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In Israel this week, the election campaign for a new parliament kicks into high gear. Last night the first television ads aired. Networks are required to leave long stretches of space for the ads. With the vote just two weeks off, opposition parties are hoping their TV spots will at last weaken the frontrunner, the prime minister's Likud Party.

NPR's Larry Abramson reports from Jerusalem.

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New York State already has some of the nation's toughest gun laws. And today Governor Andrew Cuomo is expected to propose far-reaching new gun control measures during his State of the State address.

Getting those reforms through the state legislature may be another matter, as NPR's Joel Rose reports.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday delivered his State-of-the-State speech. It contained no new policy objectives. It was designed to boost morale in state where he said 346,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.

The International Labor Organization, the U.N. agency that deals with labor issues, has released a report on the growing number of domestic workers around the globe, and their lack of legal and worker protections. There are almost 53 million domestic workers and 83 percent are women. They have often been ignored by policy makers.

Target says it will match the online prices of Amazon.com and others. Target knows that increasingly consumers are using mobile devices to check prices online as they cruise the aisles. And if the price is better somewhere else, that's where they'll buy it.

Insurance company AIG holds a board meeting Wednesday to consider joining former CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg's lawsuit against the government over its handling of the AIG bailout in 2008. For more on the suit, Steve Inskeep talks to business reporter Michael de la Merced of The New York Times.

The Consumer Electronics Show opened this week in Las Vegas. It's supposed to give the world a glimpse of what's coming next in technology. But the absence of major consumer-technology companies such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, has led some to wonder whether CES still matters.

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Alcoa, the biggest aluminum producer in the U.S., has announced it posted a profit of more than $240 million in the last three months of 2012. That's a big improvement from the same quarter the year before when it lost $190 million.