The back-and-forth is the latest in an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

Trump first announced he was banning the outlets Friday, assailing what he called “fake news,” and only later arguing that their reporting was a risk to national security. The outlets argued in a joint lawsuit that the ban was a blatant violation of the First Amendment because it singled them out for the content of their coverage.

In his late-night ruling, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the three outlets’ access. He said they had met the legal thresholds to obtain a temporary restraining order, in effect for 14 days, and were likely to succeed in showing that their press passes were revoked without due process.

“This is a high bar, but Plaintiffs have met it,” he wrote.

Kelly — whom Trump nominated in 2017 and who ordered a CNN journalist’s access restored in a similar case in 2018 — said the government must have clear standards for conduct that would lead to revoking a press pass. He called the standard of objectionable reporting outlined in letters that the White House sent the outlets “so vague it hardly does the trick.”

The judge also made clear he did not buy the administration’s argument that the news outlets’ reporting endangered national security — and noted that Trump himself had not used that argument in the beginning, focusing solely on what he called negative coverage.

“Nothing in the record ... suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” he wrote.

The ruling came after Kelly heard arguments in an emergency hearing Wednesday. Temporary restraining orders are typically designed to preserve the status quo pending a closer review of the case by the court.

“This is a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law," Theodore Boutrous Jr., attorney for the outlets, said in an emailed statement. "We greatly appreciate the court’s swift action.”

But a few hours after the ruling, reporters from those outlets said they were not allowed to enter the White House.

The White House did not respond to emails from The Associated Press asking for comment on the order and whether it would let reporters back inside.

Attorneys debated access to the White House and any risk to national security

Boutrous argued in the hearing that there was an urgent need for renewed access, saying that the ban caused irreparable harm to the outlets at a time of momentous news events. “We’re at war. We have world leaders coming to Washington.”

Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik, in his argument, reiterated the administration’s point that the president has the right to choose who gets into the White House.

“Access to the White House is a privilege, not a right,” Velchik said.

In arguing that Trump was not engaging in viewpoint discrimination — the government singling out specific media outlets for the content of what they say or publish — Velchik said the president had criticized other news organizations, but not banned them. He noted, for example, that Trump had called ABC “the worst."

He added: “The president should be able to take immediate action to protect national security."

In response, Boutrous said, “Suddenly it’s a national security case,” arguing that the president brought up that point only after the lawsuit was filed.

Trump “keeps proving our point,” Boutrous said, describing how the president has consistently used negative coverage of him as justification for the ban.

Kelly seemed to agree, writing of the national security claim: “Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting.”

The Trump administration outlined ‘reporting incidents’ of each news outlet

In a filing Tuesday, administration lawyers detailed letters sent to each of the three news outlets that identified “a non-exhaustive list of reporting incidents, including those that have threatened national security and spread falsehoods.”

Among the incidents cited were: CNN reporting on “‘top-secret’ construction details related to the East Wing bunker”; MS NOW reporting “on an alleged leak investigation”; and Politico publishing “a document detailing funding for the White House ballroom containing intricate descriptions of how the Secret Service would invest in security improvements.”

Politico’s letter also included an incident in June of a report in which a “senior administration official … granted anonymity” predicted whether a preliminary deal would end the conflict with Iran.

That item appeared to reference a background briefing set up by the White House, where an official briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the administration itself. Several other outlets also reported the official’s remarks.

Major networks refrained from covering Trump for the media pool

The ban prompted other media outlets to take action in solidarity. The U.S. network press pool — consisting of the five major networks, including CNN — has suspended coverage of Trump pool events pending further notice.

The ruling did not address that rotating pool.

After the hearing Wednesday, the networks continued their ban on Trump coverage. At Joint Base Andrews, where the president formally welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping, journalists from Fox News, CBS and NBC were present but not shooting video.

Other television outlets whose crews were present, according to signs on their tripods and cameras, were NewsNation, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting Network, One America News and LindellTV.

Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, an amicus brief was filed by other news groups, including The AP, urging the court to immediately restore the three outlets’ White House access.

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Golden reported from Seattle and Kellman from London.

It looks as good as over, but Baku has sprung surprises before and the 20-year-old Italian was beaten by teammate George Russell in both of Thursday's practice sessions.

A year ago, Baku was where Oscar Piastri's title shot began to fall apart. The Australian was leading the standings when he almost stalled on the grid, dropped to last and crashed, all in the space of about a minute on the opening lap.

That kicked off a run of six races without a podium finish for Piastri, who had to watch the title race become a fight between eventual champion Lando Norris and Max Verstappen.

Antonelli — whose practice was hampered by car problems Thursday — is sounding cautious as he aims to become F1's youngest-ever champion.

“Until you cross that finish line, it’s not over. It’s like tennis, one point at a time, here one race at a time," he said. “The sooner it’s over, the better it is. Still a long way and it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be intense but I’m ready to give my best and to keep having fun.”

There are key differences this year. For one thing, Antonelli’s lead is more than double the biggest advantage Piastri had last year. He’s coming off back-to-back wins, not the team orders controversy which was dogging Piastri and Norris a year ago.

As for Piastri, he says it's “love-hate in some ways” as he returns to a venue where he won in 2024 and endured a nightmare 2025.

“I think probably my best race ever has been at this track and probably my worst race ever has been at this track, so always eventful,” Piastri said.

Russell fastest in both practices as Antonelli has car trouble

Antonelli’s teammate George Russell was dominant in both practice sessions Thursday, heading the first by 0.4 seconds and beating second-place Antonelli by 0.552 in the other.

Max Verstappen was best of the non-Mercedes drivers as he went second-fastest in the first session and third-fastest in the second, with the two Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton close behind in both.

Antonelli's day was disrupted by a hydraulic failure which left his car smoking at the side of the track in the first session. Arvid Lindblad hit a barrier in second practice, causing a red-flag stoppage.

Antonelli's title rivals need to bounce back

The three British drivers behind Antonelli are all trying to recover from disappointing races at the Spanish Grand Prix two weeks ago.

Russell all but ruled himself out of the title race after an uncompetitive run to fifth in Madrid, while Norris was left ruing a badly-timed virtual safety car which cost him the win. Hamilton retired, making it five races off the podium for the Ferrari driver.

“I’m going to keep fighting every single race until it’s mathematically impossible, but it doesn’t change how I go about my job," Russell said Wednesday. "There’s obviously a huge deficit, but it’s not even really a consideration right now.”

Red Bull's double bet on Isack Hadjar

Red Bull is backing Isack Hadjar's health and his potential in the hope the young French driver develops into one of F1's top talents.

It was a tough day for Hadjar as an engine failure in first practice cost him valuable time to readjust to F1. He went ninth-fastest in the second session.

Hadjar returns for Baku despite saying he still feels pain from the wrist fracture which ruled him out of the last three races. And he has a contract extension to partner Max Verstappen for 2027, too.

Wrist injuries can have long-term consequences. Lance Stroll rushed back from wrist fractures sustained in a preseason cycling crash in 2023 but ended up missing a race after all in 2025 when he needed a follow-up operation to deal with lingering pain.

A rare Saturday race amid broader F1 schedule uncertainty

It's an unusual race week in a very unusual F1 season, as the Azerbaijan Grand Prix is held on a Saturday to make way for a national day of remembrance on Sunday. That means Thursday practice and Friday qualifying.

This starts a run of three races in three weeks because of the extra round next week in Malaysia, still carrying branding of the called-off Bahrain Grand Prix.

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See AP’s full auto racing coverage here

Also, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s ban on three news outlets from the White House grounds, ordering early Thursday that CNN, MS NOW and Politico must have their access restored. The ruling hands the outlets at least a temporary reprieve in what has been an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

Here's the latest:

Trump makes a protocol error as he compliments China’s first lady

The U.S. president offered enthusiastic praise for China’s first couple — but with a social faux pas.

“I met President Xi at the plane (Airport!) yesterday and he looks strong, vibrant, and fit — Better than ever. Madam Xi, of course, BEAUTIFUL!” he posted on Truth Social.

The latter reference was to President Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan.

She is properly recognized as Madame Peng. She is correctly listed that way by the White House in its public itinerary for the Trump-Xi meetings and state dinner.

Officials typically take great care in international meetings to honor the titles and protocols of other delegations.

In one visit with Queen Elizabeth II, Trump flouted royal protocol by walking ahead of the late British monarch. In 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama continued speaking at a Buckingham Palace banquet as the queen’s band played “God Save the Queen.”

US-China trade truce welcomed but leaves issues unresolved

Analysts welcomed the extension of the trade truce U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Wednesday but said it left unresolved many of the issues that divide the United States and China.

“Agreeing to the extension is positive, but agreement to merely avoid an all-out tariff war for a few months is not a cause for celebration and is probably the minimum necessary to call the summit a success,” said Jeff Moon, a former U.S. diplomat and trade official specializing in China.

“The summit will be heavy on pomp and circumstance and light on substance, so the question is whether (extending the trade truce) will be the principal summit deliverable (or) whether the leaders will also tackle more ambitious goals as well,’’ said Moon, who now runs the China Moon Strategies consultancy.

Trump continues his rebranding effort on AI

In his Truth Social post Thursday on AI, Trump again referred to “Super Intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence.”

Trump used his new preferred term earlier this week at the United Nations, and he’s ordered U.S. diplomats to follow suit.

The U.S. president has said Americans’ widespread skepticism about AI is unfounded, and he’s trying to put the technology and its future in a better light.

It’s the latest example of how much Trump, a former reality TV star, cares about branding.

When Republicans’ sweeping domestic policy bill was lagging in 2025, he dubbed it “The Big Beautiful Bill.” His investment accounts for U.S. newborns are called “Trump Accounts.” In private business, Trump has put his name on everything from buildings and golf courses to steaks, shoes and Bibles.

Trump suggests summit with Xi won’t yield any shift on AI

The U.S. president and Chinese president have both taken a hands-off view of artificial intelligence. Trump said in a Truth Social post Thursday that AI would be a “big topic of discussion” when the two presidents meet later at the White House.

“But I want to leave it exactly where it is,” Trump said, adding “that is China’s position also.”

Trump said the U.S. Department of Justice is “our guardrail.”

Trump has said any AI regulation should be handled by the federal government, but he hasn’t pushed Congress for any major action on the matter. And he’s opposed state government regulatory moves.

Sea bass, Christopher Macchio and red highlight China state dinner

The ritzy black-tie event honoring Xi will be held in the White House East Room, featuring décor that “draws on the color red’s longstanding cultural significance throughout Chinese history,” first lady Melania Trump said as she released key details.

Tables will sport rich red linens and be set using the Reagan-era china service, with its alternating gold and red bands. Urns will overflow with red blossoms.

Dinner will begin with a toast honoring the historic “Toast to Peace” between President Richard Nixon and China’s Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972.

The menu includes sesame-crusted sea bass served with braised bok choy and roasted eggplant, and White House honey ice cream for dessert.

American tenor Christopher Macchio, who sings at Trump events, will lead the after-dinner entertainment. Musicians from the U.S. military will also perform.

China and the U.S. have held first AI dialogue, China’s commerce ministry says

China’s commerce ministry said Thursday that Beijing will maintain close communication with the U.S. following their first dialogue on artificial intelligence.

The ministry’s comments at a regular news conference came after U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng held economic and trade talks in New York. The ministry did not give out further details about the AI dialogue. However, Bessent said earlier that the U.S. proposed a notification mechanism between the two countries for national security-related AI incidents.

The two countries on Wednesday also agreed to extend their trade truce set to expire on Nov. 10.

Judge orders White House to restore access to CNN, MS NOW and Politico

A federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s ban of three news outlets from the White House grounds, ordering early Thursday that CNN, MS NOW and Politico must have their access restored.

The ruling hands the outlets at least a temporary reprieve in what has been an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

Trump first announced he was banning the outlets Friday, assailing what he called “fake news,” and only later arguing that their reporting was a risk to national security. The outlets argued in a joint lawsuit that the ban was a blatant violation of the First Amendment because it singled them out for the content of their coverage.

In his late-night ruling, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the three outlets’ access. He said they had met the legal thresholds to obtain a temporary restraining order, in effect for 14 days, and were likely to succeed in showing that their press passes were revoked without due process.

▶ Read more

Trump and Xi Jinping head into Washington summit with both leaders thinking time is on their side

Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping have no shortage of difficult issues to cover when they sit down for talks Thursday at the White House.

China has resisted the Trump administration’s urgings — and economic threats — to use its considerable leverage to prod Iran to agree to U.S. terms to end the nearly seven-month war. Xi wants to see Trump permanently halt arms sales to Taiwan and loosen export restrictions on cutting-edge advanced chips. And the two sides on Wednesday agreed to extend a one-year trade truce set to expire Nov. 10 for two months, kicking the can on finding a more durable agreement.

All the while, both leaders seem to believe time is on their side as they look to outmaneuver the other in what's expected to be the world’s most significant economic and national security competition for years to come.

▶ Read more

The airstrikes struck the southern and eastern Afghan provinces of Kandahar, Paktia and Khost, killing four civilians, Afghan government spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement.

“These shameless acts of aggression and attacks by the Pakistani military regime will be met with an appropriate response,” he said.

Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar announced the strikes after officials said Afghanistan’s Taliban forces had fired eight drones and shelled Pakistani border posts after Pakistani troops foiled what they described as a cross-border infiltration attempt by militants.

Tarar also posted on X aerial footage that appeared to show several strikes hitting sprawling compounds in Afghanistan’s Kandahar and Khost provinces. He said the air and drone strikes destroyed militant hideouts and support infrastructure, including drone launch and storage sites, across 10 locations in Taliban-controlled areas. He said the sites were linked to attacks on civilians in Pakistan and the drone incursions on Wednesday.

Mujahid, the Afghan government spokesperson, rejected Pakistan's claims of drone attacks and warned of “consequences” for Pakistan over its airstrikes.

On Monday, Pakistani fighter jets struck sites in eastern Afghanistan that Islamabad said were militant hideouts.

The escalation threatens mediation efforts by China, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to broker a lasting peace between Kabul and Islamabad.

Pakistan has repeatedly accused Afghanistan’s Taliban government of allowing militants to operate from its territory and carry out attacks across the border, an accusation Kabul denies.

“Instead of dismantling these networks and taking credible and verifiable action against those using Afghan territory to perpetrate terrorism against Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban regime has chosen to escalate the situation through hostile drone operations against Pakistan,” Tarar said.

“The strikes were deliberate, precise, calibrated, and proportionate and strictly limited to identified military objectives directly linked to the attempted attacks against Pakistan,” he added.

Pakistani officials also claimed Wednesday that security forces had neutralized eight rudimentary drones launched by the Afghan Taliban before they could enter the northwestern city of Kohat and the border town of Torkham, and that Afghan forces fired mortars and other heavy weapons at Pakistani border posts. Pakistani forces responded with artillery fire targeting Taliban border posts, mortar sites and defensive positions, they said.

The four officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media about the latest flare-up.

Pakistan’s Information Ministry said 28 militants were killed in Monday's airstrikes, while Afghan authorities said at least three civilians died and four others were wounded. The U.N. mission in Afghanistan confirmed the civilian casualties and Kabul formally protested the attack.

On the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar expressed concern about what he said was the presence of more than two dozen anti-Pakistani militant groups in Afghanistan.

Monday’s airstrikes followed a shootout with militants in Hangu, a district in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province near the Afghan border, that killed six Pakistani security personnel. Days earlier, a suicide bomber struck a mosque inside a police compound in the nearby city of Kohat.

Eight gunmen then stormed the compound, triggering a 20-hour gunbattle that killed at least 21 people, most of them police officers. No group had claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Pakistani authorities blamed the violence on the Pakistani Taliban and allied militant groups. The Pakistani Taliban, formally known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, have stepped up their attacks on Pakistani security forces, boosted by the Afghan Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan in 2021.

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Ahmed reported from Islamabad. AP writer Abdul Qahar Afghan in Kabul, Afghanistan contributed to this report.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) is an umbrella term for the large group of human-made chemicals used in various industries and manufacturing that have been linked to serious health risks in humans and wildlife, including thyroid disease, liver damage, and increased risk of certain cancers. Because they break down very slowly over time, the chemicals persist in the environment for decades after use, including in Michigan’s water, soil, air, fish, wildlife, and our bodies.

As part of Michigan’s first PFAS Awareness Week, taking place Sept. 21-25, 2026, officials are sharing a ton of resources about how state agencies are working to reduce exposure to harmful PFAS, as well as what Michiganders can do to protect themselves and their families.

While, due to the nature of forever chemicals, exposure is inevitable, here are four steps you can take today to help reduce your risk of adverse health effects:

Test your water

You can’t see, smell or taste PFAS, so the only way to know for sure whether or not they are present in your drinking water is to test a water sample.

PFAS sampling is different than other types of water sampling since they are so persistent in our environment and in everyday products, so using proper sampling guidelines is key to avoid cross contamination.

Water testing is especially important for the over one million Michigan residents with private drinking water wells, as PFAS can easily enter groundwater when products or wastes containing PFAS are disposed of, used, or spilled onto the ground or into nearby lakes and rivers.

For more information about sampling water from a private well, check out this video from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE).

Check Michigan’s Eat Safe Fish Guide

Michigan has over 11,000 inland lakes, rivers and streams and the longest freshwater coastline in the country. In the 1970s, before regulations like the Clean Water Act of 1972 were enacted to limit pollution in local waterways and ecosystems, many industries released a variety of toxic pollutants (PCBs, dioxins, mercury, PFAS) into our environment which have since bioaccumulated in fish and wildlife.

When humans consume fish from affected water bodies, chemicals in the fish can build up in their bodies as well, which is why the state has developed an Eat Safe Fish Guide to spread awareness about the best ways to minimize health risks.

Most importantly, officials recommend keeping the “3Cs” in mind:

• CHOOSE fish that have fewer chemicals. Smaller fish tend to have fewer chemicals stored in their bodies since they are less likely to feed on larger fish with higher bioaccumulation levels. For the same reason, officials recommend eating fewer larger fish that eat smaller fish (like walleye) and avoiding bottom feeders like catfish, as chemicals can settle into the sediment of water bodies.
• CLEAN the fish to help cut out chemicals. Some chemicals, like PCBs and dioxins, are stored in the fat and organs of fish. By trimming away the dark fatty tissue and the organs, you can reduce your risk of exposure.
• COOK fish in a way that gets rid of more fat. Even after trimming away all the dark fatty tissue, some fat is still hidden inside the filet. To help get rid of chemicals found in the filet, you can try poking holes in the skin (or removing the skin entirely) so the fat can drip away as it cooks. Officials also recommend cooking fish on a grill or broiling it in the oven so the fat can drip away.

For more information about safe fish consumption, check out EGLE’s Eat Safe Fish Guide video.

Avoid foam on surface water

Though it may look harmless to some, foam found on Michigan’s lakes, rivers, and streams can contain harmful bacteria and chemicals, including PFAS.

When the foam contains PFAS, it is usually bright white in color, lightweight, and can pile up along shorelines or blow onto beaches.

While research shows the risk of PFAS entering the body through skin contact is low, state health officials warn that coming into contact with foam contaminated with PFAS could be accidentally swallowed if not rinsed off.

“We advise you to avoid contact with foam if you can, but if you accidentally come into contact with foam, you should rinse off as soon as possible,” said Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, MDHHS chief medical executive. “Rinsing off in general after water activities is always a good idea.”

Pets should be kept away from foam for the same reasons, according to health officials.

For more information about foam on Michigan’s lakes and waterways, visit the Michigan PFAS Action Response Team’s website.

Reduce the use of certain consumer products

Though it’s impossible to avoid PFAS in our environment due to their pervasive nature, there are certainly steps Michiganders can take to help reduce their exposure.

PFAS can be found in every-day products, from household items like carpeting, cosmetics, cookware and cleaning products to take out containers, waterproofing products and pesticides.

Not only can switching to PFAS-free products decrease daily exposure to PFAS, it can also decrease the amount of PFAS entering the environment.

Here are five easy steps to help minimize exposure in your everyday life:

• Read manufacturer labels before purchasing a new product and ensure to use it as directed
• Throw away scratched or damaged nonstick cookware
• Regularly dust and vacuum your home. Use a vacuum with a HEPA filter to further reduce PFAS exposure
• Regularly wash your hands, especially before preparing food
• Avoid putting your hands in your mouth before washing them

For a more extensive list of consumer products that contain PFAS, click here.

“I wish to state this very clearly before this General Assembly: Elections will be held in Venezuela,” Delcy Rodriguez said, adding that her government has started a “political dialogue with opposition sectors” to secure a “process based on equal conditions for all.”

Rodríguez said the Venezuelan people will determine the best time to get elections moving and assured the United Nations that, when the time comes, the country’s institutions “will be prepared to guarantee an inclusive and transparent process.”

Rodríguez took over in Venezuela after a surprise U.S. military raid in January that captured then-leader Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the United States to face drug trafficking charges.

This is the first trip to the United States by a Venezuelan head of state since 2018, when Maduro traveled to New York to participate in the U.N. General Assembly himself. He is currently being held only a few miles from the organization’s headquarters as he awaits trial.

She says Venezuela is coming back

Rodríguez’s participation in the international forum also marks a milestone in Venezuela’s reintegration into global diplomacy. Addressing global leaders, she said that “the last time that two presidents of Venezuela and the United States met was in 2009.”

She added that her country is coming back strong after “setbacks” suffered this year and thanked President Donald Trump for being willing to resume relations after the U.S. military spirited her predecessor out of the country.

The other setback to which she referred: On June 24, two powerful earthquakes, magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, struck north-central Venezuela and killed more than 6,500 people, leaving an untold number of missing and causing widespread devastation.

“I come to talk about a Venezuela whose national life has been affected by a crisis of political coexistence that disrupted the life of the nation and our interaction with the world," Rodriguez she said. “Interests alien to the common good of Venezuelans were imposed.”

Rodriguez faced a delicate balance in her speech, which needed to be addressed to both her people and the U.S. government that holds her predecessor. She thanked Trump for his willingness to resume the course of diplomatic relations and cooperation with Venezuela.

“We are working earnestly to resolve existing differences through dialogue, but above all to pave the way for cooperation in the energy sector, the promotion of security, the joint fight against transnational crime, and economic cooperation for the benefit of both peoples and our continent," she said. “Today, Venezuela is being reborn.”

Since rising to power, Rodríguez has forged a close working relationship with Trump. U.S. influence in Venezuela has grown following the lifting of sanctions against Rodríguez in April, one of several recent moves by Washington to recognize her as a legitimate authority ever since the U.S. military captured her predecessor.

Addressing some words to her people, Rodríguez said that she could not promise an “easy path,” noting that “the country’s recovery will take time.”

“Rebuilding the national soul will be our priority," she said. “We will walk united as a single nation that, after the pain, chose hope.”

Trump and Rodríguez met on the sideline of the UN

Before her speech at the U.N. Wednesday night, Trump and Rodríguez, who had been Maduro’s vice president, met at a pull-aside meeting late Tuesday during a reception the U.S. president hosted at a New York hotel.

It was the first time the two had met in person since the operation that captured the nation’s former leader and effectively put Rodríguez in charge.

“We discussed strengthening the bilateral relationship between our countries and advancing a cooperation agenda in strategic areas such as energy, mining, security, and other matters of mutual interest,” Rodríguez said on X after the encounter.

The meeting came after the two countries announced an agreement last month to give the United States a stake in Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. She described the deal as a step toward economic recovery that will modernize the country’s oil industry.

Rodríguez vowed to shoulder the “historic responsibility” of leading Venezuela “from a period of uncertainty and conflict toward a stage of full democracy, recognized by its own people and by the world.”

“Venezuela wants to breathe freely and exercise its rights as a sovereign nation without any kind of interference,” she said.

The Labor Department said Thursday that 197,000 applied for unemployment checks last week, the fewest since mid-July and down from a revised 198,000 the week before. The four-week average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week ups and downs, fell to 202,250 last week from 204,000.

Claims for jobless benefits are a proxy for layoffs, and economists watch them because they can be a sign of where the job market is headed. So far this year, claims have mostly stayed below 220,000 — historically low.

The American job market has remained sturdy despite higher energy prices that have squeezed businesses and consumers since the fighting with Iran began Feb. 28.

Layoffs are low. Businesses, remembering the labor shortages that followed the end of pandemic lockdowns, are reluctant to let go of staff. They’re hiring — but modestly by the standards of recent years.

So far this year, employers — companies, government agencies and nonprofits — have been adding an average 80,000 jobs a month, including a surprising 162,000 in August. That is an improvement on a dismal 2025 when monthly job creation averaged 9,700 as high interest rates and President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policies discouraged hiring.

The Labor Department will release the jobs report for September next week. It's expected to show that employers added 52,500 jobs and that the unemployment rate remained low at 4.1%, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet.

Hiring remains well below the 166,000 monthly jobs created, on average, in 2023 and 2024, and the 491,000 a month recorded during the 2021-2022 hiring boom that followed COVID-19 lockdowns.

As in years past, African leaders attending the U.N. General Assembly this year are demanding a reform of the powerful Security Council that would include permanent seats for countries from the continent in the global body's highest decision-making structure.

Many African heads of state who addressed the meeting since it began on Tuesday have decried the continent’s lack of permanent representation in the Security Council as it navigates global security issues that directly and indirectly affect their populations and governments.

These include the war between Russia and Ukraine, the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict and, more recently, the U.S. war with Iran — issues that all loom large at this year's General Assembly.

The 15-member Security Council has five permanent members — the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and China — that hold veto power. Other nations, which do not, are elected by the General Assembly rotate in and out every two years on a staggered basis. Africa holds three of those nonpermanent seats.

The representation question is becoming more urgent

While the calls for Africa to be represented permanently on the Security Council have often been debated by the General Assembly, many said the global conflicts currently faced by the organization made it more urgent for the body to be more inclusive.

According to most African leaders, the unfair representation in the Security Council has created doubt about the credibility of the organization and its oft-trumpeted commitment to multilateralism and equality among nations.

“Every nation is sovereign and equal under the (U.N.) charter. Yet, on the gravest question of war and peace, five nations possess a permanent power that the other 188 do not. The equality proclaimed in this assembly ends at the doors of the security council,” Kenyan President William Ruto told delegates on Wednesday.

They have also highlighted the large African population and the high number of African countries that are member states of the United Nations.

“How can a world led with a right conscience justify the denial of 1.6 billion Africans, the right to equal representation?” asked Ethiopia’s president, Taye Atske Selassie.

In 2024, the United States said it would support the addition of two new permanent seats for African countries on the council. That, however, was under the administration of former President Joe Biden.

Artificial intelligence is a key example

As the world's leaders grapple with the future of artificial intelligence at the meeting, many in Africa also insisted that the decision-making about its rapid growth and development should include the developing nations as they were likely to feel its impact reverberate across the continent.

This came a day after U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres urged global competitors in artificial intelligence to cooperate in addressing threats from the technology. And on the same day, the Security Council held a special meeting about AI that featured the industry's leaders calling for help in managing the technology.

On Wednesday, Botswana President Duma Boko was among the leaders calling for African nations to be included in the discussions. He said this extended to critical minerals, rare earths, and energy resources that power the technological developments. Many of those come from developing countries.

“Therefore, developing countries must have a meaningful voice in setting the standards and safeguards that will govern these technologies, ensuring that they expand opportunities, support decent work, and strengthen public services, while protecting human dignity, rights, and security,” Boko told delegates.

Most leaders are sticking the initial demands contained in the African Union's position on the issue adopted in 2005, which includes a demand for at least two permanent seats on the Security Council.

Said Namibia President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah: “The time has come for us to recognize that we have been negotiating for too long."

Daylight saving time began at 2 a.m. on March 6 this year, moving the clocks forward one hour. It ends on Sunday, Nov. 1, at 2 a.m., meaning 2 a.m. becomes 1 a.m. and that hour is repeated, adding an extra hour that day to return to standard time.

What is daylight saving time?

Daylight saving time is the time of year when clocks are moved one hour ahead.

Why does the United States have daylight saving time?

Daylight saving time creates more evening daylight during the warmest months.

Clocks are set one hour ahead at the start of daylight saving time in spring, then moved back an hour to return to standard time in fall. A common phrase to remember what to do is “spring forward” and “fall back.”

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), daylight saving time was formally introduced in the United States in 1918 to help conserve power during World War I. More daylight hours were added to the day to help reduce energy costs. It used to be nicknamed “war time” instead of “springing forward,” according to the Department of Defense.

Most of the country and its territories observe it except for Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the state of Arizona (except the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe daylight saving time).

Isn’t there a proposal to end daylight saving time permanently?

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which proposes to end daylight saving time permanently, in July. The vote was 308-117.

The bill is currently stalled in the U.S. Senate. Since it’s still being reviewed, America is still scheduled to turn the clocks back an hour on Nov. 1.

The United States tried to permanently end it in the 1970s, but it didn’t last.

What does this mean for Michigan?

Sunrises will be earlier, but darkness will arrive noticeably sooner in the late afternoon.

After Nov. 1, the sun will set at around 5 p.m. for most of Michigan until the winter solstice on Dec. 21. After that, the sun will set later and later until the summer solstice.

On the bright side (no pun intended), we get an extra hour of sleep on Nov. 1.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility from the Iran-backed Houthis in neighboring Yemen, who in recent days have been blamed for attempted attacks on the kingdom, including on Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

The Associated Press could not immediately verify the claim by Saudi Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki, who is also the spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi rebels. His statement followed alerts by Saudi civil defense authorities, who later noted the danger had passed.

The escalation in fighting near the crucial Red Sea shipping corridor has worried global markets while marking a return to civil war in Yemen.

Hamas says it is ready to move forward with the next stages of a Gaza peace agreement, while a top European Union official says only a small amount of the funds needed to rebuild the Gaza Strip has been collected.

Here is a look at the latest news from the Middle East. More coverage of the U.N. General Assembly is available here.

Netanyahu begins a whirlwind visit to address UN

The Israeli prime minister's brief stay in New York for the U.N. General Assembly includes meetings with several world leaders — but not Trump, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio or any Arab leaders.

