March and won't return to Earth until next March.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has declined for now to create artificial floating platforms for Pacific walrus that come ashore in Alaska because they lack summer sea ice.

The agency's decision came in response to a suggestion by a wildlife advocacy group to place experimental rafts over a prime Chukchi Sea feeding area 100 miles off Alaska's coast, Geoffrey Haskett, Alaska regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a letter Monday.

Covert videos released by an anti-abortion group have opened a window on a largely unknown corner of science: the middlemen who supply researchers with human fetal cells from elective abortions.

For decades, these typically small companies or nonprofits have been quietly processing human tissue and filling orders for fetal cells from scientists studying eye disease, HIV, autism and other conditions.

Syria's President Bashar Assad urged Syrian political and armed factions to unite in the fight against terrorist groups and said in comments aired Tuesday that there can be no political solution for the country's brutal civil war before terrorism is defeated.

Speaking in an interview with Russian media, he also blamed Europe for the refugee crisis currently hitting the continent, saying it is a direct result of the West's support of extremists in Syria over the past four years.

A Cincinnati film commission has announced that singer and actress Mariah Carey will be filming a Christmas movie in the region.

WCPO-TV (http://bit.ly/1OTRcDI ) reports the Greater Cincinnati Film Commission said Tuesday the singer and actress is set to star in "Melody & Mistletoe" in Cincinnati starting in October.

Rescuers trudged through muddy streambeds Tuesday in a small polygamous town on the Utah-Arizona border and found the bodies of several children who died when their two vehicles were swept away in a torrent of floodwaters that killed at least 12 people. The same flash floods claimed at least four lives in nearby Zion National Park.

The van and SUV were filled with three women and 13 children when a wall of brown water overtook them Monday evening, carrying the vehicles several hundred yards (meters) downstream and sending them plunging down a flooded-out embankment with terrifying force. The SUV was smashed beyond recognition. Three people survived, all of them children, in the secluded community that is the home base of Warren Jeffs' polygamous sect.

Google has hired auto industry veteran and former Hyundai U.S. CEO John Krafcik to run its self-driving car program.

Krafcik, 53, is credited with turning around Hyundai's U.S. operations, leading the company to huge sales increases after the Great Recession. Early in his career as a mechanical engineer he worked at a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors where he became a proponent of lean manufacturing.

As vespers drew to a close at the St. Egidio Catholic community center, a dozen homeless men in threadbare pants and rumpled T-shirts shuffled into a side room where volunteers handed out cups of soda and soft yellow rolls spread with mayonnaise.

"This is like my home," said Ernesto Gutierrez, a 66-year-old retired policeman who sleeps in parks and other public places because he has no relatives overseas helping to supplement his meager pension. Often the sandwich he gets at St. Egidio is his only meal of the day: "I appreciate it so much."

In ramping up its military involvement in Syria's civil war, Russia appears to be betting that the West, horrified by the Islamic State group's spread and an escalating migrants crisis, may be willing to quietly tolerate President Bashar Assad for a while, perhaps as part of a transition.

The logic is that prioritizing the fight with the jihadis means accepting Assad as the less bad option despite his own brutal acts, and might produce a more effective and coordinated fight in the air and on the ground.