Netanyahu's office said he was on a “tight schedule” and needed to return to Israel before the start of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which begins at sundown on Friday.

He will meet with the presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Panama, and Ethiopia, the vice president of Colombia, and the prime ministers of Greece, Slovenia, and Papua New Guinea, according to his office.

Hamas says it's ready to advance the Gaza peace agreement

A Hamas spokesman said the group is ready to move forward with the next steps of a peace agreement, after Trump’s Board of Peace unveiled a six-month, $2.45-billion plan for Gaza's reconstruction. The board announced the proposal in New York on Wednesday.

The Hamas spokesman, Hazem Qassem, expressed the Palestinian militant group’s “full readiness to implement the Board of Peace’s roadmap” but made no mention of any disarmament plans.

Israel has said it will not allow reconstruction to move forward until Hamas disarms.

Hamas last year agreed to a plan that includes disarmament but has since traded accusations with Israel of ceasefire violations and has accused Israel of violating the agreement by continuing to occupy much of Gaza.

Hamas has publicly backed handing over power to Palestinian administrators operating under the Board of Peace. Board officials have blamed Hamas' failure to disarm and a lack of Israeli withdrawal as reasons for stalling progress in advancing reconstruction in Gaza.

The EU says only a fraction of needed Gaza funds have been collected

A top EU official says only 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) has been raised out of the 71 billion euros ($80.8 billion) that the United Nations, the World Bank and the 27-nation European Union estimate are needed to rebuild Gaza.

“All of us, we have to scale up our efforts,” said European Commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Šuica, speaking on the sidelines of the General Assembly. She called for a unified recovery plan that would bring together Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the U.S.-backed Board of Peace, and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza.

The UN urges access to humanitarian aid for civilians in Yemen

The U.N. pleaded for all parties in Yemen to ensure humanitarian aid is delivered rapidly as fighting between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and Saudi-backed government forces intensifies an already dire humanitarian situation.

U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said people fleeing violence need protection and access to food, shelter and healthcare. Ground fighting, artillery and aerial strikes have killed and wounded at least 125 civilians since the beginning of August.

Türk also called for the release of 73 U.N. staffers “arbitrarily detained” by the Houthis in the past few years.

Saudi Arabia says it intercepted 6 missiles fired by Houthis

Saudi Arabia says it intercepted six missiles fired by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen.

The kingdom’s military spokesman Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki said Thursday the ballistic missiles were intercepted and destroyed. He said the missiles had targeted the Red Sea port city of Yanbu and the southwestern city of Taif.

The Associated Press couldn’t independently verify al-Maliki’s claim.

Earthquake shakes parts of Turkey and Syria

A moderate earthquake shook southeast Turkey and parts of Syria on Thursday, sending people rushing out of buildings in panic. There were no immediate reports of any damage.

The magnitude 5.4 quake was centered in Sanliurfa province, near the border with Syria, according to Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Agency.

In 2023, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed more than 53,000 people in Turkey and destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of buildings in 11 southern and southeastern provinces, including Sanliurfa. Another 6,000 people were killed in Syria.

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This report will be updated throughout the day as new developments emerge.

It is the second big round of store closures under Starbucks Chairman and CEO Brian Niccol, who joined the company in 2024. Last September, Starbucks closed 627 stores in North America and Europe and laid off 900 non-retail employees.

In a letter to employees, Starbucks Chief Operating Officer Mike Grams said the locations targeted either aren't delivering acceptable financial results or can't provide the kind of experience that Starbucks wants for customers and employees.

The company didn't say Thursday which coffeehouses will close or how many are located in the U.S. It also didn't say how many of the affected coffeehouses are unionized. More than 700 U.S. Starbucks stores have voted to unionize since late 2021, but Starbucks doesn't support the unionization effort and the union and the company have yet to reach a labor agreement.

Grams said Starbucks is continuing to retrofit its North American coffeehouses to make them cozier and more inviting. The company expects 1,500 stores will be retrofitted by Sept. 30, which is the end of Starbucks' fiscal year.

“This progress has given us a clearer view of the performance of every coffeehouse,” Grams said in his letter. “While most are benefiting from this overall momentum, some coffeehouses continue to underperform despite the hard work and commitment of all of you.”

Grams said Starbucks is still committed to growing its store count in North America.

Starbucks said it will transfer employees to other stores if possible or provide severance support if it's not able to place an employee in another location.

In May, Starbucks laid off an additional 300 corporate employees and closed some underused U.S. offices.

Starbucks shares rose less than 1% Thursday in premarket trading.

Adams purchased an entire teacher’s classroom wishlist to help kick off the new school year, according to the St. Brown Foundation.

The foundation is also collaborating with Adams to support additional teacher wishlists.

Adams’ birthday falls in September, which is National Literacy Month.

The timing aligns with the St. Brown Foundation’s mission of helping students strengthen their literacy and vocabulary skills and succeed academically.

The foundation was established in 2025 by NFL brothers Amon-Ra, Equanimeous, and Osiris St. Brown.

Its programs include Rhymes with Reason and Strike for Literacy, which are designed to make learning engaging for students.

Last year, Rhymes with Reason launched at Durfee Elementary-Middle School in Detroit.

The program uses music to help students build vocabulary skills.

The foundation is also preparing for its second annual Strike for Literacy fundraiser, scheduled for Oct. 26.

The event will raise funds to continue supporting children in their educational journey.

The birthday initiative will focus on supporting teachers, who the foundation says play an important role in helping students succeed.

Teachers are encouraged to apply for support through the foundation’s program.

Donations made in honor of Adams’ birthday will help fund teacher wish lists at the start of the school year.

The St. Brown Foundation says its mission is to empower children to reach their full potential through fun and meaningful learning and to encourage students to “shoot for the stars.”

More information about the foundation, teacher applications, and donations is available on the St. Brown Foundation website.

A strike on Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region killed six agricultural workers and wounded 12 others, Interior Minister Ihor Vyhivskyi said. An attack on the capital Kyiv killed a man and a woman, he said, while officials in the southern port of Odesa also reported a major bombardment.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed in a speech at the United Nations late Wednesday for countries to starve Russia of revenue through sanctions and trade bans, denying Moscow the money it needs to prolong the war. He and other leaders at previous U.N. general assemblies have sought to pressure Moscow into giving up its ambitions in Ukraine.

But despite years of diplomatic efforts there is no sign of a breakthrough in ending a war that has had repercussions for the global food and energy supply, as well as severely straining relations between Russia and Western countries.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated Moscow’s demand for a comprehensive peace deal, not a temporary break in hostilities, following Ukraine’s call for a complete and unconditional ceasefire.

“We believe it’s necessary to seek peace, not a temporary truce,” Peskov told reporters Thursday. Russia's demands for Ukraine to surrender its territory, among other things, are unacceptable for Kyiv.

The aerial war has intensified in recent months. Russia keeps hammering Ukraine with cruise and ballistic missiles, powerful glide bombs and jet-powered drones, while Ukraine’s long-range drones target oil refineries and businesses that are a vital part of the Russian economy.

There have been few significant changes since last year along the roughly 1,250-kilometer (800-mile) front line in eastern and southern Ukraine, where a huge number of drones on both sides limit movement.

Russian strikes are an ordeal for Ukrainian civilians

The attack on Kyiv damaged more than 50 civilian sites, including apartment blocks, post offices, a maternity hospital and a textile plant, Vyhivskyi, the interior minister, said.

Russia has repeatedly hit Ukrainian trains, shopping malls, supermarkets and gas stations, among other sites, keeping civilians on edge.

Valentyna Kolosenko, a 49-year-old Kyiv resident, said a solid oak door she was standing behind saved her when three blasts occurred around her home. She said she would endure the hardship, even though she was scared.

“Everything is paralyzed. Nothing works,” she told The Associated Press. “Getting to work is incredibly difficult and frightening.”

Liubov Paziuk, a 74-year-old pensioner in the capital whose house windows were shattered, said she remained determined to resist the Russian onslaught. “We don’t get used to it, we adapt, because we have only one choice: to stay here, on our land, despite everything,” she said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said the military overnight struck arms factories, telecommunications and logistical facilities in Kyiv and the Odesa region.

The United Nations said last week that more Ukrainian civilians were killed and wounded in the first eight months of 2026 than in the whole of last year. Russian attacks in August killed at least 368 civilians and wounded 2,314 others, according to the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.

“Russia’s escalation of terror demonstrates that active diplomacy must come hand in hand with devastating pressure on Putin’s regime and unwavering support for the defense of Ukraine,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X.

As another Ukrainian subzero winter approaches, Zelenskyy said things are likely to get worse. But he promised to keep fighting.

“Ukrainians understand that this winter could be very harsh for us. But in response, we will have no choice but to make it painful for Russia, too,” the Ukrainian leader said on social media. “And that’s exactly why we say that de-escalation steps are important are needed before winter.”

Ukrainian drones strike in western Russia

Officials in western Russia on Thursday reported Ukrainian long-range attacks but provided few details.

Ukrainian drone fragments damaged an administrative building of an oil refinery in the Rostov region but there was no fire, Gov. Yuri Slyusar said.

In the Krasnodar region, Ukrainian drone fragments sparked a brief fire on the premises of an industrial facility, regional emergency officials said.

Ukrainian officials made no immediate comment.

Drones fly into Romania and Moldova

Romania’s Ministry of National Defense said Thursday that a drone violated its airspace for four minutes before crashing near a town in the north of the country, near the border with Ukraine.

The ministry had earlier scrambled two Romanian F-16s and two Spanish F-18s to monitor its airspace in two separate locations after a spate of drones were detected in Ukraine near the border.

Authorities did not specify who the drone belonged to.

Also, Moldova’s Ministry of Defense said Thursday that it recorded a spate of airspace incursions during Russia’s attacks on neighboring Ukraine. The incidents prompted authorities to close part of Moldova’s northern airspace, the ministry said.

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Hatton reported from Lisbon, Portugal. Associated Press journalists Volodymr Yurchuk and Srdjan Nedeljkovic in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Stephen McGrath in Leamington Spa, England contributed to this report.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

China has resisted the Trump administration's urgings — and economic threats — to use its considerable leverage to prod Iran to agree to U.S. terms to end the nearly seven-month war. Xi wants to see Trump permanently halt arms sales to Taiwan and loosen export restrictions on cutting-edge advanced chips. The two sides on Wednesday agreed to extend by two months a one-year trade truce that was set to expire Nov. 10 as they work to find a more durable agreement.

All the while, both leaders seem to believe that time is on their side as they look to outmaneuver the other in what is expected to be the world's most significant economic and national security competition for years to come.

“The president very much believes that over time the U.S. economy is going to grow, the U.S. will get stronger, the U.S. will keep making advances in AI and on technology, and that ... the U.S. will develop alternative sources of critical minerals and rare earths,” said Edgard Kagan, a former U.S. ambassador to Malaysia who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “I think when Xi Jinping sits down with Donald Trump, he very much believes the U.S. is in hurtling decline and that time is on China’s side.”

The president said Thursday in a social media post that artificial intelligence — “superintelligence” as he is trying to rebrand it — will be high on the agenda amid growing global anxiety that the technology will kill jobs or potentially even wipe out humanity.

“I want to leave it exactly where it is,” Trump wrote. “That is China’s position also.”

Trump has made clear he wants to impress Xi with the visit. The Republican president made sure construction of a new helicopter landing pad on the White House's South Lawn was completed before the visit and he met Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, on Wednesday evening when they flew into Joint Base Andrews outside Washington.

Trump has lamented about his planned White House ballroom not being ready for the state dinner in Xi's honor on Thursday evening.

That black-tie event will be held in the White House East Room, featuring a décor that “draws on the color red’s longstanding cultural significance throughout Chinese history,” according to first lady Melania Trump.

Dinner will begin with a toast honoring the historic “Toast to Peace” between President Richard Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972.

The guest list includes Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, among other tech titans staking out positions on whether more safeguards are needed in the race to develop artificial intelligence.

US and China still have work to do on trade truce

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two leaders may be open to a new “notification mechanism” for AI incidents that could affect national security. But on AI and a host of other thorny issues, it remains unclear whether the leaders can make progress.

Shortly after Xi's arrival in Washington, Bessent announced on Fox News that the two sides had come to terms on extending the trade truce, forged last year in South Korea. He said it is possible that Trump and Xi could come to a larger agreement by January or just decide to once again extend it further.

Trump and Xi certainly have incentive to keep the truce alive.

Trump's Republican Party is facing headwinds as they try to maintain control of Congress in November's midterm elections and can hardly afford further economic disruption. Meanwhile, Xi is navigating an uneven Chinese economy — one in which its domestic economy is struggling while its high tech exports remain strong.

Peak baseline U.S. tariffs reached 145% during last year's trade battle — matched by China’s reciprocal levies of 125%. After Trump and Xi met in South Korea last year, the average U.S. tariff rate fell to roughly 47%, while China charged an average in the mid-30s. But in February, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned many of Trump’s tariffs, causing the taxes on Chinese goods to have more variation.

The stopgap announced by Bessent was shorter than what both sides had suggested in recent weeks.

The Chinese side had indicated that they wanted to see the trade truce extended until the end of Trump's term in January 2029.

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials had suggested a three- to six-month extension as a more appropriate time frame because China has been slow to fulfill past commitments on rare earth exports as well as imports of U.S. soybeans and aircraft.

A breakthrough on Iran seems unlikely

Trump has argued to little effect that China, which is far more dependent on Gulf oil than the U.S., has plenty of incentive to use its sway with Tehran to help force an end to the conflict.

But Trump's war of choice has unnerved Beijing, with the government condemning the U.S. and Israeli military action and Xi expressing concerns the conflict signaled a return to what he called the “law of the jungle."

The Chinese were also unsettled by the military operation Trump ordered to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power and sweep him off to New York City to face federal narcoterrorism and drug trafficking charges.

“China is very nervous about the kind of 19th-century imperialist cast of geopolitics that Trump has been pursuing,” said Jake Werner, director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute. “But at the same time, Beijing really sees the U.S.-China relationship as the decisive factor. They don’t want to move in a way that’s going to blow up the U.S. relationship.”

Xi expected to press Trump to end Taiwan arms sales

China has made clear it views Taiwan as the most sensitive issue in the U.S.-China relationship.

Beijing considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory and vows to annex the island by force if necessary. The U.S. is obligated by law to provide Taiwan with sufficient hardware to deter any armed attack from the mainland.

China has pressed Washington to permanently halt the arms sales, most prominently when Trump and Xi met in Beijing in May.

After that meeting, Trump said he was holding off on final approval for a record-breaking $14 billion arms package that was in the pipeline. He also described arms sales to Taiwan as a “very good negotiating chip” with China.

The U.S. president may be motivated to keep the pause on until at least the end of the year, analysts say.

Trump, who sees face-to-face meetings with Xi as a key part in maintaining stability in the relationship, wants the Chinese president to attend the Group of 20 summit in December at his resort in Doral, Fla.

Xi, meanwhile, wants Trump to show up to November's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China.

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Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

The two former heavyweight world champions will meet at the Principality Stadium, promoter Turki Alalshikh said on social media.

“For 15 years no one has been able to make this fight,” he posted on X. “ I can now confirm that Fury Vs Joshua will be coming to the UK, as I promised British boxing fans. The time for talking is over...”

A clash between the British rivals has been one of the most anticipated fights for more than a decade.

Fury stepped out of retirement this year and made his return to the ring for the first time in more than a year with victories against Arslanbek Makhmudov and Mariusz Wach.

Joshua’s only fights since losing his IBF world title fight against Daniel Dubois in 2024 were against YouTuber Jake Paul and Kristian Prenga.

Alalshikh is a Saudi Arabian adviser who organizes boxing events for the kingdom.

While Fury and Joshua are arguably past their peak, it is fight that is still likely to garner global attention and will be streamed on Netflix.

“THE WAIT IS OVER. Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua finally collide,” Joshua's promoter Matchroom posted on X.

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See AP’s full sports coverage here

The two-time Grand Slam singles champion is scheduled to play in the Florida Flamingos Racquet Club's home matches on Dec. 14 and 15. The team will play in Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, home of the NHL's Florida Panthers.

Gauff grew up in Delray Beach, Florida.

“I’m looking forward to playing at home in front of my family and friends in South Florida," Gauff said Thursday in a statement. "It’s not often, as a tennis player, that we get to compete as part of a team, so I’m excited for the new experience, not only for myself but, even more importantly, for the fans.”

The Flamingos were one of the original franchises when World Team Tennis began in 1974 as a way of having a mixed-gender team format for tennis, with Hall of Famer Billie Jean King among the founders.

It returns in December with the other teams based in New York and Toronto. U.S. Open semifinalists Frances Tiafoe and Jessica Pegula will be teammates for New York Empire Racquet Club, while the Toronto North Racquet Club features Canadian players Denis Shapovalov, Leylah Fernandez, Victoria Mboko and Gabriel Diallo.

Gauff's teammates include Tommy Paul, Learner Tien, Iva Jovic, Brandon Nakashima and Eva Lys.

The league will have a new match format featuring four singles sets (a men’s and women’s No. 1 and No. 2), and a mixed doubles super tiebreaker. Each team will start two men and two women.

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See AP’s full tennis coverage here

Futures for the S&P 500 fell 0.54% Thursday. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 154 points, or 0.54%, while the Nasdaq composite sank 0.92%.

Stocks came under significant pressure late Wednesday when the 10-year Treasury jumped to 5.14% from 4.96%, a substantial move higher. High yields undercut prices for stocks and other investments, while also slowing the economy by making it more expensive for everyone to borrow money.

Yields continued to hover near a two-decade high Thursday, around 5.13%, sustained by anxiety over high inflation, the U.S. government’s heavy debt and other concerns.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams, speaking in London on Thursday, hinted that another hike to the Fed's benchmark interest rate this year would be a “reasonable way of thinking about it."

He stressed, however, that any decision will be made based on incoming data.

Fed Gov. Michael Barr said in a speech this week that further hikes “are likely to be needed” to get inflation to the Fed’s 2% target.

The Fed raised its benchmark interest rate last week for the first time since 2023.

Potential rate hikes later this year are dragging on the high-flying tech sector, which relies on access to credit for rapid growth. All economic sectors headed south before the market opened, led by the tech sector, notably chip makers.

Marvell Technology and Intel both fell about 3%.

The cost of borrowing adds to growing anxiety about prices for everything else in the U.S., including gasoline, which has marched higher this week, trapped in the gravitational pull of crude.

Benchmark U.S. crude rose more than 1% to $93.17 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, gained 1.25% to $99.35 a barrel.

The cost for a gallon of regular gasoline in the U.S. ticked higher to an average of $4.48 Thursday, according to motor club AAA. Last year at this time, that gallon cost $3.16. Diesel, which reaches into almost every sector of the economy because of its use in shipping and manufacturing, hit an all-time high this week.

Investors are also closely watching for what might come of the talks between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping later Thursday at the White House. Topics of trade, the war in Iran and AI are front and center. There is not much in the way of high hopes for any major agreements.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 gained 0.8% to finish at 65,513.99, as some chipmakers got a boost from the recent interest in artificial intelligence. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 fell 0.7% to 8,702.00.

Although the Bank of Japan recently raised its benchmark interest rate to stem the slide in the Japanese yen, the move was largely figured in for weeks. And so the yen hasn't really bounced back. A weak yen works as a negative for oil-importing Japan when oil prices are soaring.

In currency trading, the U.S. dollar edged up to 158.37 Japanese yen from 158.30 yen. The euro was unchanged at $1.1388.

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Yuri Kageyama reported from Tokyo and is on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@yurikageyama

Many gorilla families are used to people, but while their population grows, the forest available to them does not.

Communities have planted trees for medicine, firewood and crafts along the edge of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in a bid to reduce pressure on gorilla habitats.

The idea is simple: If residents can find the trees they need outside the park, they will have less reason to cut them inside the forest.

Bwindi’s forest is home to about 450 mountain gorillas, close to half the world’s remaining population. A 2018 survey put the global population above 1,000, a significant recovery for a subspecies that once faced possible extinction.

“Being a neighbor to the park, I understand that the number of gorillas is increasing, but the forest habitat is not increasing,” said Christina Katushabe, founder of Change a Life Bwindi.

Her organization supplies useful trees, restores degraded land while improving biodiversity. Katushabe said members of the Batwa, an Indigenous community that has helped guide the project, select species used for medicine, timber and firewood.

The Uganda Wildlife Authority distributes seedlings, including medicinal trees that people might otherwise seek inside the park.

Joseph Muhindo, an assistant tourism and hospitality officer with the authority, said residents can harvest what they need in their communities “without tampering with the habitat for the gorillas.”

The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies mountain gorillas as endangered, an improvement from their earlier designation as critically endangered.

Tourism has helped support that recovery. Visitors trek through the forest to observe habituated gorilla families, generating jobs and revenue for nearby communities. Residents also sell locally made crafts.

Eunice Owembabazi, a member of a women’s crafts group, said the tree planting near the park means "we people and the gorillas do not inconvenience each other.”

The campaign has reached nearby schools, where students plant trees their families will be able to use.

“Now we are going to protect the forest, so that our gorillas can stay well,” said Davis Musinguzi, a student at Ruhijja Seed Secondary School.

The tree planting was among community conservation activities organized to mark World Gorilla Day, observed each year on Sept. 24.

Neria Leiter, a reservist in Israel's military, “needs a miracle," Ambassador Yechiel Leiter said in a social media post. The ambassador's older son, Moshe Yedidya Leiter, who also served in Israel's military, was killed in Gaza about a month after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack, which triggered the war in Gaza.

According to the military and law enforcement, a Palestinian man rammed his car into a security checkpoint Wednesday afternoon near the settlement of Beit Horon, seriously wounding the soldier. Israeli forces at the scene then opened fire at the man as he attempted to flee and killed him.

More military forces were deployed in the aftermath in the area, which is crossed by a major highway connecting Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

The suspect was identified as Mahmoud Suleiman, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog both sent wishes for Leiter's recovery. A social media post by Herzog described Leiter as “fighting for his life."

Netanyahu visited Leiter's family at the hospital Wednesday night before departing for the U.N. General Assembly in New York. The Iran war, which Israel launched together with the United States on Feb. 28, is a major focus of the gathering of world leaders.

Earlier this week, an Israeli man was killed in a shooting attack in the West Bank, which has experienced a surge in deadly violence since the war in Gaza began. Recent months have seen marked increases in attacks by settlers on Palestinians, evictions from Palestinian towns, Israeli military operations, as well as several Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

The latest violence happened in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days, just after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which is widely considered the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

In mid-April, Ambassador Leiter was a central figure in the first direct diplomatic talks in decades between Israel and Lebanon in Washington. In late June, Leiter, Lebanon’s ambassador to the U.S., and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a framework agreement between Israel and Lebanon that was described as a first step toward peace following months of renewed conflict between Israel and the Lebanon-based, Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

The money will go toward 31 projects across 26 states that are expected to produce more than 23 gigawatts of additional electricity capacity — enough to power 16 million homes. The projects will use new technologies such as sensors and other devices to measure real-time weather conditions to ensure safe transmission or direct power away from congested or overloaded paths, the department said.

The upgrades could improve power reliability and lower electricity costs for about 100 million Americans, officials said.

“These investments will get more out of the infrastructure we already have, move more electricity across the grid, and help deliver affordable, reliable and secure power that will fuel American prosperity for decades to come," Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.

Wright was set to announce the grant program Thursday in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Associated Press obtained program details before its public release.

The announcement comes amid warnings that AI’s voracious demand for power is threatening to overwhelm U.S. power supplies, as massive new data centers come online faster than new power plants can be built. It also comes as electricity bills rise faster than inflation in many parts of the U.S., blamed in some areas on demand from data centers.

The snowballing opposition to data centers in communities across the country has thrown a wrench into the plans of the world’s richest companies and transformed the midterm election landscape.

Trump continues to stick up for data centers, even as politicians from both major political parties criticize them and many communities try to block them. Trump, a Republican, said last month that U.S. communities that don’t have data centers will “end up being backwards and poor.”

In the meantime, Congress and some states are trying to push regulators to require utilities to use technology and new components to make grids more efficient and better able to serve new customers without additional power sources.

Utilities — which have seen rising profits and share prices during the data center-fueled energy boom — tend to stay away from such efficiencies because they make more money from building new power plants and grid infrastructure projects that are more expensive and take longer to complete, utility critics say.

Projects being announced Thursday will involve component enhancements on more than 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) of transmission lines and technological enhancements across nearly 21,000 miles (34,000 kilometers), the department said.

Projects were prioritized based on those that can be put into operation quickly, officials said. Money for the grants comes from the bipartisan infrastructure law enacted by Congress under then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat. The government's $1.9 billion in funding will be matched by $3.35 billion in cost-share funding from the recipients, the Energy Department said.

Trump has vowed to “unleash” the nation's energy sector in his second term, aiming to drive up record-setting domestic oil and gas production, strip away pollution restrictions on power plants and keep expensive coal-fired power plants operating past their retirement dates.

His administration has pushed to help tech giants build and connect data centers to power plants and high-voltage power lines and convert Cold War-era uranium enrichment plants into data center and power plant complexes.

Trump's Environmental Protection Agency this summer issued a plan that would make it harder for the public to learn about and comment on proposed AI data centers.

The affluent city of Scottsdale mainly uses purified water from the city's liquid waste to recharge aquifers that can be drawn when other sources are running low. But in June, as criticism mounted, the city council replaced funding for the recycling program and other water projects with a vague $100 million allocation for new water sources and supplies.

The recycling program has become a strange wedge in a three-way race for two seats on the council in the November election. One candidate supports adding purified wastewater to the drinking supply. Meanwhile, a former Republican state lawmaker and a conservative incumbent say they're skeptical and questioned the safety and cost of meeting new state regulations.

The city says the candidates’ claims of “toilet to tap” or untested “poop water” marginalize the science behind the treatment program. Less than 1% of the city’s liquid waste comes from toilets, water officials said.

The budget change killed a plan to add purified wastewater that exceeds federal drinking water standards directly to Scottsdale’s supply by 2027.

Some experts and residents said the budget change — along with a council majority that frowns upon wastewater reuse — could weaken resilience at a time when the West is mired in drought and cities are facing significant cuts from the Colorado River.

Looming shortages push cities to adapt

Scottsdale pioneered the wastewater recycling system in 1998. The city’s recycling facility is big enough to serve 60,000 households.

That expertise is vital for water officials elsewhere in Arizona who are looking to replicate the work in at least four other facilities.

“It’s so important to protect and reuse water in the Southwest,” said Bryan Cassens, an assistant senior director for Scottsdale Water, which runs the recycling program. “Here we already know it all. We’ve been doing it for 28 years.”

The city of 250,000 gets 70% of its water from the Colorado River, more than any other city with the same population or larger in Arizona and California.

Scottsdale Water employees said that reliance and decades of population growth pushed them to recycle to defend against drought. All wastewater is treated through intensive steps — like ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet photolysis, officials said.

Some was sold to breweries to make beer. Around 7,500 people tried the water after facility tours and other events, but no residents received it through their taps at home.

With the program expansion stalled, officials with Scottsdale Water said they'll be prepared to present options to the council in October.

Water reuse faces uncertainties

Former state lawmaker Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who is running for the city council, has been the most vocal opponent of the advanced water purification program.

She and actor Rob Schneider held up a glass of clear water and a glass of brown liquid in a May campaign ad that accused her opponents of pushing Scottsdale residents to drink sewage water, which her opponents denied.

A month later, the council approved the $100 million budget change.

Incumbent Councilman Barry Graham said the program is costly and an “alarmist” overreaction to drought.

Water officials in Scottsdale, Phoenix and Tucson also said some new state requirements on mixing purified water into the drinking water supply — like tracking chemicals and contaminants that are not federally regulated — unnecessarily raise costs.

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality is making the new rules easier to follow but won’t be finished until early 2027, said Randall Matas, who leads the department’s Water Quality Division.

Despite the debates, Cassens said the facility is operating as normal.

Ugenti-Rita did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press. Graham said advanced water purification would be a last resort in a water crisis, not now.

“I can’t just assume that every visitor and resident is going to trust the experts and is even going to listen to the experts,” Graham said.

Half of Arizona voters worry about water

The criticism in Scottsdale comes as two key barometers of the Colorado River's health — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — hit record lows this summer.

A federal proposal for the Colorado River outlines combined water cuts for Arizona, California and Nevada that could serve more than 25 million people annually through 2036.

“It’s not really a good time to start being selective,” said Cynthia Campbell, a former water resource management adviser for Phoenix. “Are you really going to play political games with the one thing that makes it possible to live in the desert?”

Since last year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has committed to investing more than $300 million in advanced water purification projects in the arid West.

In Arizona, just over half of voters in the 2022 midterm election said they were “very” or “somewhat” confident that the state would have enough water over the next 10 years, according to AP VoteCast, which surveyed more than 3,000 Arizona voters. The other half, 47%, said they were “not too” or “not at all” confident.

Communities shouldn't abandon long-term investments in public health and sustainability for short-term gain, said Ben Grumbles, the executive director of Environmental Council of the States, a nonpartisan group of state and local environmental agency leaders.

“It can be frustrating when there are politicians scoring a cheap, fast point,” Grumbles said. “I hope that over time, the facts will bear out.”

___

Associated Press journalist Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington, D.C., contributed.

🍇 Grapevine

🌅 Good morning! On this day in 1789, Congress passed the Judicial Act of 1789, establishing the Supreme Court and the federal court system as defined by Article III, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution.

Here are a few things to know for Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026:

☀️ 4Warn Weather: Temperatures will be slightly cooler than average today due to wind, but a drier air mass will bring plenty of sunshine with highs in the upper 60s. Check out the 10-day forecast.

👀 Flock Cameras Covered: St. Clair Shores has covered its 12 Flock cameras after residents raised concerns about privacy, data sharing and potential misuse of the technology. Read more.

🐟 Sturgeon Rescued: Nearly 30 lake sturgeon were rescued from a river channel in the Upper Peninsular after a hiker reported seeing three of them stranded in the area. Read more.

⚖️ Stabbing Arrest: Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced Wednesday that a man has been charged in the deadly stabbing of Jaquoya Wix in downtown Detroit on Sunday. Read more.

🧫 Storage Unit Mold: People renting units inside a Downriver indoor, climate-controlled, storage facility say they’ve each lost thousands after discovering mold on their belongings. Hear their story.

🏊 Morning Dive

Good morning ☀️

Detroit Council Member Angela Whitfield Calloway says the city’s new background check policy for developers and others seeking tax incentives is intended to arm city officials with important information before deciding whether or not to approve tax breaks that could total millions of dollars each year.

“We award tax abatements, tax incentives like we hand out Skittles and Starburst,” said Calloway, who has taken issue with the number of approvals.

The City Council has the final say on tax abatements and tax incentives for development projects in Detroit.

“It’s our responsibility to do our due diligence on the front end to make sure that these folks are coming to the council with clean hands,” Calloway said.

The policy change came after a resident raised concerns with Calloway about the background of someone connected to a tax abatement request.

Detroit corporation counsel Conrad Mallett said in a memorandum to Calloway this month that the policy “represents a reasonable and significant step toward safeguarding the integrity of the City’s economic development programs and tax incentive determinations.”

Get the full story from Local 4 Anchor/Reporter Will Jones.

🗞️ Other headlines to know today

• Teen charged in fatal shooting of 14-year-old boy on Detroit’s west side
• Man killed by officers in Lansing after reports of armed person banging on doors
• Michigan selects official Christmas tree for holiday season
• Warren woman says thieves stole her car, and her father’s ashes
• Aaron Glenn returns to Ford Field as Dan Campbell talks Detroit Lions-Jets game, Bishop Fitzgerald signing
• New pipe repair method lets homeowners skip the dig
• DTE conducting power line inspections in Ferndale
• Man arrested after police seize hundreds of pills, multiple weapons from Shelby Township home
• Arson investigation leads to 30 child sexual abuse charges against Harrison Township man
• Warren teacher faces child sexual assault, child pornography charges
• Fiancée of Detroit Lions’ Amon-Ra St. Brown’s gives back for her birthday by supporting teacher wishlist
• Lionel Richie is taking a break from performing following a heart procedure
• Judge hears arguments without immediately ruling in lawsuit over White House ban on 3 news outlets
• Mackinac Bridge reopens following crash, multiple injuries reported
• Deaf Pet Awareness Week highlights caring for deaf animals
• 2 accused of threatening Michigan elected officials, including Dearborn mayor, state supreme court
• Find more Local News headlines here
• Find more Entertainment headlines here
• Find more Health headlines here
• Check out the latest ClickOnDeals here
• Introducing the ClickOnDetroit Help Desk: How it works and how to use it

🌎 Meanwhile

News from around the world via the Associated Press:

The Trump administration said Wednesday it would set aside $7 billion for loans to support energy, mining and infrastructure projects in Argentina, its latest move to secure energy and critical minerals closer to home and back the South American country’s libertarian president.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a federal agency, would make up to $7 billion available through 2027 for projects in Argentina, the State Department said, helping companies in the country obtain loans to buy American equipment and hire U.S. firms to expand the country’s railways, pipelines, ports and power networks. (Read more)

----

The FBI said Wednesday that it was investigating a criminal hacking group’s claims that it had stolen “very sensitive data” belonging to thousands of agents and applicants and that it had compromised the bureau’s jobs website.

“The FBI is aware of a cyber-criminal enterprise group claiming a compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and alleged impact to FBI employee personally identifiable information,” the FBI said in a statement. It said that while the “point of breach” was undetermined, “we are actively and aggressively investigating this matter and working closely with those third-party providers that support FBIJobs.gov to mitigate any and all risk.” (Read more)

----

Three people who went to California’s Six Flags Magic Mountain have filed lawsuits saying they were left with traumatic brain injuries from the park’s famed X2 roller coaster that is advertised as a rite of passage for the “ultimate daredevil.”

The filings are the latest against the world-famous amusement park operator and S&S Worldwide, the manufacturer of the X2 roller coaster cars. Six Flags recently settled a wrongful-death lawsuit from the family of a 22-year-old man who died after riding the coaster in 2022. (Read more)

---> Find more headlines from around the world right here <---

📝 Word Up

Today’s Word Up is: Tocsin /ˈtäk-sən/ (noun) -- defined as “An alarm bell or warning signal.”

Example: ”The sudden drop in local water levels served as a tocsin for the town, prompting them to enforce strict conservation laws.”

🧹 Housekeeping

Hey, if you like this newsletter, let us know. We’d love your feedback. We also offer several other newsletters, including 4Warn Weather, All 4 Pets and more. Hopefully, we have one that caters to your interests — unless you’re only interested in Judge Judy reruns. We don’t have one for that, sorry.

✍🏽 Written and curated by: Jenny Sherman (Have something to say? Feel free to send an email here.)

Polo was forecast to maintain Category 5 strength as it skirts Mexico's coast over the next few days. Rain and strong winds had already started to pummel the coast, with waves crashing onto the normally pristine beaches.

While the eye and the strongest winds were expected to remain at sea, the heavy rains could cause life-threatening flooding and landslides, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Farther west in the Pacific, Tropical Storm Nolo was churning about 295 miles (475 kilometers) south of South Point, Hawaii. It was forecast to become a hurricane by Thursday night and was expected to approach the Big Island as early as Friday. A hurricane watch was issued for Hawaii County.

Gov. Josh Green's office said public schools and state and county offices on the Big Island will close Thursday and Friday, while Maui County will shutter them on Friday ahead of the threat of heavy rain, winds and flooding. Forecasters said the storm could drop up to 20 inches (51 centimeters) of rain.

Polo could bring flooding and mudslides to Mexico’s Pacific coast

Concepción López Villegas was busily bolstering her seaside restaurant in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán state, against the expected onslaught of rain. Strong waves were already hitting some beaches and López Villegas said she feared the storm could destroy the small business she worked decades to build.

“We’re worried and trying to protect our businesses,” López Villegas said. “And of course, we’re sad because it’s our heritage, our legacy that from one moment to another could be destroyed.”

Guerrero state was particularly at risk of life-threatening flooding and mudslides, the hurricane center said.

Polo was swirling about 130 miles (209 kilometers) south-southwest of Zihuatanejo early Thursday and was moving northwest at 7 mph (11 kph). A turn west-northwest was forecast for later in the day, taking it further out to sea, before turning northwest Saturday.

The storm had maximum sustained winds of 160 mph (257 kph), and was expected to remain a major hurricane for the next few days. Hurricane-force winds extended up to 40 miles (65 kilometers) from the eye and tropical-storm-force winds extended up to 115 miles (185 kilometers).

The region most under threat from Polo is rural and mountainous, scattered with a few small tourist towns and ports. Much of the area is marked by poverty and residents routinely complain authorities abandon them to fend for themselves during natural disasters.

Mexico’s government has called for evacuations in some areas and set up shelters for those affected. Thousands of military and Red Cross personnel have been deployed to the region as a preventive measure.

Another hurricane could hit Hawaii as soon as Friday

The National Weather Service said Tropical Storm Nolo would likely strengthen before closing in on the Big Island on Friday or Saturday.

The storm has the potential to be a major hurricane, John Bravender, a weather service warning coordination meteorologist, said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

While high winds are expected, Bravender said the main concern is the possibility of flash flooding. He said 20 to 30 inches (50 to 76 centimeters) of rain could fall through Saturday on southeastern parts of the Big Island, the same region hit hard in August by Hurricane Lala.

“That by itself could cause catastrophic flooding, but when you put that on top of grounds that we’ve been raining off and on for the last couple of months … that rain could cause even more damage,” Bravender said.

He urged preparation across all Hawaii islands in case the storm’s trajectory shifts.

“You need to take action now,” said Bravender. “Today is really the last dry day you have to get ready.”

Hawaii County Mayor Kimo Alameda told residents in a video message on social media that they should start preparing now for the storm. He urged people to put together an emergency kit with food, water and medications, trim vegetation and clear drains.

“This is a very serious situation,” he said. “We do believe that the rain is going to come. It's coming already.”

The governor issued an emergency proclamation Tuesday and more than 230 Hawaii National Guard members have been activated, said Maj. Gen. Stephen Logan, adjutant general of the state’s Department of Defense.

Kauai’s electric cooperative urged residents to prepare for “the possibility of prolonged power outages,” and to store nonperishable food and potable water.

Over 100 Kauai households remain without power from Hurricane Lowell, which passed west of the island on Sept. 7.

Hawaiian Electric, the state’s primary utility, said crews would return to at-risk areas in preparation for the coming storm.

Odalys and Fay are not near land

Tropical Storm Fay re-formed early Thursday in the northern Atlantic Ocean with maximum sustained winds near 40 mph (65 kph), the U.S. hurricane center said. It was 935 miles (1,505 kilometers) west-southwest of the Azores, moving west-southwest at 9 mph (15 kph).

In the Pacific, Hurricane Odalys had winds of 85 mph (137 kph) and was centered about 1,200 miles (1,940 kilometers) west-southwest of the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.

___

Aoun reported from San Diego. Associated Press reporters Desiree Brooks in Atlanta and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.

"Our anniversary is really founded through this theme of ‘Welcome Home. Our Legacy Continues,'" said Shanita Brackett, the museum's acting director. "It means we are planning our next 10, frankly 20 years of exhibitions right now.”

Beginning with a full museum activation on Thursday, the celebrations extend through the rest of the weekend, both at the museum's National Mall home and The Wharf, located along the historic Washington Channel of the Potomac River. Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, the museum's founding director who announced his plan to retire earlier this month, will headline “Understanding America,” a discussion to commemorate the anniversary.

The festivities come as the Smithsonian museum, affectionately called the “Blacksonian” by its most committed visitors and patrons, has faced outright hostility from President Donald Trump's administration.

The president last year signed an executive order seeking to change a range of museums and landmarks supported by the federal government. The Interior Department has also removed dozens of displays from national monuments that highlighted the history of social activists, people of color, women and LGBTQ people, among others.

The order instructed federal officials to work with Congress to bar the Smithsonian from using federal funding for exhibits that allegedly “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law.”

But the Smithsonian's leadership, which responds to a board that includes lawmakers from both parties, private donors and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, says they have continued their work without interference.

“We have not changed any exhibitions. We haven't changed our language. We know that what we do is steeped in scholarship,” Brackett said of the African American museum.

‘No changes’ to museum's mission amid targeting by Trump administration

The Smithsonian is supported by a mix of federal and private funding. The institution's significant funding and complex governance structure have made it difficult for the administration to directly influence its content, as officials have done with federal landmarks, which are maintained directly by the executive branch. That hasn't stopped an outpouring of concern from supporters of the African American museum's mission in response to any curatorial changes the museum has made over the last two years.

Administration officials have also expressed frustration at the Smithsonian's resistance and have outlined new measures. Trump, a Republican, has ordered officials to place signs in front of some Smithsonian buildings warning visitors they may experience exhibits with an inaccurate portrait of American history.

Brackett said her museum is confident they can continue with the museum's original vision “to capture and share the unvarnished truth of African American history and culture.”

“We know that Black history is a part of American history, and it's our job to ensure that everyone who comes to this museum, who engages in our programming, who visits us online, understands exactly how all of this evolved, how the contributions of African Americans have advanced this country, and that's really what people walk away with,” she said.

“There are no changes to exhibits other than rotating objects that need conservation,” she added.

Some visitors had expressed fears that exhibits, such as the casket of Emmett Till and a Greensboro lunch counter housed at the neighboring American History Museum, may have been altered to appease the administration’s concerns. Brackett was clear: “Nothing has changed.”

A decade of honoring Black history after more than a century of advocacy

The idea of a landmark recognizing the contributions of African Americans on the National Mall goes back more than a century.

In 1915, Black Civil War veterans called on lawmakers to establish a landmark honoring their contributions to the war effort, often fighting for their own liberty. The idea advanced in fits and starts over the 20th century until eventually calls to commemorate the legacy of the Civil Rights movement captured the interest of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The Museum of African American History and Culture was first approved by Congress in 2003 and opened its doors on Sept. 24, 2016. At its opening ceremony, then-President Barack Obama urged African Americans to see their story as an integral thread in the broader American story.

“It is a glorious story, the one that’s told here. It is complicated, and it is messy, and it is full of contradictions, as all great stories are,” Obama said. “The very fact of this day does not prove that America is perfect, but it does validate the ideas of our founding: that this country — born of change, of revolution, of we the people — that this country can get better.”

Since its opening a decade ago, the museum has welcomed close to 14 million visitors from 200 countries and has hosted more than 26,000 school groups, according to the Smithsonian. Across 10 floors — five above ground celebrating art and cultural achievements and five below ground exploring deep histories — visitors have learned of the complex history of African Americans in the U.S., a story that is by turns harrowing and triumphant, and how it fits into the broader narrative of American history.

Visitors ‘yearn’ to take in Black museum's offerings

A day before the anniversary, Shallary Duncan of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, visited the museum for the first time.

“Quite honestly, with all of the changes in our country, it made me yearn to be here. I don't want to see any changes that would mitigate the reality of this experience,” said Duncan, a psychologist and self-described “history buff.”

“We know that African Americans have been in this country for as long as the country has been here, so it's important for us that we are a part of a voice that says this is real, our history is real and we don't want it to change,” she added.

More than a dozen students from a consortium of historically Black colleges and universities also visited the museum on Wednesday, eager to learn from its exhibits. Some of the students said they had visited the museum repeatedly since they were children.

For Jaina Dotson, the trip was a special experience. Growing up in Maryland, she'd visited the museum once as a child and was “eager to see how my perspective has changed.”

Now a student at Tuskegee University studying architecture, the visit was also a chance to put her classwork into practice. Dotson said she had researched the museum’s design for her latest architectural project.

“Looking at the outside facade, the corona, and the intention of the design behind that, as well as the layout of the museum itself, was an integral part of my research,” Dotson said. “The layout of the museum, its architecture, is really important for the experience. So it'll be fun to actually experience that as a patron.”

Another clear and crisp fall evening is ahead. Lows tonight will fall well into the 40s outside of the city, making for a chilly night.

We may dip a couple degrees tomorrow as a few more clouds mix in, but high pressure will keep the weather dry through the weekend. Temperatures will gradually warm, making for increasingly comfortable conditions heading into the weekend under mainly sunny skies.

The Harvest Moon, September’s full moon, is set for this Saturday, September 26, 2026. This is the full moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox and we will have clear skies for great viewing.

The next opportunity for more active weather arrives between late Tuesday/Wednesday and Thursday next week. A Pacific wave is expected to move toward the Great Lakes, although there is still some uncertainty regarding its eventual track and strength. It’s still too early to determine exactly how this system will evolve, so forecast details will become clearer over the next several days.

The main combatants are Ethiopian federal troops and fighters loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, an armed political group in Tigray, Ethiopia's northernmost regional state.

The TPLF and Ethiopian federal troops waged war between November 2020 and November 2022, when a peace deal was signed in Pretoria, South Africa.

Eritrean troops fought alongside Ethiopian forces against the TPLF in that conflict. The civilian death toll was estimated by Ghent University researchers to be 500,000, including from violence, famine and the collapse of health services.

After both sides signed the Pretoria peace deal, a caretaker administration seen as loyal to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was installed in Mekelle, the Tigray capital. But tensions remained, with the TPLF maneuvering for political control in Mekelle.

Rebel fighters forge a coalition

This time, the TPLF appears to have mobilized widely, bringing together former foes in its stated goal of removing Abiy from power in Addis Ababa, the federal capital.

On Sunday, the TPLF and six other opposition groups announced that they had formed an alliance to overthrow Abiy's governing Prosperity Party, which was reelected in June polls that were boycotted by major opposition groups.

Both sides had been accusing each other of bad faith, and for months some civilians in Tigray expected a return to armed hostilities. In May, the TPLF forced out regional leader Tadesse Werede, who reported to Abiy, and replaced him with a new council led by TPLF leader Debretsion Gebremichael, who led the Tigrayans in the previous conflict.

Ethiopian federal authorities accused the TPLF of seeking to build an alliance with neighboring Eritrea to destabilize Ethiopia. The TPLF accused Ethiopian authorities of conducting drone attacks in Tigray. Eritrea said that it was alarmed by Abiy’s repeated assertions of his wish for sovereign access to the Red Sea via Eritrea.

Both sides deny responsibility for launching this round of hostilities, and most of the fighting is believed to be in remote areas of often ragged, mountainous territory. On Wednesday, TPLF fighters seized the airport in Mekelle from federal police, and national carrier Ethiopian Airlines canceled flights there and elsewhere in the region.

Observers say pressure is building on Abiy

The Ethiopian News Agency, the official news organization of the Ethiopian government, described the TPLF as a “Trojan horse,” saying that the group’s “repeated attempts to incite conflict” defy the government’s “patience, concessions and magnanimity.”

The coalition formed by the TPLF and six other opposition groups said that it would be known as the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival. In addition to the TPLF, the others include the Amhara Fano National Movement, the Oromo Liberation Army, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front, the Benishangul Peoples’ Liberation Movement and the Gumuz Peoples’ Democratic Movement.

That alliance, which unites some groups previously opposed to each other, may put pressure on Abiy, according to Kjetil Tronvoll, an academic analyst of Ethiopia at Oslo New University College.

“The situation now differs substantially from the 2020-2022 war on Tigray,” he said in an analysis posted on X. “This time around Fano is an ally and Eritrea a backer. Supply lines are also secured through Eritrea.”

Regional blocs and the U.S. call for an end to fighting

The African Union and a key regional bloc known as IGAD called for de-escalation of hostilities. U.S. Ambassador Ervin J. Massinga said in a statement that he felt disappointed by the TPLF’s “poor decision to launch a large-scale offensive.”

His statement said that the TPLF’s “unwinnable fight does nothing for the people. Other armed groups would be wise to avoid this.” A TPLF official, Amanuel Assefa, said the statement was unfair.

Abiy has been praised by many for his ambitious infrastructure projects that seek to turn Addis Ababa into a world-class city. To his supporters, the prime minister is a renaissance man trying to reimagine the old greatness of Ethiopia.

Abiy rose from relative obscurity to power in 2018 as a reform-minded pragmatist. Ties with Eritrea, which broke away from Ethiopia in 1993 after decades of brutal guerrilla warfare, had been cold since the 1990s, and Abiy’s efforts to repair relations with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki helped him win the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.

A year later, Abiy confounded expectations by launching a military operation against the TPLF.

Some of Abiy’s critics now see him as a provocateur whose actions could lead to hostilities in the Horn of Africa. His push for sovereign access to the Eritrean seaport of Assab has reignited tensions with Eritrea, which shares a border with Tigray. Abiy also angered Somalia by trying to negotiate access to the sea via the territory of Somaliland.

___

Rodney Muhumuza reported from Kampala, Uganda.

An OpenAI agent infiltrated the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on June 18, he said. The portal hosted aggregate data about health spending and drug subsidies and is popular with researchers and academics. No personal information had been accessed, the government said.

Albanese made the breach public following a telephone conversation with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. Both are in New York to address the U.N. General Assembly.

Altman was among heads of major AI firms who in speeches Wednesday pleaded with the United Nations to save the world or at least its people by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing.

“Today I spoke with … Altman to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident,” Albanese told reporters. “I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred and the nature of the way that notification occurred as well was unacceptable.”

OpenAI said in a statement it had reviewed activity involving several Australian government departments and discovered “our models took actions we did not intend.”

OpenAI notified Australia of the breach in an email to a government department’s generic address on Sept. 10, Albanese said.

An inquiry looking into the security breach would examine whether OpenAI could be criminally charged, Albanese said. The inquiry would also investigate how Australian security agencies failed to detect the breach before OpenAI revealed it.

Albanese said he assumed there were commercial reasons for the AI investigation of how much was being spent on particular medicines and where expenditures were changing.

Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher said OpenAI had advised on Sept. 10 that an “AI agent had accessed infrastructure behind the public-facing” portal. OpenAI shared with the government the vulnerability the agent had found.

The Australian government had not been confident that it knew what the agent had been doing until officials held a technical briefing with OpenAI on Tuesday, Gallagher said.

She said the portal had been closed and the data moved to more secure systems.

OpenAI said last week it was introducing a new framework for tracking, investigating and disclosing instances of what it called “misalignment,” including cases where AI models acted without authorization, coordinated with other models or evaded oversight.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the incident was the first time that an AI agent was known to have gained unauthorized access to the Australian government’s information technology systems.

“This is a warning about the technology being developed without safeguards and without guardrails in place,” Marles said.

OpenAI was engaging with the government but the situation was “fundamentally unacceptable,” Marles said.

When the agent was denied information, it engaged in “misaligned behavior” to gain unauthorized access, he said.

Marles said the information accessed was “not particularly sensitive” and had since been made public.

Marles used an analogy of the information sitting behind a fence.

“It was not sitting behind a particularly high fence. This AI agent scaled the fence ... and the point is it was unintended. It wasn’t asked to. That’s our concern here,” Marles said.

___

This story corrects the date of breach to June 18.

But what happens when the hackers aren't human?

That's the question at the center of a public policy debate roiling Silicon Valley and Washington following disclosures by leading tech companies that their artificial intelligence models went rogue and hacked into other organizations. The attacks have generated calls even from within the industry for greater oversight and regulation, spurred congressional inquiries and raised questions about whether a years-old legal framework designed to punish criminal hackers is sufficient in an era of autonomous actors capable of engineering their own havoc.

It all adds up to a “Wild West,” said Jack Nelson, chief information security officer and deputy general counsel at the software company Ivanti. Questions of accountability will focus on what the companies knew when they were developing the models, how much they understood about what could happen and what guardrails existed, he said.

“If you owned a tiger and you didn’t put a lock on the cage, the tiger probably did something bad you didn’t intend for it to but you knew it could have, so you are responsible for not putting a lock on that cage,” Nelson said.

“I don’t know if I would go so far as to say these models are tigers without locks, but that’s probably a decent framework to think of it as,” he added.

The prospect of legal accountability is unclear. Lawsuits are a possibility, but some legal experts believe any criminal investigations would face an extremely high burden given the autonomous nature of the attacks and the absence of evidence the AI models were designed with the intent to hack into other networks.

The FBI director has called the autonomous attacks ‘the new frontier’

The issue surfaced in July when OpenAI revealed that its artificial intelligence system escaped from a testing ground and used stolen credentials to break into the servers of Hugging Face, an AI development hub and marketplace, to obtain information it needed to carry out a task.

Since then, Anthropic said its AI models hacked into three other organizations during testing, triggering a company review into whether the models were able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off. Meta has said a “misconfiguration” during testing resulted in an AI model accessing the internet on its own and hacking another company. Google recently made a similar disclosure.

The revelations contributed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urging a development slowdown. The topic has likewise dominated Washington, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent telling lawmakers he opposed giving AI labs a “liability exemption — which is what they are asking for." President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has resisted calls for greater oversight but did announce plans to appoint an AI czar and task force.

The hacks could tee up a fight over liability reminiscent of the debate over Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields technology companies for material posted on their platforms.

The FBI has not publicly announced any investigations, but Director Kash Patel at a congressional hearing last week called the issue “the new frontier." He suggested in response to questions from Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who has launched a congressional investigation, that the bureau would limit scrutiny to models created with the intent of committing a crime.

“What we need to do on a resource basis is go after the people that created these models that are going rogue ... for the specific purpose and with the intention to commit a criminal act,” Patel said. “We can’t be punishing people if they created something lawfully and then a criminal took it and changed it and then dispersed it."

Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that the Justice Department had no plans to regulate AI but that “if anyone associated with AI violates criminal law, we’ll investigate that.”

The case law and FBI and Justice Department approach "is going to be fascinating because it can go a bunch of different ways,” said former Justice Department cybercrime prosecutor Sid Mody.

Various criminal statutes govern cyberspace

The Department of Justice does have statutes at its disposal for a company determined to have been "reckless in the way that it tests its AI agents," said Michael Zweiback, a former chief of the cyber and intellectual property section of the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

"And if in fact the AI agent gets loose in the wild and then causes substantial damage to other companies, then DOJ has to look at it from a prosecutorial discretion issue as to whether or not they want to make an example out of the particular company," he added.

Among the possibly relevant laws: a 40-year-old statute called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it illegal to knowingly access a computer without authorization. The White House cited the statute, used against hacktivists, nation-state hackers and other cybercriminals, in an executive order directing prosecutors to pursue those who use AI to illegally access computers or further other crimes.

But some experts say even if there may be a basis to investigate, that hardly means a crime was committed.

For one thing, the law makes several references to behavior done “knowingly” or “intentionally," but there's no indication the autonomous agents were given any directive or tasked by the companies to enter another network, said Kiran Raj, a former senior Justice Department official who specializes in cybersecurity law.

In detailed public accountings of the incidents, the companies have characterized the hacks as inadvertent outgrowths of testing and evaluation, with OpenAI calling its model behavior “unexpected" and “unprecedented."

“I think it would be a pretty big stretch to say any of these companies are intentionally trying to do this. That's not their purpose. That's not what they were doing,” said Raj, also a former Microsoft program manager. “The fact that an AI agent may intentionally be doing something is going to be, I think, pretty hard to attribute to the companies.”

Tens of thousands of Catholic devotees are converging on St. Louis for a formal ceremony of beatification on Thursday, in which the prelate will be designated Blessed Fulton Sheen — one step away from sainthood.

The afternoon ceremony is taking place at the Dome at America's Center after years of delays. The stadium was chosen for the site because there wasn't a venue large enough in his home Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, to accommodate the anticipated number of attendees.

About 48,000 tickets were distributed as of Tuesday, according to organizers with the diocese and the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Foundation, which advocates for his sainthood.

The event honors a prelate who was once a regular presence in the living rooms of millions of Americans — including that of the future Pope Leo XIV, who says he watched the broadcasts of his fellow Illinois native while growing up in Chicago.

Sheen was a pioneering radio priest who quickly adopted the new medium of television in the 1950s, when he began hosting the program, “Life is Worth Living.” Dressed in a cassock, cape and skullcap, he stood at a chalkboard and delivered moral and religious lessons without a narrow Catholic focus.

The show competed favorably against entertainers Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra on other networks. In an Emmy acceptance speech, Sheen thanked his writers — Gospel scribes Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He’s been called America’s first televangelist.

“Archbishop Sheen was a beacon of faith, hope, and love who shone through radio and television for decades,” Pope Leo said in a June speech to directors of The Pontifical Mission Societies, which Sheen headed in the U.S. for 16 years. “I myself witnessed his evangelization efforts as I was growing up.”

Sheen was born in 1895 in the small town of El Paso, Illinois, and raised in Peoria. After becoming a priest and earning a doctorate in philosophy, he had a short pastorate in Peoria before becoming a professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington.

He became known both for his academic lectures and his plainspoken addresses from the pulpit and the studio, first on radio and then on TV. He often signed off with the benediction, “God love you.”

Sheen appeared in a Time magazine cover article. He guided celebrities and others converting to Catholicism.

He met with popes and spoke at the reformist Second Vatican Council. He railed against communism, though he opposed the Vietnam War.

Sheen raised funds and traveled the world on behalf of Catholic missions. He served as a bishop in New York state, retiring as an archbishop. After his death at 84, he was buried at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York until his niece won a court battle in 2019 to move his body to Peoria’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception.

It's there, where Sheen had been a young altar server and was later ordained a priest, that pilgrims now place crucifixes and other items on his marble tomb, giving them status as relics.

To qualify for beatification, the Vatican normally requires one miracle attributable to the faithful seeking the candidate's heavenly prayers.

The late Pope Francis approved the beatification, attributing to Sheen the resuscitation of an infant born in 2010 without a pulse and revived only after lengthy efforts by medical workers. The child, the now-teenaged James Fulton Engstrom, is slated to present relics of Sheen at the ceremony, accompanied by his family, who had sought Sheen's intercession for healing.

The beatification was originally scheduled for 2019, but the Vatican delayed the ceremony. The Diocese of Rochester, which Sheen briefly led in the 1960s, requested the delay out of caution, due to legal investigations taking place then into the oversight of priests accused of sexual abuse across New York state.

Church officials later concluded that Sheen’s record gave no cause for further delay, and plans for the ceremony resumed. Pope Leo XIV approved the beatification earlier this year.

“May the example and the intercession of this holy bishop, known for his evangelizing work through the media, inspire many others likewise to find new ways of spreading the gospel message with joyful enthusiasm,” Leo said Wednesday on the eve of the ceremony.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

The 15-year-old is not being charged as an adult but has been designated for potential adult sentencing if convicted.

Under an adult designation, a judge may sentence a juvenile as a juvenile, as an adult, or impose a blended juvenile sentence that can include an adult sentence if the juvenile violates the terms.

The shooting occurred on Sept. 13, 2026, around 1:48 a.m. at a residence in the 7000 block of Brace Street.

Detroit police responding to a reported shooting found the 14-year-old unresponsive with a gunshot wound to the head.

He was taken to a local hospital, where he died from his injuries.

Prosecutors allege the 15-year-old robbed the victim of his backpack before firing a handgun at him and fleeing the scene.

The teen is also accused of lying to police during the investigation into the boy’s death, according to prosecutors.

The teen turned himself in Sept. 17 at Detroit Public Safety Headquarters.

He is charged with first-degree murder, felony murder, armed robbery, two counts of lying to a peace officer and three counts of felony firearm.

The teen was arraigned Wednesday (Sept. 23) and remanded to the Juvenile Detention Facility following a hearing.

His probable cause conference is scheduled for Sept. 29 at 11:30 a.m. via Zoom.

Campbell also knows the man leading the Jets defense.

Aaron Glenn, Detroit’s former defensive coordinator, spent five seasons with the Lions before becoming New York’s head coach.

Campbell said Glenn has built the Jets into a more talented team with a clear identity in his second season.

“This is not the same team as it was last year,” Campbell said. “It was about building it from the ground up. And they’re in year two. They’re much more talented. They play hard. They have an identity. They play a physical brand of football.”

Campbell said New York wants to control the ball, establish the run and create opportunities for explosive plays downfield.

He also pointed to the Jets’ defense and special teams as reasons the Lions will have to be prepared.

“There’s an argument they should be 2-0 right now,” Campbell said. “So we have a good idea what’s coming in here and what we need to be ready for. But we’re ready to embrace this challenge and looking forward to it.”

The familiarity between Campbell and Glenn adds another layer to the matchup.

Campbell said Glenn’s ability to work through difficult stretches was one reason he continued to have confidence in him during Glenn’s time as Detroit’s defensive coordinator.

“When things get a little rocky, that’s where you really find out what your conviction in something is and in someone,” Campbell said. “You don’t just let go of good coaches.”

Campbell pointed to a difficult stretch during the 2022 season when Glenn’s defense shifted toward a more aggressive, attacking style before eventually adjusting its approach.

Campbell said Glenn showed an important quality by recognizing the need for change and making it.

“That’s a sign of a good coach,” Campbell said. “And Shep’s got that, too. But that’s why AG just checked all those boxes.”

Now Glenn has the Jets defense forcing turnovers at a high rate.

Campbell said New York’s emphasis on punching the ball out is evident on film and requires attention from Detroit’s offense.

“It’s an emphasis every week,” Campbell said. “Every week we show what the opponent, how they’re getting balls out, what they’re doing.”

Campbell specifically praised Jets linebacker Demario Davis for his aggressive approach to creating takeaways.

“He bites the football, he hits with violence, and he punches at the football,” Campbell said. “And you watch them, they’re all doing it. And so that goes a long way. It’s an identity, an attitude that’s developed.”

The Lions also will have to account for quarterback Geno Smith, whom Campbell said has played well against Detroit at Ford Field.

Campbell said keeping Smith in the pocket will be a major point of emphasis.

“He is doing a good job of this whole thing about them possessing the football and finding the completions, taking the shots when they’re there, just playing smart football,” Campbell said.

Smith can hurt defenses when he escapes pressure, Campbell said, making containment particularly important.

“If he makes throws in the pocket, then we’ve got to fight the next play,” Campbell said. “But if we let him get out of there in the open field and run or find a throw downfield because he broke contain, that’s where that could be problematic.”

Campbell dismissed the idea that the Jets could present a trap game for the Lions.

Detroit enters the matchup at 1-1, and New York is also 1-1.

Campbell said the Lions understand the challenge because of Glenn’s familiarity with the organization and because of what they have seen from the Jets early this season.

“This is not going to be a trap game,” Campbell said. “This is going to be a knockout, 60-minute brawl. It’s going to go down.”

Detroit also has areas it wants to clean up offensively.

Campbell said the Lions have scored 31 points through their first two games but have been inconsistent and need to improve on third-down conversions.

He highlighted missed opportunities in the red zone and self-inflicted mistakes as areas to correct.

“We just have to be more consistent, and we’ve got to convert on some of these third downs,” Campbell said.

Campbell also said the Lions must continue protecting the football against a Jets defense that aggressively attacks it.

“When our opportunity is there, we have to strike,” Campbell said. “We have to be able to strike because that alone is going to alleviate a lot of stress on our defense.”

Campbell also addressed defensive tackle Alim McNeill’s workload after he played nearly 150 snaps through the first two games.

Campbell said the Lions would ideally keep McNeill fresh but noted that young defensive lineman Skyler Gill-Howard is continuing to develop as a backup.

“The more he grows, the more he’ll play,” Campbell said.

Campbell also discussed adding safety Bishop Fitzgerald to Detroit’s 53-man roster.

He said Joseph stood out to the Lions during the pre-draft process because of his versatility and range.

“He’s a football player,” Campbell said. “He’s somebody that’s got some versatility to him. We felt like he’s got some range, can play top down.”

The Lions will host the Jets on Sunday at 1 p.m.

The Lions will host the New York Jets on Sunday (Sept. 23), with former Detroit defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn returning to Ford Field as the Jets’ head coach.

Detroit quarterback Jared Goff said Wednesday that Glenn’s familiarity with the Lions creates an interesting back-and-forth heading into the matchup.

“He certainly knows us, and we know him,” Goff said. “It’s like that kind of back and forth, cat and mouse. Is he going to change? Are we going to change? What are we going to do different?”

Glenn spent five seasons as Detroit’s defensive coordinator before taking over as New York’s head coach. Goff said Glenn’s teams have taken on the same competitiveness and physicality he emphasized during his time with the Lions.

“I think you can start to feel the team take on his identity,” Goff said. “You can certainly see that in the first two weeks, just the competitiveness that they play with and the speed and the physicality.”

The Lions enter Sunday at 1-1 after a 41-31 loss at Buffalo last week.

Goff said Detroit has identified several areas that need improvement, particularly pre-snap mistakes and missed opportunities on short fields.

Detroit had a first-and-goal opportunity in Week 1 against the New Orleans Saints at the one-yard line and also turned the ball over on offense, mistakes Goff said could have changed the game.

“Just some of those pre-snap mental (mistakes) and then taking advantage of those short fields would be great,” Goff said.

Goff also pointed to positives through the first two games, including production from the offensive line and an unselfish group of receivers.

He said the Lions have enough playmakers to make things difficult for opposing defenses, even when certain players aren’t seeing as many targets as they would like.

“We have a lot of guys that can make plays with the ball in their hands,” Goff said.

The Lions have scored at least 30 points in each of their first two games, but Goff said the offense needs to turn that production into more consistent results.

“We’ve scored 30 in back-to-back weeks, and great. It’s awesome. We’re towards the top of the league in points,” Goff said. “But one of the weeks it wasn’t good enough.”

Ball security a major focus

The Jets’ defense has forced six fumbles through two games, making ball security a major focus for Detroit.

Goff said protecting the football is always part of the weekly preparation, but the Jets’ emphasis on forcing turnovers makes it even more important.

“When you run into these teams that have a knack for it, you’re a little bit more aware of it,” Goff said.

Running back Jahmyr Gibbs also described Glenn’s defense as aggressive and said the Jets blitz frequently.

“They always play hard,” Gibbs said. “They blitz a ton. You can’t take them lightly at all.”

Gibbs said Detroit’s offensive approach remains focused on distributing the football among its many playmakers.

The Lions have leaned on Gibbs, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jameson Williams and other offensive weapons through the opening two weeks.

“We’ve done a pretty good job the past four years I’ve been here,” Gibbs said. “Just continuing to do stuff like spreading the ball around, getting everybody a chance to eat, and continue winning games.”

Gibbs also said he isn’t concerned about Detroit’s 1-1 record.

“We’ve been 1-1 before,” he said. “We’ve been 1-1, went 9-8. We’ve been 1-1 and went 15-2. So, we just got to keep pushing.”

Hutchinson ready for normal week

Defensive end Aidan Hutchinson said he feels refreshed after playing 138 snaps over five days during Detroit’s opening two games, including the short turnaround into the Buffalo game.

The Lions had the weekend off before returning to a normal practice week.

“I feel great now,” Hutchinson said. “We had the weekend off and kind of got into a normal week.”

Hutchinson drew attention during the Buffalo game after television cameras repeatedly showed him on the sideline between plays.

He said the fatigue looked normal.

“I do this every game,” Hutchinson said. “I’m out there for 10 plays, and I’ll go to the sideline and just get some air for one or two plays.”

Hutchinson said playing extensive snaps is part of his preparation and that he has trained specifically to handle the workload.

The Lions’ defensive front also is focused on eliminating the breakdowns that contributed to Buffalo’s rushing success.

Hutchinson said the problems weren’t necessarily complicated.

“It’s just all around the board,” Hutchinson said. “You have a couple holes here and there, and they just pop a run.”

He said Detroit’s defense needs to focus on proper gap assignments and executing its responsibilities rather than becoming overly focused on an opponent’s scheme.

“Just simplify it, play your key, get off the ball and go,” Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson reflects on Glenn

Hutchinson also discussed his relationship with Glenn, who coached him early in his Lions career.

The former Michigan Wolverines standout said Glenn gave him increasing freedom as their relationship developed and described the former coordinator as an influential leader.

“AG was great, man,” Hutchinson said. “He was great.”

Hutchinson said Glenn’s ability to lead players through difficult periods reminds him of current Lions defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard, who is in his first season overseeing Detroit’s defense.

“AG is such a leader of men for sure,” Hutchinson said. “We all always trusted him to figure that out. And I think the same is with Shep.”

Miller prepares for Jets pass rusher

Rookie offensive tackle Blake Miller also spoke Wednesday about his upcoming matchup with Jets pass rusher David Bailey.

Miller faced Bailey in college and said he remembers recognizing his talent before the game.

“I remember sitting there and talking to my other tackle in college like, ‘This guy’s a special player,’” Miller said.

Miller missed Detroit’s game against Buffalo because of the short turnaround after an injury but said he is feeling healthy and ready to return.

He said he spent the week studying his first NFL game and identifying areas to improve, including technique, pass protection, and when to be aggressive within Detroit’s offense.

“There’s plenty to clean up,” Miller said. “To me, that’s the fun part.”

Fitzgerald eager for opportunity

Safety Bishop Fitzgerald is also getting his first opportunity with Detroit after joining the Lions’ 53-man roster.

Fitzgerald went undrafted after a college career in which he established himself as a versatile defensive back and playmaker.

He previously spent time with Pittsburgh and said he was excited when Detroit reached out.

“Oh man, let’s do it — like, right now,” Fitzgerald said of learning about the opportunity.

Fitzgerald said his ability to play multiple safety positions, work in the box and contribute on special teams could help him earn a role.

“Just trusting your instincts,” Fitzgerald said of his approach to creating turnovers. “Coaches put you around the ball for a reason.”

Fitzgerald also said he is looking forward to learning from Lions safeties Brian Branch and Kerby Joseph, players he watched before entering the NFL.

“Being in the same room with them, it’s a great opportunity for me,” Fitzgerald said.

For the Lions, Sunday’s matchup provides a chance to correct the mistakes from Buffalo while facing a Jets team led by a coach who knows Detroit’s personnel and philosophy well.

Goff said that familiarity could make the game unpredictable, but execution will ultimately determine the outcome.

“At the end of the day, it’s who executes,” Goff said. “Who’s the best late in the game, in the red zone, third down, all that stuff will still continue this week.”

The warning came despite signs of improvement in other provinces, including Ituri, the outbreak’s epicenter. The outbreak has spread to seven provinces, with 7,773 confirmed cases and 3,759 deaths, according to the latest government figures.

Between Aug. 31 and Sept. 20, cases fell 26% in Ituri province and 15% in Haut-Uele, said Marie Roseline Belizaire, the WHO’s regional emergency director for Africa. But transmission patterns vary widely and the outbreak remains uncontrolled, she said.

“While cases and deaths are declining in some provinces, they continue to rise in others,” Belizaire said. “The outbreak is still not under control and remains spread across a wide geographic area.”

The outbreak is spreading under extremely difficult conditions, fueled by insecurity, displacement, a health workers’ strike and intense population movements. The World Health Organization has said it is on track to surpass the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak, the deadliest on record, which killed more than 11,000 people, primarily in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Catherine Smallwood, the WHO’s Ebola incident manager, said cases and deaths had begun declining in North Kivu after several weeks of increases. But although treatment beds are being added daily, facilities still lack enough staff and partners to operate them.

“The human resources gap is one of the biggest gaps,” Smallwood said.

WHO representative in Congo Anne Ancia said one Ebola treatment center requires about 300 health professionals, including anesthetists, hygienists, nurses and general practitioners.

“We are building Ebola treatment centers but do not always have the human resources needed to operate them,” Ancia said. “Those health workers must be paid.”

Frontline workers in Ituri previously went on strike over unpaid wages, worsening access to care. Health Minister Roger Kamba said in July that the government was verifying payroll lists after the names of people not involved in the response were added. Frontline workers said officials promised to pay the arrears, but some workers received nothing and others only part of what they were owed.

Another major challenge in the response is the fatality rate among children, according to the WHO. Children under five have the highest case fatality rate, more than 60% compared with approximately 40% among adults, Belizaire said.

WHO Ebola Incident Manager Smallwood said detecting cases among children under five is also very difficult because the children can’t necessarily explain their symptoms, and the presentation of symptoms can be confusing.

Iraq, meanwhile, pledged to remove armed groups that Turkey considers security threats from the region of Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq, according to a joint statement issued after the meeting late Wednesday between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi.

“In light of the progress Iraq has achieved through security measures, Turkish forces will gradually hand over the Bashiqa-Zelikan camp to the Iraqi federal government, in accordance with the agreed-upon mechanism and timeline,” according to the joint statement released by Erdogan and al-Zaidi’s offices.

Turkey and Iraq also agreed to “fully extend the authority of the Iraqi state in Sinjar and to end the presence of banned foreign armed elements,” the statement read.

The strategically-located Bashiqa base has long been an issue of contention between Turkey and Iraq, with Turkey failing to fully withdraw forces, despite previous discussions for their removal. Turkey established a military presence there in 2015 to support operations against the Islamic State group and help secure the region.

Although Turkey maintains several bases in northern Iraq for operations against the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, the Bashiqa camp is Turkey's furthest base from its border.

Turkey, for its part, has long been pressing Iraq to curb groups with links to the PKK and other non-state armed groups from operating in Sinjar.

The Iraqi government announced earlier this month that the Sinjar Resistance Units, a Yazidi militia affiliated with the PKK, had agreed to disarm and eligible fighters would be integrated into the Iraqi security forces. The group played a significant role in the fight against IS, but was seen by Turkey as a threat because of its PKK affiliation.

The agreement came as the U.S. is ending its decades-long military presence in Iraq, with officials saying the hundreds of troops remaining in northern Iraq will be out by a Sept. 30 deadline.

Turkey, meanwhile, is engaged in peace efforts with the PKK aimed at ending a decades-long conflict. The group, whose fighters have launched attacks on Turkish targets from bases in northern Iraq, has agreed to disband and lay down arms as part of the effort.

“Our target is Russia’s ability to finance this war, to drag it out, to make it more brutal and more destructive,” Zelenskyy told the U.N. General Assembly’s annual gathering. “Russia’s finances and Russia’s production are what must be stopped if Putin is to be stopped.”

When Russia gets money from trade, “it always says no to diplomacy,” Zelenskyy argued, “so Russia’s revenues must remain a target.”

Earlier Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov clashed with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and his country's European supporters at a U.N. Security Council meeting, and Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met on the assembly sidelines and discussed the war.

Top US diplomat talks about potential for a ceasefire

Rubio later told reporters that Russia and Ukraine have expressed interest in a limited ceasefire that would halt attacks on grain shipments — both countries are major exporters — and on each country’s energy sectors, which have been targeted in escalating drone and missile attacks.

Rubio said reaching even a partial deal would be difficult but worthwhile, noting that Zelenskyy has publicly endorsed such a plan. The United States would be willing to help make it happen, Rubio said.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry made no mention of a partial deal on grain shipments in a statement after the Lavrov-Rubio meeting. The statement reiterated that the root causes of what it calls its “special military operation” must be addressed.

At the Security Council, Lavrov said Russia will not “pause” its military action, claiming Europe would use it to “pump" Ukraine with weapons. He also made no mention of any kind of grain and energy deal, called Ukraine’s government “terrorists,” and said Moscow’s military operation aims to ensure Russia’s security and the rights of Russian speakers.

Lavrov is due to address the General Assembly on Saturday.

Zelenskyy cast doubt on Russia’s interest in ending the fighting. “Something always seems to stop Putin from saying, ‘That’s it. Enough. Peace,’” Zelenskyy said. “Can you even imagine him without war? He is ‘patient zero’, the one from whom this idea of war keeps spreading further.”

“The more freedom Putin has to act, the more dangerous the world becomes for everyone else,” the Ukrainian president warned.

The war has reverberated across the planet -- with global repercussions for fuel, fertilizer and grain shipments — and for geopolitics, widening divisions between Russia and the West.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, expecting to take the capital, Kyiv, in a week. But Ukraine rallied to defend its sovereignty, and the conflict has dragged on, with front-line positions in eastern and southern Ukraine largely unchanged since last year.

Western analysts estimate that over 500,000 Russian troops have been killed and that Ukraine has recorded more than 500,000 military casualties, including up to 140,000 deaths. Neither country discloses its own casualty totals.

Russia and Ukraine have intensified their long-range attacks with drones and missiles, and Russian drones pounded Kyiv Wednesday, killing two people and wounding 23; two others were injured by a strike that started a big fire at a shopping mall in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it struck Ukrainian military-industrial and energy facilities, logistics centers, and sea vessels overnight. The ministry said its air defenses intercepted more than 500 Ukrainian drones over multiple Russian regions and Crimea, as well as the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. Crimea is the peninsula that Russia seized by force and illegally annexed in 2014.

Zelenskyy says ‘you can stand and survive’

Zelenskyy told the assembly that Russia has used 63,000 attack drones of different types against Ukraine so far this year alone. While celebrating that his own country “has proven that even against a much bigger enemy, you can stand and survive,” he implored world leaders to deny Putin money or foreign fighters.

“Limit his money. Limit his war,” the Ukrainian leader said.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine must boost its military and has already successfully tested four new jet-powered interceptor drones against Iranian-designed Shahed drones used by Russia in Ukraine. He also heralded drone and anti-ballistic missile agreements and programs with various countries.

Zelenskyy worried, however, that artificial intelligence “will begin to decide what happens on the battlefield” with the development of autonomous killer weapons.

“We need peace before we reach that point," he said.

“Sometimes, it may seem that Ukraine is focused, focused, only on war because we speak about weapons, we speak about defense and sanctions against the aggressor. But Ukrainians did not choose this war,” Zelenskyy said. “We choose not to die. …. We are defending ourselves.”

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AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed from New York.

Meanwhile, the governing National Assembly of Independents, known by its French acronym RNI, suffered major losses while a moderate Islamist party made a strong comeback.

Moroccans voted for a new parliament Wednesday in an election shaped by mounting frustration among young people, high unemployment despite a thriving economy and demands for better schools, hospitals and housing.

Authenticity and Modernity, or PAM, won 97 of the 395 seats in the House of Representatives, Morocco's lower house. The party was followed by the Independents with 66 seats and the Istiqlal Party with 65. The Justice and Development Party, a moderate Islamist party that won just 13 seats in 2021, surged to 54.

Authenticity and Modernity and Istiqlal were members of the parliamentary majority that formed the outgoing Independents-led government.

Authenticity and Modernity was founded in 2008 by Fouad Ali El Himma, a childhood friend and close adviser to King Mohammed VI. The party emerged as a major political force seen as a counterweight to Justice and Development, which previously led the government for a decade.

Voter turnout was 38% — the lowest since 2007.

The vote was the first since deadly youth-led protests nearly a year ago and a mass attempt by migrants to cross Morocco’s northern border into the Spanish territory of Ceuta that left dozens dead. It will determine the next prime minister and the makeup of the government, which will serve alongside a powerful monarchy that retains broad authority over strategic affairs.

The next government will oversee billions of dollars in investment as Morocco prepares to co-host the 2030 World Cup, prompting some to describe it as the “World Cup government.” The new political leadership will also face pressure to address everyday concerns, including jobs, wages and the cost of living.

The Moroccan Constitution requires the king to appoint a prime minister from the party that wins the most seats in legislative elections.

Since no single party is expected to capture an absolute majority, the winner will need to build a coalition government. Portfolios are split among the political allies, but the palace traditionally keeps key posts such as defense and foreign affairs under royal control.

One possibility for prime minister is Faouzi Lakjaa, president of Morocco’s soccer federation, who recently joined the PAM party and has been buoyed by Morocco’s recent soccer achievements.

Fatima-Zahra Mansouri, 50, mayor of Marrakech and minister of urban planning, is another possibility. If selected, she would be Morocco’s first female prime minister.

He went 1 for 4 with two strikeouts and a walk while batting second as the designated hitter against the San Diego Padres.

“He looked good,” manager Dave Roberts said. “At-bat quality good, there wasn’t any chase, I thought he hit the ball hard his first at-bat, just missed a homer in that other at-bat, took a walk. It just felt like he wasn’t sped up at all and I think he came out of it pretty well.”

A roar went up from Dodgers fans as Ohtani walked to the plate to Michael Bublé's “Feeling Good.” He promptly lined a 2-1 pitch from Padres starter Robbie Ray into right field and the fans got loud again. Ohtani was out at second base when Will Smith grounded into a fielder's choice to third.

“Tonight showed that he's in a good spot physically,” Roberts said.

Ohtani didn’t speak to the media afterward. He’ll be back in the lineup Thursday for the series finale.

Mookie Betts was in Ohtani's usual leadoff spot, where he's been since the two-way superstar went on the injured list on Sept. 8.

Betts is hitting .366 with six home runs, 21 RBIs, 13 walks and 18 runs scored in 18 games in September. He's tied for third in the major leagues with 26 hits this month, and also ranks among National League leaders this month in extra-base hits, RBIs, total bases, doubles and runs.

Ohtani last played on Sept. 7 against Cincinnati and came in hitting .277 with 30 homers, 80 RBIs, 89 runs scored and 80 walks in 134 games. He appeared physically compromised at the plate, shaking out his arm and wincing at times.

“A few weeks ago you could see that he couldn’t hit a fastball, he was underneath everything and it was a slower swing,” Roberts said before the game. “Just controlling the swing, the barrel, I think that’s something I’ll look at and obviously stuff like the wincing, but I don’t expect to see any of that.”

Roberts said he likely would have Ohtani leading off and Betts hitting second against right-handed pitching.

Roberts expects to see a focused Ohtani at the plate.

“It’s go-time for all of us and I think he’s in a good spot,” Roberts said. “He's getting ready for the postseason. His mind should be there and my bet is that that’s where it’s at.”

In other moves, pitcher Tarik Skubal was reinstated from the bereavement list. He is scheduled to start Friday at San Francisco. Reliever Kyle Hurt was optioned to Triple-A Oklahoma City.

Rookie Josue De Paula sent back to minors, could return for postseason

With Ohtani's return, Josue De Paula was sent down to Triple-A to join the Comets in the Pacific Coast League playoffs against the Las Vegas Aviators. De Paula had been in the lineup as the DH.

De Paula quickly became a fan favorite during Ohtani's absence. The 21-year-old New York native reached base safely in 10 of his first 11 games in the majors. He went 2 for 3 with a run scored and a walk while notching his first career triple in the Dodgers' 7-0 win over the Padres on Tuesday.

“He performed more than admirably,” Roberts said. “This also just gives us an opportunity to potentially have him back for the postseason. He’s a part of the conversation and he’s earned that, and that’s what I told him.”

If De Paula makes the postseason roster, he would serve as a pinch hitter.

“Josue has been awesome,” said Andrew Friedman, president of baseball operations. “Injected some real life and energy into our team.”

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See AP’s full MLB coverage here

Trump’s territorial ambitions over Greenland almost broke the NATO military alliance and shattered trust with one of America’s oldest and closest partners. The new defense agreement puts an end to the standoff. But was it worth the cost?

While the new defense agreement is a bit broader, the United States already had extensive military access under an existing 1951 deal and all the gains laid out in the agreement signed on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday could, ostensibly, have been achieved by asking nicely a year ago. The trans-Atlantic distrust created since the end of 2024 seems a very high price to pay for what may ultimately be a fairly incremental gain.

Interestingly, one place may emerge from this standoff as the real winner: Greenland itself.

The promised investments and contracts may never fully materialize, but the episode marks a major step forward in its push for greater autonomy and a more influential seat at the table. Greenland is no longer merely the subject of foreign policy decided by its former colonial rulers. Increasingly, it is helping to shape it.

There's been progress toward self-determination

“A notable change is Greenland itself at the table today, signing this agreement," said Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen speaking to a room cram packed with journalists and officials at the UN to witness the signing of the deal.

That's an understatement. The world’s largest island, home to about 56,000 mostly Inuit people, was still considered a colony until the early 1950s. Progress towards greater self-determination has been slow and it wasn't until 2009 that Greenland became a self-governing country within the Kingdom of Denmark.

Even then, while the Self-Government Act recognized Greenland’s right to independence when requested by local voters in the future, Denmark retained control of defense and foreign affairs.

“I cannot stress it enough: This is the first time that we are venturing into a binding agreement as a country," Naaja Nathanielsen, one of Greenland’s two lawmakers in the Danish parliament and a former government minister in Nuuk, told The Associated Press. “That is a huge step forward in our quest for more self-autonomy.”

Denmark and Greenland confront their own troubled past

Like most former colonial powers that discover history keeps receipts, Denmark's ties with Greenland are complicated. Greenland's economy is heavily dependent on Denmark, families and students often live between the two territories and the cultural linguistic ties are strong. Yet underwriting modern relations are centuries of Danish policies that dehumanized Greenlanders and their families.

They included forced contraception, the removal of Inuit children for reeducation by Danish foster families, and controversial parental-competency tests that led to children being separated from their parents.

“For many, many years you believed that you were a good colonizer,” Múte Bourup Egede, then Greenland's prime minister and now its foreign minister, reminded Danish journalists early last year, shortly after a newly elected Trump made his first military threat against the island. “But time has also caught up with us, and ... cruel things have come to light.”

The abuses are not distant history; many victims remain alive. Hundreds of Inuit women have claimed compensation from Denmark, alleging that health authorities violated their rights by fitting them with intrauterine devices — often when they were teenagers and without their informed consent. Danish authorities estimate that as many as 4,500 women and girls received IUDs between the 1960s and mid-1970s.

While the first official apology for the historic mistreatment had long been coming it was finally delivered in the summer of 2025.

The standoff with the United States “has been applying pressure and focused some of the Danish attention” on reconciliation with Greenland said Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, but “perhaps, some Greenlanders feel that it’s not as credible as it could have been without Trump.”

Trump's involvement changed the equation

While Denmark moved to address past grievances, anger with Trump's tactics also helped shore up support for its sovereignty and take the edge off calls by some in Greenland for quick moves to independence.

At the height of the crisis over Trump's ambitions in January, Nielsen said that “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO."

For Denmark, the main victory is no doubt getting the US president off its back and succeeding in framing the crisis as a European security problem.

Danish and Greenlandic diplomats “have been working very hard to have European allies be part of this," Pram Gad said. "The result is an attempt to patch together the NATO alliance.”

And while Denmark has accepted some limitations to its sovereignty, investments by adversary countries such as Russia had long been off the table.

“The benefit of keeping the transatlantic alliance, or patching it together, or at least not allowing Greenland to be the occasion for Trump to blow it up, I think that counts heavily on both the Danish and the Greenlandic cost-benefit analysis here,” he said.

After Tuesday’s signing ceremony, relief was palpable. But while the Danish and Greenland delegations celebrated with a cold beer on a rooftop bar in Manhattan, the Greenland crisis has scarred a once-undefiable bond. It leaves leaders in Copenhagen, Nuuk and other European capitals now assessing the reliability of the United States — and whether a signed agreement can repair trust once it has been broken.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came this assessment: “We could lose control of the future to AI.”

Both said the countries of the world, through the U.N. Security Council, where they testified Wednesday, have to set safeguards of some kind to prevent the technology from getting too powerful to rein in.

They also called for the world to make sure that the power of AI isn’t concentrated in one company or country. They also touted the benefits of the technology for bettering humanity and what Altman called “giving people more power over their own lives.”

Those tech leaders “are telling us in stark terms that it cannot be left to them to prevent disaster from befalling the world,” British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said at the Security Council. “We cannot ignore them because they are right.’’

AI will be at the heart of G20 discussions

Miliband said when the U.K. leads the G20 next year, it will put controlling AI at the heart of discussions, looking for a single set of global standards “to insure that AI development is safe.”

But, the United States said: Don’t do it.

Worries about control of AI are “not a reason to pause its further development or to constrain it with new global governance structure,” said White House Science Adviser Michael Kratsios. “We want you, our allies and partners, to share in the benefits of this technology.”

The U.S. and China are jostling for AI dominance — and Chinese U.N. Ambassador Fu Cong emphasized that all countries should be able to choose AI technology as they see fit.

He warned against “banding together into a petty us-vs.-them clique in the tech sector and forcing other countries to take sides” and enabling unnamed major powers that he described as seeking “digital hegemony.” He called on countries instead to promote open-source models -- China’s approach to the technology.

For most of the world leaders, one key question about AI is this: Who should control life-and-death decisions — human or machine?

Amodei, Altman and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, who spoke via a glitchy remote connection, spoke with the U.N.’s most powerful council because they and world leaders are trying to figure out not just whether to control AI, but by whom, how it could possibly be done and when it might be just too late.

The day before, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of “killer robots.” Experts and European leaders said that’s not hyperbole but something that’s either already a grim reality or perilously close.

Amodei called on world leaders to agree on not letting AI build biological weapons, figure out how to verify what models have the capability to do and “establish common standards” for testing and for loss of control and misuse.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, whose country convened Wednesday’s meeting, compared the current state of AI to both the runaway computer HAL9000 in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the dawn of the atomic age.

“Just as with the atom back then, the international community must now regulate AI in order to make the most of its potential and avoid the worst,” Barrot said.

Other leaders and nations are paying close attention to AI

His wasn't the only concern expressed during this high-profile U.N. meeting week.

“We must not allow the cost of today’s hesitation to become tomorrow’s catastrophe,” said Liberian UN Ambassador Lewis G. Brown II.

Ukrainian President President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking at the General Assembly, said some kind of human control over machines must achieved soon. Otherwise, he said, for his country — at war for 4½ years — it may be just too late.

“There is already a real possibility that AI, not only people, will begin to decide what happens on the battlefield. And we need peace before we reach that point,” Zelenskyy said.

Last month, a Russian drone seemingly using AI “autonomously made a targeting decision that killed three Ukrainians. Killer robots are technically easy to build, and they are real. We should not be under any illusions otherwise,” Kentaro Toyama, an information technology professor at the University of Michigan, said in an email.

Data scientist Rumman Chowdhury, co-founder of the accountability nonprofit Humane Intelligence, said the idea of killer robots “evokes a science-fiction villain, when the question I want the public to ask is much more concrete: Who authorized a machine to select and attack a target, under what constraints, and who answers for the result?”

The U.N. meeting unfolded as Chinese President Xi Jinping headed to Washington for a much-anticipated state visit. AI interests are looking to what comes out of Xi’s discussions with U.S. President Donald Trump. Earlier, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two countries had discussed a potential new “notification mechanism” for AI incidents that could impact national security.

But on Tuesday, Trump, lauding AI as “superintelligence,” said the United States would reject efforts to control the technology as it tries to win the development race with China. Kratsios was the one of the few who used that term in the Security Council.

Meanwhile, regional groups in Europe, Asia and elsewhere also are trying to coordinate AI policies, and various nations — and even subcomponents, such as U.S. states — are crafting their own.

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Farnoush Amiri, Edith M. Lederer and Jennifer McDermott contributed to this report from the United Nations.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

The women are among the thousands of federal workers and contract employees in the Washington region whose lives were upended when the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency overhauled the federal workforce last year, cutting jobs and grants.

A new survey released Thursday by Gallup and the Greater Washington Community Foundation shows the far-reaching impact on the nation's capital.

Despite living in one of the most affluent parts of the country, many in the greater D.C. area — which includes parts of Maryland and Virginia and is referred to as the DMV — now see a bleak local job market and rising costs. Some are even considering leaving the region.

“It wasn’t just about our jobs being gone. It was really this awful ripple effect of all these lives and destinies really disrupted," Nataro said.

The District of Columbia, which official figures show accounted for a fifth of the roughly 100,000 job losses in the region and is host to an ongoing deployment of the National Guard, has been particularly impacted. According to the survey, about two-thirds of D.C. residents said their household had been directly affected by the job cuts, one of the highest percentages in the region.

Federal job cuts impacted higher-income households

More affluent households were hit especially hard by the cuts, the survey found. A majority — 58% — of those in households with an annual income of $90,000 or more said they were impacted by the reductions, compared to 48% of lower-income households.

Trumbull earned over $130,000 annually at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After DOGE came for her job, she took a deferred resignation in the second-round offering, under threat of a forthcoming USDA reorganization that wasn’t really a decent option. She only secured new, part-time employment a year later.

During that time, she had to take a forbearance on her mortgage. She applied for public assistance. She and her husband took home just $2,000 a month, she said, while amassing debt from their home ownership.

When jobs didn’t come through, she did some contract work and taught to “cobble together enough money to make sure my kids were supplied — cause you don’t get to stop buying diapers.”

“I don’t see a future where I can go back to not worrying about moving money around constantly” to cover bills, she said.

Even though lower-income residents were less likely to report any impacts, the survey suggests that hardship was still acute among this group. About 1 in 10, 14%, DMV residents say that they or someone in their household accessed social services like food banks or job placement support for the first time in the past year, which rose to about one-quarter of those in households earning less than $90,000 per year.

Many residents worry about housing payments and healthcare

About one-third of DMV residents say they are “very” or “somewhat” worried about being able to pay their rent or mortgage, down from about half in 2023 following the economic troubles of the COVID pandemic. Renters, Black and Hispanic adults, and lower-income residents are particularly worried about housing payments.

Nataro, 42, and a single mom of two young children, asked her landlord for a rent reduction after she lost her job at USAID, one of DOGE's first targets. She signed up for food stamps and unemployment assistance. She found work in academia quickly but took a substantial pay cut.

“It’s very humbling, because you know before that you’re paying all your bills and struggling but you’ve got enough to cover everything,” she said. Now, she has had to ask for help.

Roughly 2 in 10 DMV residents say there were times in the past year when they couldn't pay for healthcare, according to the survey. Nataro said she has had to make tough choices on her personal healthcare needs to cut costs.

Danielle Yates, the managing director of marketing and communications at the Greater Washington Community Foundation, said the survey found that a significant number of people in the region had trouble taking care of their basic needs.

About 1 in 10 DMV residents say they couldn't provide adequate shelter or housing for their family the past year, according to the survey, and roughly 2 in 10 say there were times when they couldn't pay for food.

A Capital Area Food Bank survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago last year also found broad food insecurity. “Thirty-eight percent of our area’s residents said that they needed some support in putting food on their tables so that they could lead an active and healthy lifestyle,” said Radha Muthiah, executive director of the CAFB.

Views of the local job market have dimmed

Residents' perceptions of the local job market are much less optimistic than just a few years ago. Only about half of DMV residents rate the availability of good jobs where they live as “excellent” or “good," down from 65% in 2023.

Those who have found work say they've been left with the scars of DOGE's ruthlessness.

A job Nataro loved and felt made a difference in the world was taken away, leaving her “traumatized.”

"I haven’t taken any real personal effects to the office. We haven’t really unboxed things.”

Some consider leaving the region

Rising costs and housing also influence how DMV residents think about the region, in addition to the job cuts.

About one-third of DMV residents expect that living conditions in the Washington area will be “worse” in the next five years, while about half think they will be “about the same.” Only about 2 in 10 expect things will get better.

About 1 in 10 D.C. residents, 14%, say they are considering leaving the DMV region in the next year, with most who are thinking about departing pointing to rising costs and housing expenses.

Barbera and her husband both worked at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a place where the staff was fired twice because of court decisions. A year and a half after they were fired in March 2025, the couple are considering leaving the area because of rising costs, especially childcare for their three children. Although both have full-time jobs doing consulting work, they are earning half of what they did, said Barbera.

The two had worked a collective 30 years for the peace-focused organization when they were let go. She said she feels lucky because they have family support and jobs but are being forced into considering a different future.

“This is the only place they’ve lived,” Barbera said of her children. “We don’t want to leave. But we have to have the conversation.”

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The VoicesDMV analysis is based on a mail survey of U.S. adults aged 18 and older living in the Greater Washington Region using random address-based sampling. The survey of 2,801 residents was conducted Feb. 9 to April 6, 2026. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

Dr. Heidi Overton, a physician and top White House aide, has spent most of her career working for Trump or conservative groups aligned with his agenda. That connection may prompt questions from some members of the Senate health committee which is considering her nomination.

In her current role as a domestic policy adviser, Overton worked on several White House health initiatives, including the revamped food pyramid and efforts to overhaul childhood vaccines. Previously she was an executive at the America First Policy Institute, authoring papers critical of abortion and transgender care. During Trump’s first term, she served as a White House fellow.

If confirmed by the Senate, Overton would inherit a raft of controversial projects, including a safety review of the nation’s principal abortion drug, a plan to break up combination vaccines and new rules that make it easier to sellflavored electronic cigarettes.

All three policies break from FDA’s longstanding positions, especially on the safety of childhood vaccines. Overton stood beside Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy in the Oval Office last month when they falsely suggested that the use of combination vaccines could be a contributor to autism.

Health committee chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician from Louisiana, called Overton’s support for that plan to space out vaccinations “almost disqualifying.”

But Cassidy and other Senate Republicans may find common ground with Overton on abortion. Cassidy and several colleagues have spent months urging the FDA to restrict access to mifepristone, the pill currently used in most abortions in the U.S.

The FDA first approved mifepristone in 2000 and has repeatedly affirmed its safety while broadening access, including allowing it to be sent through the mail. But Kennedy ordered a reevaluation of the drug’s safety last year, following calls from anti-abortion groups and lawmakers aligned with Trump.

FDA officials have said almost nothing about the review, except that it is ongoing.

While working at the America First Policy Institute, Overton blasted the FDA’s 2023 decision — under President Joe Biden — to allow mail delivery of mifepristone, referring to the practice as “chemical abortion on demand.”

She was similarly critical of the administration’s approach to transgender care for children, including providing access to puberty-blocking drugs and gender-affirming surgeries.

Overton co-authored a 2024 article about then-vice presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, titled: “Tim Walz Made Minnesota A ‘Sanctuary’ For Baby Killers And Child Mutilators.”

Overton’s abortion views could complicate her efforts to win over two moderate Republicans on the panel: Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Both have bucked their party on the issue, supporting federal access to abortion. Collins is currently locked in a tight reelection race where abortion access is a central issue.

To become commissioner, Overton will need a majority of votes from the 21-member health committee, followed by a positive vote from the full Senate.

Headquartered in the suburbs outside Washington, the FDA oversees U.S. medical products plus billions of dollars in food, cosmetics, tobacco and vaping products.

Under the current administration, leading the agency has involved balancing Trump’s demands for slashing regulations — such as those for vaping products — alongside Kennedy’s interests in scrutinizing vaccines, drugs and food ingredients.

Those challenges dogged the tenure of the previous FDA head, Dr. Marty Makary, who resigned in May. Makary's time at the agency was defined by scientific disputes, leadership changes and a string of media stories detailing low morale and internal dysfunction among staffers. The FDA has lost about 20% of its employees to layoffs, buyouts, retirements or resignations since Trump took office.

Overton studied under Makary at Johns Hopkins University, where she received a doctoral degree in clinical research after earning her medical degree at the University of New Mexico.

Like Makary, Overton has no experience running a large bureaucracy, a critical skill for steering the FDA's 16,000 staffers spread across numerous U.S. and international locations.

In financial disclosure forms, Overton reported no investments in health care or food companies. That’s a stark contrast to Makary and other recent FDA nominees who have had to divest investments or cut other financial ties with companies regulated by the FDA.

Overton reported $50,000 to $100,000 in student loans.

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The Associated Press’ health and science coverage receives financial support from the AP Fund for Journalism and private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Attorneys representing the 18-year-old Black college student's family have called for transparency, asking that the grand jury investigative materials and the official autopsy report be publicly released. Crump released the final independent autopsy report Tuesday on behalf of the family and scheduled a livestreamed release of the cellphone report Thursday.

The grand jury had been given access to that information when it convened last week, according to its report. But details of those findings have not been made public.

Wells' family and their legal team have slammed the grand jury report and have been working to keep the investigation open and active. They've asked for federal authorities to look into the events around Wells' death. His body was found two days after he went with a group of mostly white friends on a boat trip to a barrier island for a July 4 party.

The high-profile death in a Deep South state with a history of racial tension has sparked rampant speculation and suspicion. While state and local officials and several of Wells' white friends who had become the target of that speculation hoped that the grand jury report would quell critics, there was little sign that the suspicion was subsiding in the immediate days after the report's release.

Lingering family suspicions

Wells’ parents and their lawyers voiced suspicions after Wells’ friends left the island without him, saying he wanted to stay behind and talk to a girl. Wells’ phone was on the boat that took him to the island, and his family and their attorneys have expressed doubt that he would choose to stay behind without his phone.

They also raised concerns about the phone possibly being tampered with given that there were no recordings or messages in the hours before he was last seen on social media apps his family said he avidly used.

A number of the grand jury's written findings appeared to attempt to dispel those suspicions, such as that Wells chose to stay behind, that leaving on different boats was common on crowded days on the island and that it wasn't unusual for phones to be left on boats and eventually returned on the mainland.

The report also directly addresses the veracity of accusations against the white friends seen in a picture with Wells the day he went missing. The grand jury findings attempt to explicitly clear the people who left the island without Wells from any wrongdoing, and to squash online interpretations of a call to a sea towing company that suggested an attack could be heard in the background as being “not true and accurate.”

A lawyer representing several of the friends said the report had lifted a weight from his clients.

Inconsistencies and further investigation

The report said the grand jury found Wells' death to be “consistent with drowning” and found that he had not been in a fight or altercation while on the island.

Both Crump and Wells' parents questioned how the panel could determine Wells drowned, when both the official and independent autopsies said the cause of death could not be determined. They said both also noted that Wells had unexplained blunt force trauma on the back of his head.

A witness testified to the grand jury that he saw Wells slip awkwardly off the side of a boat around 3:30 p.m. on July 4, but that Wells continued to socialize after the fall and didn’t appear injured, the report said. The panel said it couldn’t determine whether the fall caused the bruising on Wells’ body, but noted the bruising was not a fatal injury.

At a news conference Tuesday, Wells' mother, Christine Wonsley, Crump and representatives of the NAACP called for an independent investigation by the U.S. Justice Department. The grand jury report noted that federal law enforcement had been involved in the investigation, but it was unclear what role they played or the extent of their participation.

“What we have learned is that we still have no answers,” Wonsley said. “And the report reinforced the fact that Nolan was not given a thorough, transparent and honest investigation.”

Hurricane Polo, an “extremely dangerous” storm, is expected to skirt Mexico’s Guerrero state, submerging coastal areas with 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) of rain through Thursday, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Guerrero has been repeatedly pummeled by hurricanes in recent years.

Farther out in the Pacific, Tropical Storm Nolo was churning about 295 miles (475 kilometers) south of South Point, Hawaii. The storm is forecast to become a hurricane by Thursday night and is expected to approach the Big Island as early as Friday.

Gov. Josh Green's office said public schools and state and county offices on the Big Island will close Thursday and Friday, while Maui County will shutter them on Friday ahead of the threat of heavy rain, winds and flooding. Forecasters said the storm could drop up to 20 inches (51 centimeters) of rain.

Polo could bring flooding and mudslides to Mexico’s Pacific coast

Concepción López Villegas was busily bolstering her seaside restaurant in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, against the expected onslaught of rain. Strong waves were already hitting some beaches and López Villegas said she feared the storm could destroy the small business she worked decades to build.

“We’re worried and trying to protect our businesses,” López Villegas said. “And of course, we’re sad because it’s our heritage, our legacy that from one moment to another could be destroyed.”

Guerrero state was particularly at risk of life-threatening flooding and mudslides, the hurricane center said.

Polo, which was swirling about 130 miles (209 kilometers) south-southwest of Zihuatanejo Wednesday, was not expected to make landfall, meteorologists and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said. Rain and strong winds had already started to pummel the coast, with waves crashing onto the normally pristine beaches.

The storm was packing winds of 160 mph (257 kph), the hurricane center said Wednesday night. It warned that Polo’s deluge could cause life-threatening flooding and mudslides, in particular in Guerrero.

The region most under threat from the hurricane is rural and mountainous, scattered with a few small tourist towns and ports. Much of the area is marked by poverty and residents routinely complain authorities abandon them to fend for themselves during natural disasters.

Mexico’s government has called for evacuations in some areas and set up shelters for those affected. Thousands of military and Red Cross personnel have been deployed to the region as a preventive measure.

Another hurricane could hit Hawaii as soon as Friday

The National Weather Service said Tropical Storm Nolo would likely strengthen before closing in on the Big Island on Friday or Saturday.

The storm has the potential to be a major hurricane, John Bravender, a weather service warning coordination meteorologist, said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

While high winds are expected, Bravender said the main concern is the possibility of flash flooding. He said 20 to 30 inches (50 to 76 centimeters) of rain could fall through Saturday on southeastern parts of the Big Island, the same region hit hard in August by Hurricane Lala.

“That by itself could cause catastrophic flooding, but when you put that on top of grounds that we’ve been raining off and on for the last couple of months … that rain could cause even more damage," Bravender said.

He urged preparation across all Hawaii islands in case the storm’s trajectory shifts.

“You need to take action now,” said Bravender. “Today is really the last dry day you have to get ready.”

Hawaii County Mayor Kimo Alameda told residents in a video message on social media that they should start preparing now for the storm. He urged people to put together an emergency kit with food, water and medications, trim vegetation and clear drains.

“This is a very serious situation," he said. "We do believe that the rain is going to come. It's coming already.”

The governor issued an emergency proclamation Tuesday and more than 230 Hawaii National Guard members have been activated, said Maj. Gen. Stephen Logan, adjutant general of the state’s department of defense.

Kauai’s electric cooperative urged residents to prepare for “the possibility of prolonged power outages,” and to store nonperishable food and potable water.

Over 100 Kauai households remain without power from Hurricane Lowell, which passed west of the island on Sept. 7.

Hawaiian Electric, the state’s primary utility, said crews would return to at-risk areas in preparation for the coming storm.

Odalys strengthens into a hurricane

Hurricane Odalys, also in the Pacific, strengthened on Wednesday, carrying maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (137 kph). It was located about 1,205 miles (1,939 kilometers) west-southwest of the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula and was not at risk of making landfall, according to the hurricane center.

An advisory said Odalys could increase in strength over the next couple of days but would likely weaken by the end of the week.

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Aoun reported from San Diego. Associated Press reporters Desiree Brooks in Atlanta and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed.

The St. Clair Shores City Council voted Monday to place bags over the cameras and revisit the city’s contract with Flock in March.

The cameras had been used to capture images of vehicles entering the city.

Council members approved a five-year contract with Flock in April 2025.

Some council members who supported the contract said their views changed after hearing from residents who opposed the cameras.

“The best way to calm our residents, I would feel, to let them know that we’re really hearing them, was a drastic measure, and that was with the covering up and putting the bags on the Flock cameras,” said Council Member Linda Bertges.

“I’ve talked to hundreds of people about this, and they’re very opinionated about what they want,” said Council Member David Rubello. “They don’t want them.”

Police Chief Jason Allen said the cameras have helped lead to more than 40 arrests and the recovery of multiple stolen vehicles over the past year.

He said officers must have a legitimate law enforcement reason and a complaint number to search the system.

Allen said officers receive training, searches are audited monthly, and an automated system flags unusual activity, including repeated searches of the same license plate.

The cameras capture still images of vehicles, including their make, model, color and license plate.

Allen said the system does not use facial recognition, monitor people, or detect speeding.

“The cameras face inward into the city, so they’re kind of like a perimeter around the city,” Allen said at the meeting. “When a vehicle drives into the city, it captures the rear of the vehicle as the vehicle drives away from the camera.”

Despite the current safeguards, some residents are still concerned about who can access the data and how it could be used.

Last week in neighboring Eastpointe, police revealed that two officers had been found to have misused the technology.

“Those type of vulnerabilities are shared on a network and there’s nothing — our chief can do it by the book — it doesn’t matter on a shared network,” said resident Daniel Farr.

Farr said he supports covering the cameras so residents have more time to learn about the technology and weigh in.

“Never have the people even had a chance to vote on it,” Farr said. “It’s always been councils, it’s always been police departments, it’s always been township votes.”

Council members also raised questions about Flock’s transparency portal, data retention and the agencies that can access information.

The city currently retains camera data for 30 days and shares it with several agencies, though Allen said the department does not currently share data with federal or out-of-state agencies.

The cameras were funded through the city’s Drug Law Enforcement Fund rather than the general fund.

The city has 12 cameras at an annual cost of about $3,000 per camera, in addition to installation costs during the first year.

Mayor Kip Walby told Local 4 he was out of town and unavailable for an interview Wednesday evening.

Allen didn’t immediately return a request for an interview.

The council is expected to reconsider the Flock contract at its second meeting in March.

The Minnesota Lynx have clinched the top seed and will face eighth-seeded New York in the opening round that begins Sunday. The Atlanta Dream will be the four seed after beating New York on Wednesday night. They will play either Indiana or Washington.

“Everybody in the playoffs are capable of winning on the road and stealing a series,” Atlanta coach Karl Smesko said. “I definitely think it's an advantage to have to play in front of your home crowd.”

Indiana plays at Minnesota and Washington hosts Chicago on Thursday.

Dallas is locked into the seventh seed and will face either Golden State or Las Vegas. The Valkyries visit Los Angeles and the Aces play at Phoenix.

The Lynx clinched the top spot in the playoffs on Tuesday after Golden State lost to Portland in overtime. Minnesota benched its starters after an awful first half against Indiana. The Lynx reserves battled back, but fell short. Minnesota has dropped four of its past five games and has one game left at home against the Fever on Thursday.

“The margin for error throughout this regular season is incredibly small and you’ll see that in the playoffs,” said New York Liberty star Breanna Stewart. “Like one through eight you don’t know who will be playing at the end of October, which is exciting. I feel like for us we’re going to get a fresh start when it comes Sunday.”

Stewart missed Wednesday's game with knee soreness. New York also lost Jonquel Jones to an ankle injury in the third quarter.

With New York finishing at 26-18, this is only the second time in league history that all the playoff teams have won at least 59% of their games. The 1998 playoffs, which only had four teams, had all four teams at 60% or better.

In the four major sports it's rare to find the last place team in the playoffs with such a high win rate.

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See AP’s full WNBA coverage here

Skies gradually clear overnight, and lows fall into the upper 40s and lower 50s.

Thursday

Wednesday was the first full day of fall, and Thursday will keep that crisp feel.

Sunshine returns, but northeast winds help to hold highs in the mid-60s.

Thursday night turns mostly clear and cool, with lows in the mid-40s to near 50 degrees.

Friday

Friday brings more sunshine and a high in the mid-60s.

The Tigers host the Pittsburgh Pirates at Comerica Park at 6:40 p.m., and fans can expect dry weather.

Temperatures will slip from the 60s into the 50s during the game.

Weekend

The dry stretch continues Saturday, with a high in the upper 60s. Sunday warms to around 70 as the Lions host the New York Jets at Ford Field for a 1 p.m. kickoff.

It should be a comfortable afternoon for tailgating, though early arrivals may want a light layer.

Temperatures stay closer to normal next week, with a high around 70 degrees Monday and the lower 70s Tuesday.

A chance of rain returns Wednesday.

National weather

Beyond Michigan, a developing nor’easter could bring strong winds, rough surf and coastal flooding to parts of the Northeast and New England.

Monsoon moisture is raising heavy-rain concerns in the Southwest, while forecasters monitor a tropical threat near Hawaii.

Share your weather photos with Local 4 at MIPics.

New York manager Aaron Boone repeated he's not counting on Judge to play in the AL Wild Card Series opener Tuesday. Judge, sidelined since Sept. 16, said he's trying to do all he can to be in the lineup.

“The Bronx is a magical place in October,” Judge said after Wednesday night's 9-2 win over AL East champion Tampa Bay. “I don’t want to miss out on that opportunity.”

Judge had a platelet-poor plasma injection Monday. He was sidelined by a fractured rib from May 31 to Sept. 8 and played in just seven games before the latest injury.

“Any injection doesn’t feel too good that day, but I feel a lot better today and we’re going to keep making strides,” he said.

A three-time AL MVP, Judge is hitting .241 with 18 homers, 41 RBIs and an .871 OPS in 66 games this season, including .174 with one homer and three RBIs since coming back from the rib injury.

“We are going to listen to the body and see how he heals,” Boone said. “If he is in a position to do that, obviously we are going to want him. So, no, I haven’t ruled anything out, of course.”

Boone said Tuesday he wasn't planning on having Judge available for next week's best-of-three series, likely against Boston.

“Obviously as a player, you don’t want to hear that but that’s out of my control,” Judge said.

Boone said Judge had a moderate strain.

“Everybody’s `moderate' is a little different,” Judge said.

Stanton, trying to return from injuries to calf muscles in both legs, faced pitchers Wednesday at Double-A Somerset along with center fielder Trent Grisham, sidelined since straining his right hamstring on Sept. 4. Both ran the bases and Stanton homered while taking six or seven at-bats.

“Putting them on the outskirts of the conversation,” Boone, bothered by a cold, said in a raspy voice.

Following the end of the seasons for Yankees farm teams, New York has minor leaguers working out at Somerset in nearby New Jersey.

Stanton hasn't played since April 24 because of strained calf muscles in both legs after starting the season with a .256 batting average, three homers and 14 RBIs in 24 games. The 36-year-old former NL MVP had 38 homers and 100 RBIs in his first season with New York in 2018 but has missed 500 of 1,194 games since (41.9%), through the end of this regular season.

His other injuries included strains of his right biceps, right knee, left hamstring (three times), left quadriceps and both calf muscles along with right ankle inflammation, left Achilles tendinitis and tendon pain in both elbows.

“You’re looking more at a pinch-hit scenario,” Boone said. “We’ll see if that’s even a realistic option."

Stanton is owed $25 million next year in the final guaranteed season of a $325 million, 13-year contract that includes a $10 million buyout of a 2028 club option.

Lagrange could be brought up for major league debut

Carlos Lagrange, a 23-year-old right-hander who reached 100 mph with 98 pitches at Triple-A this year, threw to batters at Somerset. He was out between June 28 and Sept. 16 because of a right capsule strain.

Lagrange was shifted to the bullpen at the start of June.

“He’s in the conversation for something,” Boone said.

Clarke Schmidt still out

Right-hander Clarke Schmidt, who returned Sept. 16 following Tommy John surgery in July 2025, played catch but remains sidelined by right biceps cramps. New York had hoped to use him as a reliever in the postseason.

“Today was better than yesterday," Boone said. "If he’s not a real viable option by tomorrow, then we’ll probably go a different way.”

Postseason rotation

Boone said Cam Schlitter will start Game 1 or 2 of the playoffs. Max Fried appears set to start whichever game Schlittler doesn't, with Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodón available for Game 3.

“Whoever goes 1 or 2 can pitch 2 and 5 in the next series,” Boone said.

Fernando Cruz throws a bullpen

Right-hander Fernando Cruz threw a bullpen this week and is to throw another one Thursday.

He hasn't pitched in a game since Aug. 25 because of right elbow discomfort caused by a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament.

“I’m in a really good position to be back I will say in the next couple of weeks,” Cruz said.

He took issue with the diagnosis of his injury.

“I had a real good inflammation, real stiffness and irritation," he said. “People can say it’s a partial tear, but in my heart it's not a partial tear.”

Volpe will see time at the hot corner

With second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. back from a sprained right thumb, Boone said Anthony Volpe will see time at third.

“I’ll probably get him on there a time or two,” Boone said.

Volpe entered Wednesday hitting .263 with one homer, seven RBIs and four stolen bases over 11 games since his recall from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. He played three games at third base for the RailRiders.

“It didn’t feel that bad when I played there, but we’ll see,” Volpe said.

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See AP’s full MLB coverage here

Atlanta coach Karl Smesko said after the game that Reese could have gone back in the game if she had been needed.

“She was cleared, but we made a decision that it would be smart for her to sit out the second half,” he said.

With 5.6 seconds left in the second quarter, Reese drew an offensive foul on Sabrina Ionescu. The Liberty guard's arm hit Reese in the face. The officials reviewed the play and upgraded it to a flagrant 1 foul.

Reese, who had gone back to the locker room, came out and made the two free throws. She then went back to the locker room. Atlanta led 41-26 at the half. Reese had six points and six rebounds in 17 minutes.

She wasn't on the bench at the start of the second half, but came back to the bench with 6:19 left in the third quarter.

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See AP’s full WNBA coverage here

“The Malvinas for us is a national cause,” Milei, a strong ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, said Wednesday while addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Milei accused the United Nations of failing to enforce international resolutions that urge the parties to “refrain from introducing unilateral changes while the dispute remains unresolved." He also called on Britain to resume negotiations to “find a peaceful solution to the sovereignty dispute.”

“The Malvinas issue is not merely a matter between Argentina and the United Kingdom; it is also a question regarding this organization’s ability to enforce its own resolutions,” he said.

The dispute has escalated in recent weeks

Milei has recently stepped up his efforts to draw attention back to the islands after facing some criticism of his strengthening ties with Britain and his professed admiration for Margaret Thatcher, who in 1982 led the British campaign to retake the archipelago during the Falklands War.

Following Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands under the country’s then-military dictatorship, Thatcher sent a task force all the way down the Atlantic and retook the islands after just 73 days of Argentine control. The war killed 649 Argentine and 255 British troops.

Earlier this month, Milei escalated the dispute with Britain, vowing new measures to halt an oil project near the British-controlled archipelago and praising Trump for saying Washington could reconsider its neutral stance on the islands’ sovereignty.

His government last week introduced a sweeping security bill that would toughen sanctions on companies exploiting resources around the islands without Argentine authorization, create a national security council chaired by Milei and expand the military’s role in protecting critical Argentine infrastructure.

Speaking to global leaders at the U.N. on Wednesday, Milei intensified his criticism.

“Today I come to say that Argentina will not sit and wait for the U.N. and the international community to live up to their own mandate,” he said.

He also sharply criticized the United Nations and its role, accusing it of becoming “a useless organization that serves only to feed a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.”

Britain says it will ‘stand firm’

Against the backdrop of Milei’s recent remarks, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham also addressed the dispute during this high-profile diplomatic week, stating Tuesday that the U.K.’s position is “clear” and that it will “stand firm” in the face of any threats.

“We will defend the ​right of ​the ⁠Falkland Islanders to self-determination and to remain British,” ​Burnham told reporters following a meeting with Trump late Tuesday on the sidelines of the U.N.

In August, Trump said he was reviewing the United States’ neutral position over the remote South Atlantic archipelago as he criticized Britain for not doing enough to support the U.S. war against Iran.

The Falklands, which Argentines call the Malvinas, are a small archipelago of about 3,500 people located around 300 miles (480 kilometers) east of the southeast coast of Argentina. They have been a British overseas territory since 1833. In a 2013 referendum, the islanders voted overwhelmingly to remain a British overseas territory, with 99.8% voting in favor and just three votes against.

A doubleheader Wednesday meant Austin — who in addition to being Tyler's identical twin is also an umpire — was on his way to Baltimore to work the games alongside his brother.

“This is something we’ve dreamed about forever,” Tyler Jones said. "We were told last year, ‘OK, if we can make it happen, we’ll make it happen.’ And it didn’t. The schedules didn’t align. Even this year we weren’t even sure if it was going to happen or not, and then it was kind of a shock.”

The 31-year-old twins called both ends of Wednesday's doubleheader, each won by Baltimore by a 4-2 score. Austin worked first base in the opener and Tyler was at second. Then they swapped for the nightcap — although the numbers on their uniforms were the only easy way to tell them apart.

The two are on a list of Triple-A call-up umpires who fill in at the big league level for injuries, illnesses, vacations and other reasons of absence. There are typically five umpires on a crew for a doubleheader instead of four, so Austin Jones was added.

Austin umpired his first major league game in 2024, Tyler in 2025. They'd worked a game together in the Gulf Coast League and the Arizona Fall League, but never in the majors.

“We talk to each other daily, especially about baseball and about everything, what we go through on a day-to-day basis," Tyler Jones said. "But to be able to live it together, and come to the ballpark and see him in the locker room and play cards with him before the game and share that experience was probably the best part.”

The Jones twins have joined a small group of umpiring families in big league history. There have been fathers and sons, such as Harry and Hunter Wendelstedt, and brothers, such as John and Mark Hirschbeck.

Tyler Jones jokes that he got into umpiring because “I was a really bad baseball player.”

They certainly started young, working youth games and earning some money when they were in high school.

“Baseball was what we ate, slept or thought of every single moment of the day,” Austin Jones said. “But it was to the point, I guess, after umpire school. We did umpire school together, and we roomed together. We had never really lived on our own, we were 18 years old. So it was our first time out of the house, doing things on our own, and we said, ‘Man, if this is kind of what life in professional baseball is like, this is pretty cool.’”

The Jones brothers had their parents, wives and Austin's kids at the games Wednesday.

“It was cool to look over, and that’s something my wife told me,” Austin said. “She was like, ‘Hey, when you’re out there, obviously you’re looking at your partners every pitch every play, but take a second and look at him not as just the guy working first base, your partner. Look at him as your brother.’ So I did that a little bit moreso tonight, the second game.”

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See AP’s full MLB coverage here

The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a federal agency, would make up to $7 billion available through 2027 for projects in Argentina, the State Department said, helping companies in the country obtain loans to buy American equipment and hire U.S. firms to expand the country’s railways, pipelines, ports and power networks.

The deal advances U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to reduce reliance on China’s mineral processing industry, as well as bolstering his ally President Javier Milei, who is betting on oil, gas and mineral exports to transform Argentina’s economy and ease the chronic dollar shortages that have fueled repeated economic crises.

“Working together, the United States and Argentina seek to continue to build on our robust relationship through increased U.S. investment, close security cooperation and aligned values," the State Department said in a statement.

The relationship has already paid dividends for Milei's Argentina: Last year, Washington backed a $20 billion International Monetary Fund bailout for Argentina and extended a separate $20 billion currency-swap line to stabilize the Argentine peso. The countries also signed a free trade pact earlier this year.

On the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Argentine Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno said on Wednesday that the agreement aims to connect Argentina’s lithium- and copper-rich northwest and sprawling Vaca Muerta shale fields to the country’s ports, making it easier to ship minerals, oil and gas to the U.S. and other markets.

Inadequate transport and energy infrastructure has long hampered development of Argentina’s remote deposits. The country's history of protectionist trade policies, currency controls and sovereign debt defaults has also discouraged foreign investment.

Milei, a fierce believer in free markets, has moved to open Argentina's economy, scrapping import restrictions and offering tax breaks to attract investors. That has led to a surge in cheap imports, squeezing labor-intensive industries like manufacturing and retail already struggling under Milei's spending cuts and tight monetary policy. Booming oil production and mining exports have become an economic lifeline.

The country has vast deposits of lithium and copper, minerals that are necessary for the global shift toward green energy.

The F-35 Joint Program Office said in a statement that it and the Defense Department are aware of “a shipment issue" with F-35 components.

“We are actively working with U.S. authorities and industry partners to retrieve these components, investigate the incident, and place safeguards to avoid a future occurrence,” the office said.

Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles acknowledged that the jet components ended up in Hong Kong when responding to questions from reporters Tuesday. But he denied that the missing parts were “sensitive equipment.”

Australia is one of several nations whose militaries operate the stealth fighter jet.

“Yeah, so we are obviously working with the United States and obviously with its prime contractor Lockheed Martin, in respect of this,” Marles said.

He added: “My understanding is that there is a sense of comfort, and we’re not talking about sensitive equipment here or sensitive parts. Ultimately, though, this is an issue which is going to be managed by the United States and by Lockheed in terms of what has occurred.”

Lockheed did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday, when Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in Washington for a state visit with President Donald Trump. China's Foreign Ministry said it was not aware of the incident, and the Hong Kong government said it would not comment on specific cases.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that China has the F-35 parts — a cockpit canopy and weapons-bay door — after the shipment was unexpectedly diverted to Hong Kong while on the way from Australia to the United States for either repair or disposal months ago. It was not clear how the shipment was diverted.

Politico earlier reported that it prompted a congressional inquiry over concerns that China could have access to key components of the highly classified technology.

Beijing has kept tight control over Hong Kong since the territory was returned from British rule in 1997. Hong Kong cannot maintain its own military or conduct its own diplomacy.

The first F-35 Lightning strike fighter rolled off an assembly line in Texas about 20 years ago and was hailed as a technological leap. Since then, more than 1,200 of the stealth jets have been made and 19 countries have placed orders for the planes, according to the Congressional Research Service.

China already may have had at least some intelligence, albeit several years old, on the planes already. The Defense Science Board, which advises the Pentagon, released a report in 2013 alleging that Chinese cyberattacks accessed data from dozens of Pentagon programs, including the joint strike fighter.

The F-35 is “widely recognized as America’s best and most advanced fighter jet,” according to Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington-based think tank.

Bowman told the AP in November that American military systems are constantly being updated and improved, counteracting any possible secrets stolen years ago.

Described as a fifth-generation fighter, the F-35's technologies include stealth coatings as well as advanced radar and sensors, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Bowman said the plane has advanced sensors to better detect enemies as well as networking capabilities to communicate with allied planes and ground forces during combat.

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Associated Press writers Didi Tang in Washington and Kanis Leung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry did not directly confirm Zelenskyy’s comments but said it had been consulting with Kyiv and other relevant parties to resolve the matter in a manner that respects the soldiers’ free will and complies with international law and humanitarian principles.

The ministry said in a statement that it would not confirm details about the soldiers’ “disposition, the timing or route of their transfer or specific contents of consultations” with Ukraine, calling it a sensitive matter concerning the safety of the soldiers and their families.

In his speech to the U.N., Zelenskyy said Ukraine recently transferred the soldiers to South Korea, but did not provide more details about the transfer.

“These guys are not easy to capture alive,” he said. “One of them, when he realized he was going to ​be taken prisoner, tried to kill himself and he was shocked that ​fate didn’t let him die. This is how they raise people in the North.”

The soldiers were among thousands of North Korean troops sent to support Russia’s war on Ukraine. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has also supplied Russia with large quantities of weapons, including artillery shells and ballistic missiles, while leveraging his strengthened ties with Moscow to accelerate the development of his nuclear-armed military and pursue a more assertive foreign policy, positioning Pyongyang alongside Moscow and Beijing in a united front against Washington.

South Korea, the U.S. and their partners worry Russia may transfer high-tech technologies in exchange that can enhance North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

Following the soldiers’ capture in Kursk in January 2025, South Korea urged Kyiv not to send them back to North Korea, where they could face persecution, and said it was willing to accept them if they wished to resettle in the South. In some media interviews, the soldiers appeared to express a desire to go to South Korea.

In April 2025, North Korea and Russia confirmed that their soldiers fought together to repel a Ukraine incursion into Russia’s Kursk border region. The two countries haven’t disclosed exactly how many North Koreans soldiers were deployed. South Korea’s intelligence service estimated in April 2025 that North Korea had sent about 15,000 troops to Russia since October 2024 and that about 2,000 of them were killed.

The crash occurred on Wednesday (Sept. 23).

After the crash, the Rochester Police Department closed the entire intersection and reopened it around 10 p.m.

Meanwhile, another ship attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz was struck by a projectile, highlighting the dangers that continue to restrict traffic through the critical waterway as the seven-month war grinds on.

Here is the latest news from the Middle East. More coverage of the U.N. General Assembly is available here.

Iran's president calls US attacks ‘cowardly’

Iran's president said his country's people had been the “victims of terrorism” by the United States.

Delivering a rare wartime speech at the U.N. General Assembly, Pezeshkian displayed images of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and more than 150 schoolchildren killed in the opening days of the conflict.

“We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists,” he said. “Our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggressions imposed upon our country.”

Turning to the United States, Pezeshkian added: “Yes, they did hit us, but we did not bend the knee.”

Rubio says Trump still open to a deal to make Iran ‘prosperous’

Pezeshkian addressed world leaders a day after U.S. President Donald Trump used the same stage to suggest that he might “annihilate” the Islamic Republic if an agreement was not reached soon to end the nearly seven-month war.

Hours later, Trump touted “a very good meeting” between his chief envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and Iranian officials. Tehran, however, downplayed the talks. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said they were “not anything new.”

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Trump remained open to an agreement “that allows Iran to be what it should be, which is a great and prosperous country.”

Rubio said the prospects for such a deal were hindered by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and “their support of terrorism.” If those policies continued, he said, Trump could exercise “a number of options,” including further military action.

Hard-liners in Iran criticize talks with US

Hard-line figures in Iran attacked Iran’s top diplomat for engaging with the U.S. at the U.N., triggering pushback from rival factions in Tehran.

In an X post, lawmaker Ebrahim Rezaei demanded that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi explain the decision to meet with “the aggressor enemy.”

Ali Ahmadnia, a media official for Iran’s president, responded by posting an AI-generated image depicting Araghchi as a wounded warrior.

“How can a soldier be on the battlefield while the home front is being weakened from within?!" Ahmadnia wrote on X. “The Iranian delegation in New York operates in full coordination with the relevant institutions.”

US-backed Board of Peace proposes plan to begin Gaza reconstruction

The U.S.-backed Board of Peace is proposing a six-month, $2.45 billion plan to begin reconstruction and governance in Gaza as President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan struggles to stay afloat.

At a meeting of the group’s board in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, the governors unveiled a 66-project blueprint to get things started while acknowledging enormous hurdles that must still be overcome. The projects include ambitious infrastructure, education and health initiatives that are designed to support Trump’s 20-point plan to end the Israel-Hamas war.

The proposal comes as the the U.S.-backed plan has largely stalled.

While the ceasefire halted the heaviest fighting and humanitarian conditions have improved, the Israeli military has expanded its control of Gaza and now occupies some 60% of the territory. Hamas has not given up its weapons. The international military force and new government still have not entered Gaza, and reconstruction has not begun. The vast majority of Palestinians continue to live in tent camps or ruins of their former homes.

“The need is immense,” the board said, noting that full reconstruction from the physical damage across Gaza will cost roughly $35.2 billion over the medium term and an additional $71.4 billion over the next 10 years.

Another ship hit in the Strait of Hormuz

A cargo ship was struck in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said, citing an unidentified company security officer.

The vessel was hit by an “unknown projectile,” resulting in two casualties, UKMTO said without providing further details. The crew abandoned the ship, which caught fire and was left adrift.

The attack was the first reported in two days. No one immediately claimed responsibility.

The incident highlighted the continuing danger to ships attempting to navigate the waterway. Some vessels appear to be making “dark passages” without transmitting identifying signals, but Iran and the United States have maintained their competing blockades. Commercial traffic remains well below prewar levels, according to ship-tracking data from analytics firm Kpler.

Restrictions on shipping through the strait have become one of the war’s most persistent consequences. Before the conflict, one-fifth of the world’s traded oil passed through the narrow waterway, along with large volumes of natural gas, fertilizer and other petroleum products.

Vehicle ramming in the West Bank injures ambassador's son

The son of Israel’s ambassador to the United States was gravely injured in a ramming attack in the occupied West Bank.

Neria Leiter, a reservist in Israel’s military, “needs a miracle,” Ambassador Yechiel Leiter posted on social media. The ambassador’s older son, Moshe Yedidya Leiter, who also served in Israel’s military, was killed in Gaza about a month after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack, which triggered the war in Gaza.

According to the military and law enforcement, a Palestinian man rammed his car into a security checkpoint Wednesday afternoon near the settlement of Beit Horon, seriously wounding the soldier. Israeli forces then opened fire at the man as he attempted to flee and killed him.

More military forces were deployed in the aftermath in the area, which is crossed by a major highway connecting Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog both sent wishes for Leiter’s recovery. A social media post by Herzog described Leiter as “fighting for his life.”

Major Arab parties disqualified from running in Israeli elections

Israel’s election commission voted Wednesday to disqualify major Arab political parties and candidates from running in next month’s polls.

The disqualification came at the request of two right-wing parties, including the Likud party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The parties had said the candidates were ineligible under a law barring those who reject Israel’s existence, incite racism or support armed struggle against Israel.

Wednesday’s vote targeted the United Arab List, a religious Arab Muslim party also known by its Hebrew name Ra’am; as well as the Joint List, an alliance of left-wing and Arab-majority parties. Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas said the decision was a “political, illegitimate, and anti-democratic move” and that the party would appeal to the Supreme Court.

Elections will be held next month, the first since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that plunged Israel into war.

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This report will be updated throughout the day as new developments emerge.

“The FBI is aware of a cyber-criminal enterprise group claiming a compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and alleged impact to FBI employee personally identifiable information," the FBI said in a statement. It said that while the “point of breach” was undetermined, "we are actively and aggressively investigating this matter and working closely with those third-party providers that support FBIJobs.gov to mitigate any and all risk.”

The jobs website, the main portal for prospective employees to learn about the FBI and initiate the application process, remained offline as of Wednesday afternoon.

A message that circulated online from a hacking group known as ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the hack.

“We have compromised the FBI. We hold very sensitive data on almost ALL FBI Agents and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for a job,” said the ShinyHunters message, which was directed to FBI Director Kash Patel and Brett Leatherman, the assistant director in charge of the bureau's cyber division.

The claims could not immediately be verified. An email to an address associated with ShinyHunters was not immediately returned.

The hackers are seeking retribution over an FBI advisory

Miriam Wugmeister, a lawyer specializing in data, privacy and cybercrime who tracks hacking outfits like ShinyHunters, said that based on the group's past practices, there was reason to believe the hackers' claims, “so I think it’s likely that they were able to compromise this website and they got some data.”

She said that though the data that appeared to be compromised was the type of personal information that is routinely accessed during a breach, the hack nonetheless had alarming national security implications given that it could expose agents and their families to extortion, swatting and other harassment and because the identities of spouses were also said to have been obtained.

“Even if the agents and the analysts and the employees are sophisticated, you worry about their families too,” she said.

In its message, ShinyHunters said it would give the bureau one week to correct or remove what it said were false allegations contained in an FBI public advisory from May that described the organization as a “cyber criminal group specializing in large-scale data breaches and extortion.”

That advisory characterized ShinyHunters as “threat actors” who often "use their real or exaggerated claims of access to sensitive or personal information to prompt payment from victims," commonly harass or threaten victims and “may falsely claim to have sensitive or compromising information, including embarrassing photographs or videos of victims, which frequently do not exist.”

ShinyHunters said in its message to the FBI that it was “offended” by those characterizations and demanded that the FBI remove those claims. It did not say what would happen if the FBI did not do so within a week.

“This is not a ransom, coercion, or extortion. Your federal policies do not apply here. This PSA is NOT financially motivated,” the hacking group's message said.

ShinyHunters has a reputation for “causing trouble and being disruptive,” Wugmeister said, as evidenced by the group’s involvement in a hack last spring of Canvas, an online system used by thousands of schools and universities. The breach created chaos as students tried to study for finals and prompted the FBI’s advisory that ShinyHunters is now objecting to.

There have been other cyber incidents concerning the FBI

The hack was first reported by 404 Media, an online technology publication that said a representative of ShinyHunters shared what appeared to be a sample of personal data of 5,000 FBI employees, including addresses, phone numbers and some information on spouses.

The publication said the ShinyHunters representative said the group carried out the hack through an apparent vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft software, commonly used by companies and government agencies for large-scale data processing and human resources purposes. The FBI said in its statement that it had not determined whether the “point of breach” involved a “third-party or the FBI’s enterprise.”

The FBI, the nation's premier federal law enforcement agency, has been a common target for hackers.

In March, the FBI disclosed that it was investigating “suspicious activities” on an internal system that contains sensitive information related to surveillance operations and investigations. Also that month, a pro-Iranian hacking group claimed to have hacked an account of Patel's and posted online what appeared to be years-old photographs of him, along with a work resume and other personal documents dating back more than a decade.

The FBI described the compromised information as “historical in nature” and said it involved "no government information.”

At the company's annual Connect conference on Wednesday, Zuckerberg opened his keynote address by saying “it’s no secret that people in the industry have a wide range of views about how the future is going to go.” But at Meta, he said, “we are optimists because we believe in people.”

Zuckerberg has distanced himself and Meta from recent calls by rival companies for a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced artificial intelligence, arguing that individual labs can and should ensure their technology is safe.

“We believe that the best way to create a positive future for everyone is to put power in people’s hands," he said at the conference. "We believe that empowering people is the source of prosperity in the world, that the highest purpose of superintelligence is creation and invention — not automation — and that the path to a safe future is to distribute this technology widely and create the right checks and balances, rather than concentrating it in the hands of just a few.”

Zuckerberg has long said he believes wearable AI will eventually replace smartphones as the primary way people interact with technology. At the conference, the company unveiled a slew of updates to its smart glasses and virtual reality goggles, which let people control their interface using their voice, eyes and hand and finger movements.

AI agent Muse is the ‘centerpiece’ of Meta's vision

Zuckerberg said that Meta's recently launched agent Muse is the “centerpiece" of Meta's hopeful outlook for the future of AI.

Having an AI agent, which goes beyond chatbots in that it can act and perform tasks on a person’s behalf, has been a “sign of someone who is completely AI-pilled,” Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said at the conference. With Muse, Wang said, Meta is making agents more accessible and bringing “personal superintelligence” to everyone.

With the help of a mascot for the agent that looks like a plush toy, Wang and senior leadership at Meta demonstrated different uses for the Muse in everyday life. Users will be able to have real-time voice conversations and video chats with their version of the agent, which can also be customized to look and sound unique. The agent can help users plan travel, book reservations, order groceries and complete other helpful tasks. Meta has partnered with companies like OpenTable, Spotify, Ticketmaster and more to help its agents complete these tasks.

The company is working to bring Muse to its AI glasses lineup for hands-free access.

Zuckerberg also said Meta is planning to release a keychain-like device that has the “whole Muse experience” packed into it, called Muse Charm, in time for the holidays in December. The palm-sized device will allow users to engage with a personal AI agent without using a phone, computer or smart glasses.

New AI audio glasses and new updates to popular models

Meta is launching an audio version of its more widely known smart glasses. The new product will let users listen to music, make calls and talk with an AI assistant — there’s just no screen, and no video recording, which has raised privacy concerns with some users recording people without permission. Called Ray-Ban Meta Audio, it will be available in October and the cost starts at $349.

Meta is also building upon a previous feature that allowed glasses wearers to better hear a conversation in a noisy environment. Now, Zuckerberg said, a feature called hearing enhancement turns your glasses into an “FDA-cleared, over-the-counter hearing aid” that can “compensate for perceived mild to moderate hearing loss.” The feature will launch in the U.S. later this year and will be available to add to supported AI glasses for $150, or with a Meta One subscription.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses have been upgraded with new features, including improved cycling and transit navigation and a personalized hologram for video calls.

The company is also offering more styles to appeal to a broader range of people and says it will have more than 100 different options across its Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Meta Glasses by the end of the year. The glasses will also be available in more countries, including Turkey, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

The newest generation of the classic Ray-Ban Meta glasses is also now available, with what the company touts as a slimmer, sleeker design and increased battery life, among other upgrades. The Generation 3 models are available now with prices starting at $449.

Virtual reality gets a makeover with Meta VR

Glasses

The most drastic update announced at the conference is to the company's VR device, now called Meta VR Glasses. That is because the previous bulky headset has been replaced by a set of glasses, which weigh about 100 grams (3.5 ounces), or roughly as much as a deck of cards. In comparison, the Meta Quest 3, which launched in 2023, weighs about five times that much. The difference feels similar to that between scuba diving and swimming goggles.

While they are significantly lighter and more sleek than VR predecessors, the glasses require a wired connection to an external puck for battery, storage and compute.

Instead of controllers or a neural wristband that past headsets or glasses required, the VR glasses use an eye-tracking camera and sensor that essentially lets your eyes be the computer cursor and your fingers the mouse clicker. If you want to open an app, for instance, you look at it and use hand and finger gestures, or use voice commands to talk to the Meta AI agent.

In a demo at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters on Tuesday, Meta showed off entertainment and work offerings on the glasses, including sports events and concerts that replicate the experience of having courtside or front-row seats. A new feature called “VR Enhanced Cinema,” meanwhile, seeks to immerse viewers in the movie by transforming their surroundings beyond the screen into a virtual world inspired by the movie, with dynamic effects, 3D visuals and spatial audio.

Once the glasses launch, users will have access to more than 100 immersive live sports events from that courtside-like view, because of partnerships with ESPN, MLB, NBC Sports, TNT Sports and UFC. The glasses can also function as a gaming console, Meta said, and there will be more than 75 games at launch that users can play solely with hand gestures.

The glasses can also be used for work. Users can conjure a virtual keyboard on any flat surface and use the display as their computer screen (or several screens) only they can see. For even more of a robust setup, users will be able to connect their Mac or Windows PC to seamlessly transition onto these screens, and bring their own keyboard and mouse. The VR glasses, unlike headsets of the past, will let wearers see their desk setup and surroundings while they work.

One of Zuckerberg's live demos of the night also showed off the glasses' ability to use hologram technology to project a photorealistic digital version of a person, including their real-time expressions and reactions, for hands-free video calling.

The VR glasses will launch in the spring of 2027 and cost $1,300.

First in line is “bimpert,” a Bermudian word of unknown origin that is used to describe a stupid or foolish person. People on the tiny island in the north Atlantic often use it in this traditional phrase: “A bimpert is justah wuffless bye,” which roughly translates to: an idiot is just a worthless boy.

Another colorful addition is “hornerman,” a word used in the eastern Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago since 1975 to describe an unfaithful man or a man having a relationship with someone else's partner.

Leonard Alexander, a grocery store owner in Trinidad, chuckled at the inclusion of the word “hornerman.” He explained that to “horn” means being unfaithful, and now the world would know the term for a man who commits such an act.

“That’s our heritage, that’s what we grew up with,” Alexander said.

If someone in the Caribbean were to find out about such infidelities, they might be known “to get on,” which means to have an emotional outburst or make a scene, or “to cut someone’s tail,” meaning to beat someone.

Depending on the fallout from such infidelities, a woman might need “vex money,” which refers to “money carried or kept in a safe place by a woman, for use in an emergency or in any unexpected eventuality.”

Among other dark words that made the list is “jablesse,” defined as "a malevolent shape-shifting female spirit with one cloven hoof, which at night is said to assume the form of a beautiful woman to lure men to their deaths.” It is derived from “diablesse,” the French word for female demon.

Another supernatural entry is “douen." It is “typically depicted as short in stature, with backward-pointing feet, and wearing a large hat, said to be the spirit of a child who died before it could be baptized, and believed to lure children into the forest by calling their names,” according to the dictionary. It is a variation of the Spanish word “duende,” which means elf.

Avionne George, a 45-year-old maintenance technician in Trinidad, said formal recognition of such words helps preserve tradition for the younger generations: “Most of them are ignorant of certain terms from long ago like ‘douen.' They don’t know about ‘la jablesse.'”

Several food-related words were included this year: “shadeesh,” the Bermudian word for chorizo; “sugar cake,” made of grated coconut boiled with sugar, water and spices; and “peanut punch,” a wildly popular rich and frothy beverage made with peanuts or peanut butter, milk, sugar and several spices.

In the Caribbean, one might sit down to have a peanut punch with one’s “nana” or “nani,” Hindi words that are used to address one’s maternal grandparents. In Bermuda, one would sit down to partake with a “hamma,” or friend.

The final Caribbean English words added this year are “Trinbagonian,” which refers to people from both the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and “canboulay,” which refers to Carnival festivities in Trinidad in the 1800s that celebrated the emancipation of slaves. They stem from a 1700s harvest festival that the British tried to quash, leading to riots reenacted to this day to mark the start of Carnival. Canboulay is derived from “burning cane,” which the dictionary noted was associated with “acts of defiance and rebellion.”

Sherwin Williams, a construction worker in Trinidad, said the inclusion of such words in the Oxford English Dictionary would help people around the world understand their Trinidadian origins. “People recognize us by our slang,” he said.

There are some 500,000 words and phrases in the Oxford English Dictionary, which details the history of words, some of which go back to the 11th century.

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Associated Press reporter Anselm Gibbs in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

Fast-food traffic in many markets, including the U.S., is flat, so for McDonald’s to continue to grow it has to grab share from competitors and improve restaurant productivity, McDonald’s Chairman and CEO Chris Kempczinski said at a meeting with investors at the company’s Chicago headquarters. McDonald's wants to automate more tasks, like inventory and scheduling, and improve kitchen operations.

“The winners will be the companies that create more demand and deliver it more efficiently,” Kempczinski said.

McDonald's shares fell nearly 5% Wednesday, their largest percentage drop since April 2025, as investors shuddered at the eye-popping price of improving McDonald's 46,000 global stores.

On the product side, McDonald's said hand-breaded chicken, which has rolled out at 10,000 restaurants in Asia and a handful of restaurants near Chicago, has boosted sales and quality ratings. Many of McDonald's competitors, like Chick-fil-A and KFC, offer hand-breaded chicken. The company plans to expand its testing to more markets in the U.S. and Ireland next year.

McDonald's also plans to introduce grilled chicken sandwiches and wraps in the U.S. and other markets and experiment with products like egg bites and bowls to meet the needs of customers who are seeking more protein and varied portion sizes.

Skye Anderson, the president of McDonald’s USA, said approximately 30 million Americans are now using GLP-1 weight loss drugs, and they’re seeking smaller, more protein-packed meals as a result. But the company’s research indicates that 60 million Americans are actively seeking more protein in their diet.

“This is an opportunity. We need to keep giving them more reasons to make McDonald’s their first choice,” Anderson said at McDonald’s investor day.

McDonald’s said the restaurant modernizations include lockers to handle delivery orders, more visible coffee preparation areas to enhance quality perceptions, bigger play areas and improved kitchen layouts. Scales to help ensure order accuracy – which are already in use at 10,000 restaurants globally – will be in 20,000 restaurants by 2028, McDonald’s said.

The company is deploying its ArchIQ system, developed with Google, that improves order accuracy with artificial intelligence and automates tasks like inventory management and scheduling. Archy, the company's AI-enabled drive-thru ordering system, is now capable of taking orders in Spanish and English with a 90% accuracy rate.

Archy could eventually reduce at least 50 labor hours per week in a typical McDonald's, Chief Financial Officer Ian Borden said. But he said the intention is not to reduce staffing. Instead, employees can focus more on hospitality or on tasks like hand-breading chicken.

Kempczinski said customers have responded positively to Archy in testing because it helps make their orders more accurate.

“It's not AI is bad or AI is good. We try to be really thoughtful about how we use it,” he said.

McDonald's is also rolling out new employee training that will focus on hospitality and food quality, said Tiffanie Boyd, McDonald's chief people officer. The training will be more experience-based, showing employees what a perfectly cooked Big Mac tastes like, for example, and will encourage more pleasant interactions with customers.

At the same time, McDonald's is still focused on value. Kempczinski said low-income consumers, defined as U.S. households making $45,000 or less, continue to go out for fast food but not as often as they used to. McDonald's has done a good job with meal bundles, like its $5 meal deal, he said. But the company is exploring ways to offer entry-level prices on a basic menu of items in the U.S., as it does in Europe and other markets.

“This is the environment that we’re in right now. You have to be on your game and deliver that value,” Kempczinski said. “The pressure around cost of living isn't going away.”

McDonald’s U.S. franchisees typically spend up to $450,000 per decade on required store remodels. Under the company’s new plan, they will have to spend an additional $800,000 over time, but McDonald’s will pay a portion of that cost in the form of rent relief and capital support.

Borden said the investments will be phased in over time when markets and individual franchisees are ready for them. Once the investments are made, the efficiency improvements will deliver roughly $100,000 in annual cash flow benefits to the average U.S. restaurant, some of which can be reinvested in the restaurant, Borden said.

“We'd love to see it going into hospitality to elevate the experience with our customers,” Borden said.

The filings are the latest against the world-famous amusement park operator and S&S Worldwide, the manufacturer of the X2 roller coaster cars. Six Flags recently settled a wrongful-death lawsuit from the family of a 22-year-old man who died after riding the coaster in 2022.

According to documents filed Monday, Pamela Guillen and her family visited the park in July for her daughter's 16th birthday and decided to ride the X2 roller coaster. When the ride stopped, her daughter saw her “sitting with a vacant stare and her mouth open,” confused and unable to exit the ride.

Shortly after she got out, the previously healthy 39-year-old collapsed and was taken to a hospital, where she underwent emergency brain surgery, according to the lawsuit.

Just five days later, 25-year-old Naomi Greer-Wilkinson boarded the ride with her siblings. She also collapsed shortly after the ride ended and was taken to a hospital, where she was found to have massive brain bleeding inside the skull that required emergency brain surgery. She remains in a vegetative state in the hospital, unable to speak or move and dependent on a ventilator. Her family filed the lawsuit on her behalf.

Their attorney, Gary Dordick, said the firm has been retained by more than 100 clients who suffered brain injuries after riding the X2 roller coaster within the past two years.

“It’s inexcusable that more isn’t done,” Dordick said. “It was known by Magic Mountain that those injuries and deaths occurred, and they kept the ride open.”

A spokesperson for Six Flags said it's the company's policy not to comment on pending litigation. The ride has been closed since the evening of July 12.

Extreme roller coaster has riders bracing for impact

According to the Six Flags Magic Mountain website, the X2 roller coaster reaches a top speed of 76 mph (122 kph) and has a total length of 3,610 feet (1,100 meters). The seats rotate 360 degrees “so your body will be flipping around the entire time,” and the ride features two “raven turns” — half loops that turn into sheer drops midway. It debuted at the park in 2002 as the world's first “fourth dimension” rollercoaster and reopened in 2008 with new trains and special effects. The uniqueness of the ride drew thrill-seekers from around the world and garnered a fervent fanbase.

Frequent riders of X2 have discussed on Reddit forums the “unspoken rules” of how to ride the roller coaster without getting injured. Many cite the final raven turn as the most extreme part of the ride and say they have gotten major headaches and what felt like concussions if they didn't brace their heads properly. One even said they wore a soft head helmet the last time they were on the ride.

“The snapping bangs the head against the headrest and it’s causing brain damage, it’s causing hemorrhaging within the skull,” Dordick said.

Another one of his clients, Michael Wilk, visited the park with his daughter and grandchildren in February. Immediately after going on the ride, he felt stabbing pain in his head, dizziness and had difficulty walking, the lawsuit states.

While he didn't seek medical attention immediately, his cognitive function quickly declined in the following weeks as he tried to return to his job as an insurance defense attorney. An MRI scan a few months later showed massive bleeding and swelling inside his skull, requiring multiple surgeries to relieve the pressure on his brain. He said he continues to suffer debilitating headaches, confusion, dizziness, memory loss, and personality changes, and can no longer practice law.

The lawsuit accused Six Flags of intentionally restricting “public disclosure of evidence concerning X2 injuries and safety issues.”

College graduate died after riding X2 in 2022

The new lawsuits follow a settlement for wrongful death in the case of Christopher Hawley, a 22-year-old who died the day after he rode X2 and was rushed to the hospital after the ride with severe brain bleeding. The medical examiner's office said his death was from “blunt head trauma.”

An engineer involved in testing the ride when it reopened in 2008 said in court filings for Hawley's case that the acceleration forces exerted on a rider by the X2 roller coaster abided by standard practices for amusement park rides that were adopted by California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health. The division also inspected the ride's seat restraints and head padding, a state employee said in a deposition.

The employee also testified that more testing was done in 2022 following Hawley's death, but Six Flags provided them with data showing the acceleration forces exerted by the roller coaster were still within standards. The division allowed Six Flags to reopen the rollercoaster after their findings.

Hawley's attorneys alleged in court filings that the ride's headrest failed to secure or protect the rider's head and neck from the extreme forces exerted by the roller coaster. They also alleged that there was inadequate maintenance when the wheels on the ride exhibited excessive wear or degradation, affecting the forces exerted on a rider.

Dordick said the amusement park operator has argued that people are accepting risk by voluntarily going on a thrill ride, and that people who suffer injuries often have preexisting conditions.

“The risk people reasonably assume is they get dizzy, maybe someone might throw up,” Dordick said. “No one goes to a family fun amusement park and assumes the risk of brain damage.”

“I asked him to bless our motherland with favorable weather and to make it even more prosperous,” Liu said while sitting outside the Golden Hall, a Taoist temple at the summit of Tianzhu Peak.

“This place watches over our country,” she added. “We’re Chinese and this is part of our faith.”

Tourists and pilgrims in a steady stream make their way through Wudang every day. Its scenic peaks, ancient palaces and religious sites drew 14 million visits in 2025, according to government figures.

Wudang’s Taoist buildings date as far back as the 7th century. The complex expanded over centuries through China’s Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties.

Liu traveled several hundred kilometers (miles) from Hebei province with her daughter, Ji Jiaxin. She also prayed to Wudang’s protector, known as Zhenwu.

“He can guide people toward goodness,” Ji said. “He also watches over all the living things that grow across the land.”

Both women see Wudang as a place of scenic beauty and spiritual significance. Perched at about 1,610 meters (5,280 feet) above sea level, the Golden Hall is a place where they experience a sense of spiritual purification.

“Everyone comes here with a sincere heart,” Liu said. “With sincerity, the divine will respond.”

Philosophy and symbolism are woven into Wudang’s conception

The Wudang mountain range comprises 72 peaks, all thought to converge toward Tianzhu. Its lower slopes are associated with fire, while the deity enshrined at its summit is linked to water.

“Water at the top can moisten the earth, while fire below provides warmth and enables all living things to grow,” said Shu Chenghai, director of social education at Wudang Museum.

The Golden Hall’s construction reflects this symbolism too.

In the traditional Chinese concept of the Five Elements, metal is believed to generate water. And since natural sources can run dry over time, the bronze hall serves as a means to nourish Heaven and Earth.

“It embodies prayers for favorable weather, abundant harvests and peace and prosperity throughout the country,” Shu said.

Generations built their lives around Wudang’s temples

Taoist priests and monks look after the religious sites throughout Wudang. With their hair tied in high buns and dressed in distinctive blue robes, they glide through the temples, talking to visitors and scanning tickets at the entrances.

Their role also connects Wudang’s spiritual life with the communities that call the mountain home.

Cai Hongping was born in the area. Her family settled beside Zixiao Palace, a major Taoist temple complex.

“Some of the elderly Taoist priests there were exceptionally kind and compassionate,” Cai said. “Sometimes they gave us dates, peanuts or fruit.”

Life in the mountains was difficult when Cai was a child. Food and other material goods were scarce, but she remembers the temples as places of happiness and joy.

“I often went with the Taoist priests to identify Chinese medicinal herbs, practiced martial arts with them, and sometimes stole fruit that had been left as offerings,” Cai said.

Her connection to the mountain extended beyond its temples.

Cai’s grandfather was a heritage conservation worker in Wudang, a role focused on preserving and cataloging cultural relics. Her father also made walking sticks for visitors. Cai and other relatives sometimes joined him in gathering medicinal herbs to sell.

“The entire mountain was my childhood,” Cai said. “It has also given me a reverence for life.”

Ming emperors left their mark on Wudang

Wudang’s palaces and temples flourished during the Ming dynasty, when Emperor Zhu Di undertook a major building campaign to align his imperial regime with Taoism.

At its height, the complex included dozens of temples, palaces and monasteries. More than 60 sites survive today.

Wudang’s development coincided with another major project commissioned by Zhu Di: the Forbidden City in Beijing.

“When we say, ‘The Forbidden City was built in the north, and Wudang was developed in the south,’ we mean that these two World Cultural Heritage sites are like twins,” Shu said.

“The two places conveyed a message to the world: one represented Heaven, while the other represented the human realm,” he added.

Wudang’s special connection with Ming dynasty emperors remains visible today.

Along the route taken by tourists and pilgrims are several steles marking ritual proclamations made on behalf of emperors during the first year of each reign.

“An emperor needed to make a ritual proclamation to Zhenwu,” Shu said. “He would declare that he had succeeded to the imperial throne and express his hope for Heaven’s support.”

Visitors still seek meaning in Wudang’s landscape

Long before today’s visitors made their way to Wudang, the mountain drew people seeking solitude and spiritual cultivation.

Shu said its distinctive landscape embodies the traditional Chinese concept of “Dong Tian Fu Di,” or “grotto-heavens and blessed lands” — places traditionally regarded as sacred retreats.

“The idea is that a profound harmony between humanity and nature is not merely something human beings can create,” he added.

Beyond the Golden Hall, visitors encounter other temples and figures associated with different needs, from health and inner balance to martial arts.

Wang Xia recently traveled from Inner Mongolia and visited Taizipo, or Prince Slope, a Taoist temple complex linked to Zhenwu’s legendary early life as a prince.

“The fact that the crown prince once studied here makes it particularly appealing,” Wang said. “I wanted to pray for my child, to wish her academic success and a bright future.”

Her first encounter with Wudang came from books. She read about the Ming dynasty and began to dream about visiting the site herself one day.

“I imagined that coming here would give me the feeling of entering the world of Taoist immortals,” Wang said. “That is what this place feels like: a mountain of immortals.”

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AP video journalist Wu Jia contributed to this report.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the extension of the truce — under which the countries agreed to scale back tariffs and refrain from imposing new trade restrictions — during a Fox News Channel interview as Trump welcomed Xi at Joint Base Andrews just outside Washington.

“I don’t know whether a bigger deal can be done. I don’t know whether we will just roll the current deal,” Bessent said in the interview, noting the extension to Jan. 10 could give the leaders more time to talk about the issues at upcoming international summits in China in November and Florida in December.

Trade has been one of the biggest flashpoints between the two superpowers, along with artificial intelligence, Trump’s war with Iran and China’s designs on Taiwan. But much of Xi's three-day visit is expected to be far more about pomp than substance, starting with Trump’s decision to greet Xi as he landed, rather than waiting for him to drive up to the White House.

A 100-foot (30 meter) long red carpet was unfurled at the bottom of the staircase placed at the door of Xi's plane. A 21-person honor guard was arrayed on the sides of the carpet and Trump and first lady Melania Trump stood near a staircase on the side of the plane, where they greeted Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, with handshakes.

The welcome ceremony also included a flyover by two B-1 bombers, platoons from each military service, and a presentation of the flags and anthems of both countries. Trump and his wife spoke to their counterparts, but their words could not be heard. Trump, who wore gloves and an overcoat though it was a relatively warm 63 degrees Fahrenheit (17 degrees Celsius) outside, removed one of his gloves to shake hands with Xi. At one point, he slapped Xi on the back and said something to him that was inaudible.

“I think they appreciate it, tremendous people,” Trump told reporters after he returned to the White House Wednesday evening.

In a statement marking his arrival in the U.S., China’s leader wrote that his country and the U.S. “should be partners, not rivals. Achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand and the two countries can contribute to each other’s success, thereby benefiting the wider world.”

Some Republicans have questioned the optics of the visit

Beyond using the visit to try to keep “strategic stability” between the two countries, Trump has lavished praise on Xi as a “great leader” and described a warm relationship with the man he has called a friend. That is all while he has given Xi a pass on many issues.

Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, criticized the “lavish welcome.” Wicker, R-Miss., said during a speech Tuesday in the Senate that Trump should not have invited the Chinese leader “based on all of the troubling issues we have with President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. and China must interact at the highest levels because the countries are “the two largest economies in the world” and “probably the two most powerful militaries in the world.”

Danny Russel, a former U.S. diplomat under former President Barack Obama's administration, said the airport pomp delivered a propaganda win for Beijing.

“Such extreme deference is valuable evidence that China’s leader is now held in extraordinarily high esteem by the President of the United States. Beijing uses this at home and internationally to show China’s — and Xi’s — growing stature,” said Russel, now at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

China had hoped for a longer extension of the trade truce

China had wanted a longer extension of the trade truce, which had been set to expire on Nov. 10. “It underscores that the United States is still concerned about China’s full implementation of its commitments under the truce, particularly with respect to critical mineral exports and agricultural purchases,” said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator and now senior vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

The tight timeframe gives the U.S. a chance to test whether China will deliver on unmet promises to buy U.S. farm goods, said Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “This is less about buying two months of calm than making China earn the next extension,” he said.

Trump has not yet commented on the extension. The two leaders are expected to talk about issues of substance more on Thursday, after an arrival ceremony at the White House and a review of troops. Later, they will exchange toasts at a black-tie dinner, which will feature tech industry leaders like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and SpaceX’s Elon Musk.

Trump to welcome Xi with ‘the most respect’

Trump has made it clear he wants to wow Xi, telling reporters in recent weeks that he was delighted his new “work of art” helicopter landing pad would be ready for the visit while bemoaning that his massive White House ballroom would not.

“I wish we had it for tomorrow night," Trump said again Wednesday.

Trump on Wednesday was looking to match the pageantry he was met with in China earlier this year. Xi was not at the airport to meet Trump — Chinese Vice President Han Zheng was there instead. But a red carpet was rolled out to meet Air Force One in Beijing. A military honor guard, a military band and about 300 Chinese youths waving Chinese and American flags and chanting, “Welcome, welcome! Warm welcome!” also were present.

The first lady said earlier Wednesday that her husband decided to personally greet Xi when he arrived in the Washington region because “they have a great relationship.”

“He’s coming on our soil, and we need to welcome them with the most respect,” she said of Xi and his wife during an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends.”

The long red carpet recalled a similar extra-long one the U.S. laid out for Russian President Vladimir Putin when he touched down at a U.S. Air Force base in Alaska last summer for a summit aimed at trying to find an end to Russia's war in Ukraine.

On Friday, Xi and Peng will be back at the White House for a private tea with the Trumps before joining them on a tour of the National Archives in Washington. The White House has said they will view historic documents underscoring the relationship between the two countries.

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Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Will Weissert and Collin Binkley contributed to this report.

Ker’Sean Ramey, 41, was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. CDT following a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He was the sixth person executed this year in Texas, with three more lethal injections scheduled in the state over the next two months.

In the execution chamber, a prison chaplain rested his left hand on Ramey’s right shoulder and offered a brief prayer before the warden asked the prisoner if he had any last words. Ramey praised God and thanked friends, family and fellow death row inmates he called his brothers.

"To the brothers on Texas death row that grew up with me, that poured into me and showed what it means to be a man, because I came in young, and didn’t understand what manhood was ... to you brothers ... I greatly appreciate you,” he said just before the injection got underway.

As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began flowing, Ramey took a deep breath, sputtered and began snoring. After 10 loud snores and two that were nearly inaudible, all movement ceased.

A physician pronounced Ramey dead 14 minutes after the injection began. Ramey's body was then covered with a white sheet.

A jury had convicted Ramey of capital murder and sentenced him to death for the August 2005 shootings of Samuel Roberts, 24, Tiffani Peacock, 18, and Celso Lopez, 38, at the home they shared in Edna, a small rural city some 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Houston.

Ramey and LeJames Norman believed there was cocaine in the house and hoped to steal it, according to court records. The men entered the home with guns, found no drugs and fatally shot the three residents, who lived just across the street from Norman, the records show.

Norman was executed on Sept. 16 at the Huntsville prison, where all Texas executions are carried out.

Including Ramey's execution, a total of 28 inmates have been put to death around several U.S. states this year. Florida leads those states with 15 executions so far in 2026, by far the nation's busiest death chamber.

Hours before Wednesday's execution, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Ramey's final appeal.

His attorneys argued that jurors had never heard that Ramey suffered physical abuse as a child and grew up in poverty. State prosecutors told the court the appeal was “meritless” and said the evidence showed Ramey exhibited “an escalating pattern of criminal behavior.”

Norman was arrested about five months after the killings while seeking to re-enter the U.S. from Mexico, where he had fled. He testified at Ramey’s trial in January 2007 that both men shot the victims. Ramey’s attorneys blamed the shootings on Norman.

Ramey’s former girlfriend testified that she was with Ramey when he threw two handguns into a lake after the killings, and that he later described his involvement to her in detail.

Lopez was shot four times, including in the back of the head; Peacock was shot twice in the head; and Roberts was shot five times in the chest, neck and head.

Norman was sentenced to death in December 2008 after pleading guilty to capital murder.

Debra Jones-Christopher left Hollywood Casino in the 400 block of Monroe Street on Wednesday (Sept. 23) and has not been seen since.

Jones-Christopher was last seen near E. Lafayette Street and St. Aubin Street wearing a blue Detroit Lions hat, a black vest/jacket, gray pants, and black shoes.

Anyone with information should contact Downtown Services at 313-237-2850 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-Speak Up.

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The team said it was moving the Sunday afternoon game to Friday to create a split doubleheader. The first game is scheduled to begin at 1:05 p.m. EST. The originally scheduled 7:05 p.m. EST night game was moved up to 6:05.

The Red Sox said in a press release Wednesday that the change was made in consultation with Major League Baseball.

The Cubs are currently in a tight race for one of the NL’s three wild-card spots.

There was no mention of a change to Saturday’s game, which is slated for a 7:15 p.m. EST first pitch.

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See AP’s full MLB coverage here

Trump’s decision to greet Xi shows how far the U.S. president is going to honor China’s leader as he made his first state visit to the U.S. capital in more than a decade.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox News Channel Wednesday that the two countries would extend their trade truce to Jan. 10. It had been set to expire in November.

Meanwhile, a judge heard arguments Wednesday but did not rule from the bench in a case on Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds. It’s the latest development in an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes. The administration has doubled down on its contention that it has the right to decide who can set foot in the White House, while the outlets call the ban a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment.

Also, Iran’s president said Wednesday that his people have been “victims of terrorism” by the United States, delivering a rare wartime speech on the second day of the U.N. General Assembly. Trump, on the U.N. General Assembly stage a day earlier, said he could “annihilate” the Islamic Republic. Toward the end of his speech, Masoud Pezeshkian called out Trump by name.

Here's the latest:

Nevada secretary of state asks Congress members to send election observers to USPS locations

Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar says the observers would ensure that postal workers can scan the envelopes holding mail ballots without disruption.

It was unclear what prompted his ask to Nevada’s U.S. senators and House members. But it comes after the Supreme Court’s decision to reject Trump’s mail ballot restrictions.

“The Trump Administration has attempted to weaponize federal agencies to interfere in our elections, and the leadership at USPS is going along with it,” Aguilar said in a statement announcing the request. “While their efforts to take control over state-run elections failed at the Supreme Court ahead of the midterms, we must stay prepared for anything that could disrupt the election this fall.”

In the 2024 general election, about 45% of the state’s votes were submitted by mail.

Aguilar also asked that observers be sent to two out-of-state distribution centers that process mail for Nevada — in Salt Lake City and Sacramento, California.

Venezuela’s acting leader promises to hold elections

“I wish to state this very clearly before this General Assembly: Elections will be held in Venezuela,” Delcy Rodríguez said, adding that her government has started a “political dialogue with opposition sectors” to secure a “process based on equal conditions for all.”

Rodríguez said that Venezuelan people will determine the best time to get elections moving and assured the United Nations that, when the time comes, the country’s institutions “will be prepared to guarantee an inclusive and transparent process.”

The short extension gives the US leverage

Keeping the extension of the trade truce gives the U.S. a chance to test whether China delivers on its promises to buy U.S. farm goods, said Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“This is less about buying two months of calm than making China earn the next extension,” he said.

China wanted a longer trade truce extension, expert says

The extension is “way shorter than China had hoped for,” said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator and now senior vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“It underscores that the United States is still concerned about China’s full implementation of its commitments under the truce, particularly with respect to critical mineral exports and agricultural purchases,” Cutler said.

The US and China agree to extend their trade truce

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox News Channel that the two countries would extend their truce to Jan. 10. It had been set to expire in November.

Under the truce, the countries have agreed to scale back on tariffs on each other and not to impose restrictive trade measures.

Venezuela’s acting leader praises Trump for ‘readiness’ to resume ties

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly for the first time since coming to power, Venezuela’s acting president said her country is coming back strong after “setbacks” suffered this year and thanked President Donald Trump for being willing to resume relations after the U.S. military spirited her predecessor out of the country.

“Today, Venezuela is being reborn,” Delcy Rodríguez said in her remarks to the international forum.

Rodríguez took over in Venezuela after a surprise U.S. military raid in January that captured then-leader Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the United States to face drug trafficking charges.

This is the first trip to the United States by a Venezuelan head of state since 2018, when Maduro traveled to New York to participate in the U.N. General Assembly himself. He is currently being held only a few miles from the organization’s headquarters as he awaits trial.

Xi says China and the US should be ‘partners, not rivals’

In a statement marking his arrival in the U.S., China’s leader wrote that his country and the U.S. “should be partners, not rivals. Achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand and the two countries can contribute to each other’s success, thereby benefiting the wider world.”

Xi’s statement also suggested that the two sides “should move toward each other and work together to build a stable relationship – one where cooperation is the mainstay, competition is kept within proper limits, differences are managed and peace can be expected.”

In brief comments to reporters upon returning to the White House, Trump said of going to greet Xi’s plane, “I think they appreciate it, tremendous people.”

The airport pomp delivers a propaganda win for Beijing, former diplomat says

Danny Russel, a State Department official during the Obama administration, said President Trump has given the Chinese leader Xi Jinping what Beijing wanted.

“Such extreme deference is valuable evidence that China’s leader is now held in extraordinarily high esteem by the president of the United States,” said Russel, now a distinguished fellow at Asia Society Policy Institute.

“Beijing uses this at home and internationally to show China’s — and Xi’s — growing stature,” Russel said.

And it may not serve U.S. interests, because Beijing is likely to “see this level of deferential accommodation as an indicator of weakness,” he said.

Xi bids goodbye to the Trumps at the airport

After a brief exchange with President Trump on the tarmac, Xi walked over a few steps to shake hands with Melania Trump and bid farewell to the couple. Xi had a smile on his face and looked relaxed.

Both Xi and his wife Peng were seen entering their vehicle, and the Trumps waited a while before walking off.

The two leaders are set to meet Thursday for formal talks.

Trump sports black gloves and a long coat for Xi welcome

The president appeared to be the only one dressed in cold-weather attire. He took gloves on and off multiple times for rounds of handshakes with Xi and Peng.

It was about 65 degrees F (18 degrees C) with a brisk breeze, according to the National Weather Service.

Greeting for Xi in Washington echoes Trump rolling out red carpet for Putin last year

The 100-foot (30-meter) red carpet unfurled as Xi stepped off his plane outside Washington recalled a similar, extra-long one the U.S. laid out for Russian President Valdimir Putin when he touched down at a U.S. air force base in Alaska last summer.

This time, Trump and first lady Melania Trump, shook hands with Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, before appearing to chat and exchange pleasantries that couldn’t be heard.

There was a 21-person honor guard, a flyover from two B1 bombers, flower presenters, platoons from each military service and the flags and anthems of both countries.

When Putin arrived in August 2025, he shook hands with the President Trump while both grinned. The first lady wasn’t present.

Trump and Putin then took the unusual step of climbing into the U.S. president’s limo to share a ride that whisked them to ultimately unsuccessful talks about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Kids present flowers to Xi and wife Peng

Two American children presented bouquets of yellow-colored flowers to the Chinese leader and his wife as the U.S. president and first lady welcomed them at Joint Base Andrews.

Welcoming red carpet rolled out — with a bit of a struggle

A giant red carpet was rolled out at the bottom of the red stairs leading down from Xi’s jet. It took several U.S. service members and an animated director of sorts to unroll the carpet, steer it into place and get it straightened out.

Chinese officials briefly waited at the entrance of the jet while the carpet was adjusted.

The US rolls out 100-foot red carpet for Xi

The Chinese president’s plane was greeted with a long red carpet, a salute with battery guns, a 21-person honor cordon and a flyover from two B1 bombers.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump took the unusual step of appearing in person to greet Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan.

As part of the ceremony, the national anthems of both China and the U.S. were played.

China offered Trump an elaborate welcome ceremony when Air Force One touched down for his visit to Beijing in May, involving top officials and school children acting as greeters, but Xi did not attend personally.

Xi arrives for Washington visit

The Chinese president’s jet touched down at Joint Base Andrews at about 5:40 p.m. Wednesday.

The Air China jet landed while U.S. troops were gathered nearby for a welcome event.

President Donald Trump and Melania Trump were waiting at the base for a rare airport welcome for Xi and Chinese first lady Peng Liyuan.

Trump is awaiting Xi touching down outside Washington

The president and first lady Melania Trump arrived at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland via chopper, then stepped into the presidential limo to wait for Xi’s arrival.

The president saluted waiting Marines upon climbing off his helicopter, then fixed his coat on the windy tarmac.

The motorcade eventually drove past a riser with assembled media waiting to cover Xi’s arrival.

Trump could be seen looking at the reporters in attendance before the motorcade headed to a white tent next to the airport terminal.

Judge dismisses Trump’s lawsuit against Iowa newspaper

Iowa District Judge Scott J. Beattie dismissed Trump’s lawsuit that accused The Des Moines Register and its former pollster J. Ann Selzer of misrepresenting the state of the 2024 presidential race, rejecting the president’s claim that the newspaper’s poll coverage violated Iowa’s consumer fraud law.

Selzer and the Register described the lawsuit as a conspiracy theory and an affront to free speech protections.

Trump and his team have filed several lawsuits against media organizations accusing them of bias, calling into question the boundaries of First Amendment protections for speech and press. Some of those lawsuits have ended in settlements.

Trump filed the lawsuit against Selzer, The Des Moines Register and the newspaper’s parent company in December 2024, accusing them of fraudulently publishing inaccurate poll results to damage him and help Democrats, saying coverage of polls is not protected speech.

Trump’s push to acquire Greenland almost broke NATO. The winner of it all may be ... Greenland

In the end, it was all kisses and laughter as President Donald Trump hailed his “fantastic” relationship with Denmark and Greenland after signing a new security deal that America’s European allies hope will close one of the most dangerous chapters in transatlantic relations.

Trump’s territorial ambitions over Greenland almost broke the NATO military alliance and shattered trust with one of America’s oldest and closest partners.

Interestingly, one place may emerge from this standoff as the real winner: Greenland itself.

“I cannot stress it enough: This is the first time that we are venturing into a binding agreement as a country,” Naaja Nathanielsen, one of Greenland’s two lawmakers in the Danish parliament and a former government minister in Nuuk, told The Associated Press. “That is a huge step forward in our quest for more self-autonomy.”

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Major networks set to continue coverage ban at Xi arrival

The five major networks on Wednesday were poised to continue their ban on filming Trump coverage. At Joint Base Andrews, where the president is set to formally welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping later Wednesday, journalists from Fox News, CBS and NBC were present but not shooting, and some appeared to be breaking down their cameras.

Other television outlets whose crews were present, according to signs on their tripods and cameras, were NewsNation, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting Network, One America News and LindellTV.

Democratic leader says House Republicans are ‘running scared’ ahead of elections

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who is in line to become House speaker if Democrats win control in fall, chided Republicans for trying to distance themselves from Trump on the Iran war and other issues.

“On one hand, they want Donald Trump’s MAGA money. I mean, they’re feeding at the trough of Donald Trump’s MAGA money,” he said. “And on the other hand, they want to pretend that they creating distance between Donald Trump and themselves.”

Jeffries held a news conference at the empty House chamber, criticizing Republicans for cutting short the legislative calendar to go home and campaign.

Judge hears arguments without immediately ruling on Trump’s news outlet ban

A judge has heard arguments but did not rule from the bench in a case on Trump’s ban of three news outlets from White House grounds.

Wednesday’s hearing marked the latest development in an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

Trump banned the outlets beginning Friday, assailing what he called “fake news.” More recently the president has said negative coverage was dangerous for the country.

The outlets argued they were singled out because of the content of their coverage — in other words, viewpoint discrimination and called the ban a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment.

Hearing on Trump’s ban of 3 news outlets from White House is underway

In court arguments over Trump’s ban of three media outlets from White House grounds, the administration continues to defend the move as constitutional.

Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik told the court Wednesday that “access to the White House is a privilege, not a right.”

The case is being heard by U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, whom Trump appointed in 2017 and who ordered a CNN journalist’s access restored in a similar case in 2018.

Arguments began with attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr. calling the ban against CNN, MS NOW and Politico an “unprecedented, unreasonable punishment” and saying there was “not a semblance of due process.”

Trump to attend Texas-Tennessee football game

The White House confirms that the president, who has put athletics front and center in his second term, will attend the matchup Saturday.

No. 1 Texas is traveling to No. 14 Tennessee for the Southeastern Conference opener in Knoxville. It’s the first meeting between the two marquee football programs since the 1969 Cotton Bowl.

State Department orders diplomats to use ‘super intelligence’ rather ‘artificial intelligence’

The move follows Trump’s attempt to rebrand the technology in his address to the UN General Assembly.

“Following the president‘s remarks at the GA today, please change all references of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to ‘Super Intelligence’ in our documents and positions. We will be using ‘SI’ in all remarks, positions and press elements moving forward,” said an email sent Tuesday to employees by Michael Drager, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.

That bureau is in charge of U.S. diplomatic missions to all U.N. and multilateral agencies around the world. The email was obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear if other State Department bureaus would follow suit.

AI company leaders warn that without intervention, ‘AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole’

The heads of major AI companies are pleading with the United Nations to set controls over the burgeoning technology they are designing to save the world or at least its people.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Dario Amodei, Chief Executive Officer, Anthropic said.

“We could lose control of the future to AI,” his competitor, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

Both testified Wednesday to the U.N. Security Council. They said the countries of the world, through the council, have to set safeguards that would be actual controls to prevent the technology from getting too powerful to reign in. They also called for the world to make sure that the power of AI isn’t concentrated in one company or country.

Rubio says Trump has invited Putin to US-hosted G20 meeting in Florida

Speaking to reporters Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Rubio said the Trump administration was hopeful that Putin would accept the invitation despite differences over Russia’s war with Ukraine and other matter.

“In order to solve problems, you have to meet with the people that you disagree with or the people that you might have some issues with, so we’ve invited President Putin to the G20,” Rubio said. “We think it’s an opportunity for him to engage not just with the president, but with other world leaders. We hope that’s, an invitation he’ll accept.”

Trump will host G20 leaders at his Miami country club in December.

County election offices in Texas are scrambling to process backlogged voter registrations

The problem started with the Texas Department of Public Safety, which allows people to register to vote or update their registrations when they renew their driver’s license.

State officials blamed an unspecified error dating to October 2025. It meant that applications were not being forwarded to the person’s home county, where they are processed and verified.

Now those counties are dealing with nearly a year’s worth of backlogged applications. Several county officials say they will need to hire temporary workers to handle the crush. Early in-person voting in Texas for the midterm elections starts Oct. 19.

The size of the backlog statewide hasn’t been determined, but the Texas Association of County Election Officials says it’s in the tens of thousands for some of the most populous counties. In Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, it’s about 45,000 voter registration applications.

State Department asks Americans to report suspected visa fraudsters

The State Department is asking Americans to report foreigners suspected of U.S. visa fraud for potential deportation and criminal prosecution.

The department said in a statement Wednesday that it had launched an online portal to make it easier to report such cases.

The department said tips from “upstanding and concerned” members of the public have been responsible for the revocation of visas from many of the tens of thousands of people who either lied on their applications or were violating the conditions of their stay in the U.S.

“This new online tool provides a convenient and reliable way for the public to submit crucial information for prompt review and action,” the statement said.

Aminata Seck, 26, is from Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and her attorney said on social media that she entered the United States on a student visa.

Her attorney, Sadiqa Reynolds, wrote that Seck was detained on Aug. 7 at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport, as she was planning to travel with her team to an HBCU tournament.

The Louisville Courier Journal, which first reported Seck’s arrest, wrote that Reynolds said Seck may have missed a student visa deadline because she was having back surgery, and that she also has an ACL injury.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Seck legally entered the U.S. in September 2019, then “chose to overstay her welcome in violation of our nation's laws.” The agency wrote that an immigration judge had ordered Seck removed a year ago after she failed to appear at an immigration hearing.

DHS said that Seck was wearing a leg brace for a knee injury when she was arrested, and is receiving treatment at a hospital.

Reynolds wrote that she spoke to Seck last week, and the player said she remained in a lot of pain. Reynolds said she was transferred to multiple detention facilities before being sent to the hospital.

Seck remains listed on the Grayson County, Kentucky, Detention Center’s online inmate roster. The offense description says: “US DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY / ICE.”

Democratic U.S. Rep. Morgan McGarvey, who represents a district including Louisville, said he is monitoring Seck’s situation, and that of others who have been arrested and detained in Kentucky.

“Aminata is a student-athlete who was arrested by ICE at the airport while traveling with her teammates,” he wrote in a statement. “The Trump administration’s cruelty knows no bounds, but we will never let this become normal and we won’t stop fighting for her.”

Seck was named to the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference All-Conference Third Team last season after she led the team with 11.7 points and 7.3 rebounds. Seck, a 6-foot-4 center, had five double-doubles last season and scored a season-high 30 points vs. Lane College on Jan. 14.

Seck also was named the SIAC Women’s Basketball Elite 16 award winner. The Elite 16 award is the SIAC’s highest academic achievement honor and is presented to student-athletes who demonstrate exemplary performance in athletics and the classroom.

The school declined to comment: “Out of respect for the privacy of those involved, Kentucky State University does not have information to share.”

U.S. Rep. Greg Casar visited a federal detention center in south Texas where Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, 28, was taken into custody after being shot Sunday in Austin by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

Casar said Garces Perez was in a wheelchair and still in pain, but did not say whether the family had decided that he should undergo surgery. The Department of Homeland Security has said Garces Perez, who has been taken to a hospital twice since the shooting, is receiving around-the-clock medical care and pain medication.

"If they want to say it’s great medical care, they should start providing great medical care today by having him leave the detention center, go to a hospital or to a doctor, and do not delay his surgery if that’s what his family chooses to do,” Casar said.

Garces Perez remains in Texas detention center

Casar, whose district includes Austin, was the first member of Congress to visit Garces Perez in person since the shooting. He said the wound in Garces Perez's back remains bloody and medical staff change his gauze two or three times daily.

Following Casar's visit and a press conference, DHS issued a previous statement denying claims that Garces Perez was forced to sleep on a floor or that he was prevented from having the bullet removed, saying ICE would not advise on a medical procedure for a detainee.

Garces Perez was making a DoorDash delivery when ICE officers in an unmarked truck sideswiped his car twice, his attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said. He was shot and taken to a hospital, then released into ICE custody with a bullet still in his back, she said.

ICE and DHS haven't said what led to the shooting beyond that Garces Perez was “the subject of a targeted vehicle stop."

ICE has not said if the agent who fired was wearing a body camera. At the beginning of September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said he expected all field agents to have them by the end of the month.

Austin police released body camera footage from its officers who arrived just after the shooting. Garces Perez is seen hunched over in the front seat of his car and grabbing his shoulder and rocking back and forth. An officer later cut off Garces Perez’s shirt, and a wound can be seen in his upper back.

Garces Perez entered the U.S. in 2024 using CBP One, a program begun under President Joe Biden that allowed migrants to make appointments with U.S. authorities to be considered for asylum, Lincoln-Goldfinch said. President Donald Trump ended the program on his first day in office.

Garces Perez was an asylum seeker and had a valid work permit, according to Lincoln-Goldfinch. She said a judge issued a deportation order after Garces Perez missed an immigration court hearing because the notice was sent to a former address.

ICE crackdown in Austin sees more than 1,000 arrests

Garces Perez's shooting came at the end of a summer in which ICE notably ramped up enforcement operations in Austin and surrounding suburbs and increasingly targeted immigrants without criminal records in public places.

In all, ICE made more than 1,000 arrests in Austin, Pflugerville and other nearby cities during June and July, more than an 80% increase from a year earlier, which had been the previous peak, according to ICE data provided to the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, and analyzed by The Associated Press.

Unlike some other places, the increases in Austin were not driven by partnerships with local law enforcement agencies or by picking up jail inmates. Instead, the data shows that ICE officers made the vast majority of arrests in the community through traffic stops and other enforcement methods.

Nearly 2 out of 3 people who were arrested in the Austin area had no criminal convictions and no pending criminal charges, the data shows.

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Foley reported from Iowa City, Iowa. Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

Wilder is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Detective Tim Cooper of the Ada County Sheriff’s Office reopened a cold case investigation in 2019 that led authorities to identify Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski posthumously. He fatally poisoned himself with cyanide more than 40 years ago and was buried anonymously.

Once detectives identified Betkouski and began to learn about him, they came to believe he was a possible suspect in the killings of seven people in the Chicago area with cyanide-laced Tylenol, Cooper said.

No one was ever charged in those killings, which triggered a widespread recall of the over-the-counter painkillers.

An engraved key found with the body in the Boise church led investigators to a street in Jacksonville, Florida, where a property owner disappeared in 1982. They used photos and DNA testing to confirm his identity.

Investigators then learned that Betkouski worked in drugstores. Former colleagues and acquaintances said he had a history of volatility, was fascinated by the idea of a “perfect crime” and once said cyanide was a means to kill without detection, authorities said.

Detectives found cyanide in Betkouski’s desk, which Cooper said appeared to be homemade and was a different compound than what was used in the 1982 killings.

Betkouski lived in five states throughout his life but never in Illinois or close to Chicago, according to investigators. Photos showed that Betkouski visited the Chicago area a year before the killings, but it was not clear if he returned the following year.

The Chicago Police Department said in a statement that its detectives have been in contact with Idaho authorities to determine whether their findings are connected to the Tylenol murders investigation, which remains an open cold case. It did not say whether they consider Betkouski a suspect.

Investigators long believed a man named James Lewis was responsible for the killings, though he was never charged. Lewis died in 2023 after serving more than 12 years in prison for sending an extortion note to Johnson & Johnson, the drug's manufacturer at the time, demanding $1 million to “stop the killing.”

When Lewis was arrested in 1982, he gave investigators a detailed account of how the killer might have operated. He always denied involvement, however.

“Following the president's remarks at the GA today, please change all references of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to ‘Super Intelligence’ in our documents and positions. We will be using ‘SI’ in all remarks, positions and press elements moving forward,” said an email sent Tuesday to employees by Michael Drager, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.

That bureau is in charge of U.S. diplomatic missions to all U.N. and multilateral agencies around the world. The email, titled “Change in Nomenclature AI to SI,” was obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear if other State Department bureaus had or would follow suit.

On Tuesday, Trump told the U.N. General Assembly that he would “officially” change the name of AI, saying the existing name makes the technology seem “fake” and that U.S. government documents would from that point forward use “super intelligence.”

“The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” Trump said.

The president said at the U.N. that “from the point forward” U.S. government documents “will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial. So it’s super intelligence.”

Drager's email was sent shortly after Trump's speech, but it wasn't clear on Wednesday whether similar orders had been sent at other agencies. Such an order would likely mean adjusting the name of the “AI Force” that Trump announced this weekend to the “SI Force.”

On Wednesday, U.S. representatives used the SI term at a U.N. Security Council meeting about AI, where tech executives urged the United Nations' most powerful body to rein in the developing technology.

AI's rapid ascent has spurred dire warnings from AI company CEOs, lawmakers and others about the technology outpacing humans' ability to control it and calls for global guardrails.

Trump has rejected efforts to slow the AI development race through greater government oversight, saying he does not want to hinder industry and that the U.S. needs to ensure an edge over China.

Trump claimed on social media Monday that the U.S. is leading over China on AI and that he was “not going to stifle Growth, of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, or the Internet, itself.”

AI is expected to be a key topic when Trump welcomes Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Washington for a visit starting Wednesday.

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Associated Press writers Josh Boak in Washington and Farnoush Amiri and Seth Borenstein at the United Nations contributed to this report.

Watson is trying his best, though, to avoid saying anything that puts him at odds with fans again before this week's matchup against the Carolina Panthers.

“We’re moving forward. There’s great energy this week within the locker room and in the city. So let’s continue to build on that,” Watson said on Wednesday.

Watson was widely booed during the second half of an Aug. 22 exhibition game against the Buffalo Bills, when he was 5 of 12 for 36 yards and an interception. He drew further rebuke when he said the boos were “personal” and showed “disrespect” after he came back from two Achilles tendon injuries.

The 10-year veteran said it was an emotional response after Monken selected him as the starting quarterback two days later. Watson did not play in the Aug. 27 preseason home finale against New England.

“That’s in the past, so let’s push forward,” Watson said. “I never try to go at war with the fans. So I think the biggest thing is just be ready for support, ready to feel their energy and continue this great feeling that we have this week.”

Cornerback Denzel Ward — the Browns' longest-tenured player — is also hoping to see Watson get some support.

“We want them to back and support the entire team. I don’t think we're just looking at any individual person or any individual efforts, but I mean this is a team sport and we need everybody to play well, and we need the fans to help support us. And I think that’s the biggest thing,” Ward said.

Sunday will be Watson’s 22nd start for the Browns since being acquired from Houston in 2022. He is 10-11 with 22 touchdown passes, 13 interceptions and an 83.4 passer rating.

Watson comes into the game second in the league with a 76.9% completion rate. He was 24 of 30 for 238 yards and two touchdowns in last Sunday’s 23-19 win at Tampa Bay, marking the sixth time in franchise history a Cleveland QB has completed at least 80% with at least 30 pass attempts.

A significant part of Cleveland’s passing game in the first two games has been short passes. Watson has the second-highest rate of throws behind the line of scrimmage to 9 yards out at 76.9%. Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes leads at 79.7%.

However, Watson has been successful when he has had to go downfield, completing 7 of 12 for 215 yards with two touchdowns and an interception.

Watson has also received plenty of help from his receivers. Of his 443 passing yards, 266 have been yards after the catch, also second most in the league.

“Some of it is by design, some of it is we got pressure and couldn’t push it down the field,” Monken said. “We understand that you’re going to have to be explosive to score. With the pressure we were getting in the second half (against Tampa Bay), we had to get it out of our hands and force them to cover us. And I thought our guys did a really good job of that.”

Watson could have a favorable matchup against Carolina’s defense. The Panthers use zone coverage on 83.3% of drop-backs — seventh most in the league. Watson comes into the game with a 79.5% completion rate when facing zone, the third-highest rate in the league.

“They don’t give up big plays. They’re big, strong upfront. Great, reactive, experienced linebackers and then the secondary is very experienced,” he said. “We can’t give them free passes, and we got to take care of the ball.”

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See AP’s full NFL coverage here

Voter turnout in the election for the 395-seat House of Representatives was 38% – the lowest since 2007 – and down by nearly 25% compared to the last elections in 2021.

The vote was the first since deadly youth-led protests nearly a year ago and a mass attempt by migrants to cross Morocco’s northern border into the Spanish territory of Ceuta that left dozens dead. It will determine the next prime minister and the makeup of the government, which will serve alongside a powerful monarchy that retains broad authority over strategic affairs.

Results are expected Thursday.

The next government will oversee billions of dollars in investment as Morocco prepares to co-host the 2030 FIFA World Cup, prompting some to describe it as the “World Cup government.” The new political leadership will also face pressure to address everyday concerns, including jobs, wages and the cost of living.

For many young Moroccans, the election comes as doubts grow that political participation can improve their daily lives. Some have turned to street protests, while others have considered leaving the country or staying away from the ballot box.

Othmane Mouden, a Casablanca businessman in his late 30s, believes elections are the only way Moroccans can make their voices heard.

“Protesting like the Gen Z youth will not bring any change,” he said on his way to the polling station. “You can only claim your rights through the polls.”

Voters chose among 7,288 candidates from 27 political parties. Since no single party is expected to obtain an absolute majority, the winner will need to negotiate with others to form a governing coalition.

The Moroccan Constitution requires the king to appoint the head of government from the party that wins the most seats in legislative elections.

One possibility for prime minister is Faouzi Lakjaa, president of Morocco’s soccer federation, who recently joined the PAM party and has been buoyed by Morocco’s recent soccer achievements.

Another is Fatima-Zahra Mansouri, 50, mayor of Marrakech and minister of urban planning, who would be Morocco’s first female prime minister.

Some groups, including the far-left party The Democratic Path, called for a boycott of the election, saying that it “lacks the minimum conditions of democracy.” Banned but tolerated Islamist association Al-Adl Wal Ihsane issued similar claims.

Turnout at midday was just over 11%, slightly below the 12% at the same time during the last legislative elections in 2021.

The number of registered voters has declined by 9.7% since the 2021 election, even as Morocco’s population has grown, reflecting disenchantment with politics notably among young people.

As ballot stations opened in Casablanca and Rabat, voters of various ages formed small but continuous lines to cast their ballots.

Jamal Aamar, a 63-year-old retired banker, came to vote for the Federation of the Democratic Left, a left-wing coalition. Aamar said participating in the election allows his voice to be heard.

“If you boycott, you will leave others an empty seat,” he said.

The constitution recognizes the right to vote for Moroccans living abroad, but there is no voting by mail or ballot boxes at Moroccan consulates. Instead, they must travel to Morocco to vote or authorize a registered family member or acquaintance to vote on their behalf.

Moroccans in Madrid had mixed views on the elections, with some shrugging them off as having little impact.

Caterer Bader Eabram, 24, said Morocco's strong performance in recent World Cups and other soccer championships is driving some voters' choices, and providing hope.

“We’re all really eager to host the World Cup. It’s a great country,'' he said. ‘’We can do anything.''

——

Iain Sullivan in Madrid contributed to this report.

Grail Inc.’s Galleri test doesn't diagnose cancer but instead, with a single blood draw, looks for a signal that someone may have one of a long list of tumors. Those who receive a positive result need additional care to tell if they're really sick.

The Food and Drug Administration's advisory panel voted 7-2, with one abstention, that the DNA-based test offers more potential benefits than risks, such as causing false assurances or raising false alarms. The positive vote came even as the panel raised many questions about the technology that need more study.

“Perhaps my yes is a hopeful rather than an accurate one,” said Dr. Victor van Berkel of UofL Physicians in Louisville, Kentucky, describing how more research is needed even if the test is rolled out. “If we can find more early-stage cancers in the population that we can’t screen for currently, that will end up having benefit.”

The vote followed two earlier votes in which the experts affirmed that the test appears safe and effective for use by people age 50 and older.

Lots of companies are studying such blood tests and Wednesday's vote marks the first time a federal advisory group has backed the experimental approach. The FDA isn't bound by the advice but if it agrees, it could pave the way for widespread U.S. adoption of a long-sought way to find more cancers earlier. A final decision is expected in a few months.

Today there are a handful of recommended cancer screenings, such as mammograms and colonoscopies, that look for one kind of tumor at a time.

Those tests are designed to spot tumors in their early stages, when they’re easier to treat, and the panel balked at using that term for Grail’s test — saying it failed to show effectiveness for “early detection.”

The experts also came up with a list of precautions that doctors and potential patients to be told, including: The test would need to be used in addition to today’s routine cancer screenings, not as a replacement. A negative test doesn’t guarantee you don’t have cancer. And it will take more study to prove if the test is as beneficial as mainstay cancer screenings like mammograms.

People in the U.S. can already buy the Galleri test — typically by paying $700 or more in cash. But FDA approval would likely widen availability by opening the door to coverage from Medicare and private insurers.

FDA staffers and other outside experts spent hours debating the potential downsides to the technology.

Risks include that the test will miss a significant number of real cancers while also flagging a potential cancer in patients who are healthy. The test also was less accurate at detecting early-stage cancers, when treatment is easier and more likely to benefit patients. Grail also didn’t provide data showing that screening with its test led to fewer cancer deaths, a metric that would have required years of follow-up.

Representatives for Grail argued that its test is a leap forward because it can pick up signs of more than 50 cancers, including dozens for which there are no screening options, such as liver and ovarian cancer.

“Patients want opportunity, they want options,” said Dr. Mylynda Massart of the University of Pittsburgh, who presented on behalf of Grail. “They want the chance to fight their disease while the chance to survive is possible.”

Grail’s primary study in 140,000 older adults showed that its test detected about one third of cancers diagnosed over a one-year period. About two-thirds of patients who received a “cancer signal detected” were later confirmed to have cancer.

But FDA reviewers at the meeting flipped the company’s data to emphasize the potential downsides of that performance. The agency’s chief reviewer pointed out that the test missed 2 of 3 cancers that were diagnosed over the coming year, giving false reassurance to many patients.

Consumer advocates warned that patients might ignore early signs of cancer after receiving an all-clear from DNA testing test.

“When they start having symptoms there will be tendency to delay going to the doctor — just a little bit — and that could be deadly,” said Diana Zuckerman of the nonprofit National Center for Health Research, who spoke during a public comment period. “They will be told to continue other screening, but will they?”

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The Associated Press’ health and science coverage receives financial support from the AP Fund for Journalism and private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Days later, the vehicle is still missing, and so is the urn she planned to place at her mother’s grave.

“It’s been really rough,” Shelia Horn, who lives at the Parkview Tower Apartments in Warren, said. “I haven’t slept in days.”

Horn said she walked out of her building looking for her 2019 Kia Forte where she usually parked it, and instantly knew something was wrong.

“I’m like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my gosh,’” Horn said. “I walked out of my place, and I knew I parked right here. I saw other cars. Not mine.”

At first, Horn said she thought she might have parked somewhere else by mistake.

“I’m like click, click, click, my key fob,” she said. “I still walked around the building click, click, click and I didn’t see it.”

That’s when a second, even more devastating realization set in.

“I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. My dad’s in my car,’” Horn said. “That was the worst part of the whole thing, was realizing my dad, he was still in the car.”

By “dad,” Horn means her father’s cremated remains, which were in an urn in the backseat. She said she had placed the urn there because she was planning to take it to her mother’s grave.

“He was wonderful. He was the best grandpa ever,” Horn said, describing her father, Ron. “My kids just loved him, especially my oldest. That was Papa’s bug, Papa’s little bug. And I miss him a lot.”

Horn has filed a police report and is pleading with whoever took her car to return both the vehicle and the ashes.

“I really just hope that someone brings my car and my dad,” she said.

The Warren Police Department confirmed the case remains an active investigation.

Anyone with information is asked to contact them.

Horn’s family has also set up a fundraiser to help her during this difficult time. Details on how to contribute can be found here.

Calling the case extraordinary, Iowa District Judge Scott J. Beattie said that allowing the lawsuit and its “faulty” claims to proceed could have a chilling effect that “can discourage others from reporting on and debating public affairs.” He sided with pollster J. Ann Selzer and the newspaper in affirming that the poll and coverage of it were constitutionally protected political speech, not a commercial product.

The ruling Wednesday came hours after a judge heard arguments but did not rule from the bench in a case on Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds. Trump banned the three outlets last Friday, assailing what he called “fake news.”

After the ruling in Iowa Wednesday, a spokesman for Trump's legal team said the president will take his case to the Iowa Supreme Court.

Trump filed the lawsuit against Selzer, The Des Moines Register and the newspaper’s parent company in December 2024, accusing them of fraudulently publishing inaccurate poll results to damage him and help Democrats, saying coverage of polls is not protected speech.

Trump and his team have filed several lawsuits against media organizations accusing them of bias, calling into question the boundaries of free speech protections, particularly for the press. Some of those lawsuits have ended in settlements.

Selzer’s case was taken up by the free speech advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. She said Wednesday she was grateful for the ruling, which “reaffirms the fundamental freedom to pursue and publish the truth without political interference.”

“Polling is a social science, not clairvoyance, and no responsible pollster can guarantee an election outcome," Selzer said in a statement.

Selzer's attorneys at FIRE and her co-defendants also celebrated the ruling.

“Today is a victory for the First Amendment — and for the essential role of a free press in American democracy," Polly Grunfeld Sack, USA Today Co. chief legal counsel, said in a statement. USA Today Co., formerly known as Gannett, owns The Register.

In dismissing the case, Beattie wrote that Trump’s lawsuit sought to “stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability.” After hearing the arguments, the judge concluded the constitutional protection “is too great and the reach is too far. The case must therefore be dismissed.”

Beattie said the case would have to be dismissed even if, solely for the purpose of deciding the motions, he accepted the Trump team’s allegations that the poll was intentionally skewed and its results fabricated. “Even with this assumption, each of the three counts still fails,” the judge wrote, because the lawsuit did not meet the legal requirements for fraud or consumer deception.

The poll, conducted by Selzer’s company in the final days of October and released just days before Election Day 2024, showed then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ presidential nominee, capturing 47% of Iowa likely voters, to Trump’s 44%. Trump ultimately won the support of 56% of the nearly 2 million Iowans who voted.

U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and former Iowa state Sen. Brad Zaun, both Republicans, had joined Trump’s lawsuit.

Trump, Miller-Meeks and Zaun alleged the misleading coverage diminished their reputations, valuable time in the final days of the campaign, and campaign funds and resources.

Waltrip and his family shared a statement on Wednesday that noted the former driver, “has been diagnosed with Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD) complicated by possible Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) – likely from injuries incurred during his racing career.”

The 79-year-old Waltrip was one of NASCAR’s storied characters, one of the first to build a brand around his supersized personality, and he served for decades as one of the sport’s strongest ambassadors.

Waltrip won 84 races and Cup Series championships in 1981, 1982 and 1985 before moving straight into the broadcast booth. He was inducted into the third class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame in January 2012.

Waltrip was Fox Sports’ first hire when the network launched its NASCAR coverage in 2001 and became widely known for his signature “Boogity! Boogity! Boogity! Let’s go racing, boys” call.

A fearless Kentucky boy who first showed up on the NASCAR scene in 1972 at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, Waltrip aggravated his competitors by beating them on the track and then running his mouth out of the car.

Rivals nicknamed him “Jaws” and Waltrip was at the forefront of parlaying his personality and fame into a lucrative side hustle of appearances, celebrity endorsing and, finally, the broadcast booth.

“While this disease will inevitably progress, thankfully it is currently limited to some minor noticeable symptoms,” the family said in a statement. "As a result, he will be stepping further away from the public limelight. Be assured, Darrell is happy and otherwise healthy — spending his time with his wife, Stevie, two daughters and his three young grandchildren. We are all grateful for your continued prayer, love and support!

Boogity! Boogity! Boogity!"

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See AP’s full auto racing coverage here

“It’s a big loss, for sure," Harbaugh said following practice on Wednesday. "It’s your starting quarterback. It’s a tough loss.”

Dart was injured on the first drive Monday night against the Los Angeles Rams when his left leg bent awkwardly as he was hit by two defenders. The initial hope was a sprained medial collateral ligament and a shorter absence, but an MRI revealed a more extensive injury that will keep him out for an extended period of time.

"The season’s not over, but it is for him," Harbaugh said. "You feel like it’s the end of the world, then you wake up and the world’s not done. The world keeps spinning. The games keep getting played.”

For that next game Sunday against Tennessee, Jameis Winston takes over as the starter. Winston completed 11 of 27 passes for 111 yards and threw an interception in the 28-6 loss at LA that dropped New York to 1-1.

“I have to execute better, and I am going to execute better,” Winston said. "No matter how big it may seem, being present and focus on doing all that you can do with what you have, with where you are. For right now, that’s keeping Jaxson’s spirits uplifted and going out there on that football field and being the New York Football Giants’ starting quarterback.”

The Giants’ next five opponents have a combined 2-8 record. Winston is 3-9 in 12 NFL starts since 2024.

“Jameis is capable of doing anything,” Titans coach Robert Saleh said. “He’s got tremendous arm talent. He’s capable of putting 500 yards and four touchdowns on you in a heartbeat.”

Harbaugh did not say when Dart would have surgery or go into details about the extent of the injury after the NFL Network reported there is damage to his meniscus and medial collateral and posterior cruciate ligaments.

“With Jaxson, just unfortunate," Tennessee starter Cam Ward said. “That’s something that you don’t want to see. And he’s a great quarterback, so all of us were looking forward to going against him, that team.”

Jake Haener, who is on the practice squad, is set to back up Winston. Haener, who played in eight games and started one for New Orleans two seasons ago, joined the Giants midway through training camp and stuck around over journeyman Brandon Allen.

Harbaugh said the Giants will add another QB but move forward with Winston at the most important position in football and build a game plan for the 32-year-old set to make his 90th professional start.

“He can throw it: He’s a big, strong passing quarterback,” Harbaugh said. “Jameis has been practicing every day. He’s taken reps. He knows the offense. He’s been in every single meeting. He’s been engaged every step of the way with everything we’re doing. From that perspective, it’s seamless. It’s not ideal at all, but it’s definitely seamless.”

Dart is not the only significant Giants player who is injured

Edge rusher Brian Burns, who sprained his left ankle late in the Rams game, did not practice Wednesday. Harbaugh called Burns — who ranked second in the league in sacks last season — day to day.

Kayvon Thibodeaux would figure to move into the starting lineup if Burns is unable to play.

“We are definitely blessed with depth at that position,” Harbaugh said. “We’ll see how it goes for the game. But if he can’t go, then we are very confident in the guys that we have.”

No. 1 receiver Malik Nabers, who popped his right shoulder back into place and returned Monday night, and starting left tackle Andrew Thomas, who limped off with a groin injury, were limited participants.

Harbaugh said of Nabers: “It looks good. I think he’s going to be OK.”

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AP Pro Football Writers Rob Maaddi in Tampa, Florida, and Teresa M. Walker in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed to this report.

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See AP’s full NFL coverage here

It was only 112 days ago when Koivun helped lead Auburn to another NCAA title, the final chapter in a remarkable college career.

And on Thursday, the 21-year-old Koivun plays with Thomas in a fourballs match for his Presidents Cup debut. For a sport with a reputation of moving slowly, his career has been at warp speed.

“Definitely going to feel some nerves on the first tee, but we’re all human. I think everyone does," Koivun said Wednesday. “I told Justin once I get my first tee shot out of the way, I’m going to be good. Just kind of balancing adrenaline, nerves, everything like that to the best of my ability.”

Three days of practice on the No. 3 course at Medinah Country Club — rain-soaked when they arrived, drying out by the day — gives way to the opening session of five fourballs matches.

The Presidents Cup has a heavy favorite in the Americans — they have won the last 10 times and lost only once since the matches against the Internationals began in 1994 — and a sentimental favorite in Adam Scott, who has is playing for the 12th time without ever being on the winning side.

“History is history, and it’s nice to be a part of history on the good side,” Collin Morikawa said. “But history can always be changed. I think for us, starting tomorrow, it all starts 0-0.”

Pairings for the opening session

U.S. captain Brandt Snedeker wasted little time sending out world No. 1 Scheffler and Sam Burns against Min Woo Lee and Sungjae Im.

They will be followed by Cameron Young and Xander Schauffele against the Japanese duo of Hideki Matsuyama and Ryo Hisatsune; Thomas and Koivun against Corey Conners and Nico Echavarria; Morikawa and Wyndham Clark against Scott and Ryan Fox; and the anchor match of Chris Gotterup and Patrick Cantlay against Si Woo Kim and Tom Kim.

“You kind of have an idea of how this thing’s going to go and got a good game plan set forth,” Snedeker said. “And now it’s just about getting out of these guys’ way and let them go do what they love to do.”

What to expect? Pretty much anything.

“I think everyone comes into these tournaments with optimism,” International captain Geoff Ogilvy said. “They’re very momentum-based tournaments.”

Ogilvy thought back to two years ago at Royal Montreal when the Americans made a big opening statement with a 5-0 shutout. The Internationals responded with a shutout of their own in foursomes in which three of the matches didn't even get to the 15th hole.

“You could never have predicted that,” Ogilvy said, a vice captain in 2024. “We've been thinking about this for a long time. So we're just excited to get going.”

The United States has another embarrassment of riches compared with the Internationals. With only five matches on opening day, Snedeker sat Russell Henley, the No. 6 player in the world, and Jacob Bridgeman, who came into his first Presidents Cup fresh off another PGA Tour victory.

Koivun is the X-factor for Team USA

It also has Koivun, one of the more intriguing characters in these matches considering how quickly he made it to this stage. Koivun won in his third start as a professional in the 3M Open — Scheffler was the runner-up — and Snedeker trusted his gut in picking him.

He wasted no time giving Koivun a taste of the matches.

“Jackson being a young kid, I feel like he’s really kind of found his way on our team really quickly,” Snedeker said. “I feel like he’s handled the adjustment really well. Justin is just a natural pairing for him. I think he’ll do a great job putting his arm around him and show him how USA golf is meant to be played.”

Koivun already has had a memorable week. As the only player who came without a plus-one, the Americans had him pose with the Presidents Cup trophy with all their wives and girlfriends. Clark told of the grief Koivun caught when he was the last one to show up for the bus ride to Medinah.

They all have high hopes for him between the ropes.

“The fact that he has the maturity and the correct outlook on everything, he’s obviously really competitive and he’s obviously really talented,” Thomas said. “I’m excited for him this week. It’s going to be an awesome experience for him.”

The Americans have won the opening session eight of the last nine times.

“We would love to be in front, have a winning session,” Ogilvy said. “That's the job tomorrow is to win a session. I'm sure we'll be in good moods either way, but the goal would be to win the session.”

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See AP’s full golf coverage here

State and local governments are leading, he said, as “Trump is trying to recreate the 19th century” by reopening coal plants, announcing new plans for oil drilling including off California, and centering his energy policy on fossil fuels that cause climate change.

“He’s doubling down on stupid, and he’s putting the American economy at risk,” Newsom said in an interview. He called Trump the most destructive environmental president in American history and “an invasive species.”

White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers used Trump’s derogatory nickname for the governor, “Newscum,” in responding to the comments. She said his “doubling down on Biden’s unpopular, unreliable and costly Green New Scam is stupid.”

“No one is surprised to see him whining about the climate change hoax at another conference instead of fixing the problems plaguing his state: out-of-control crime, the highest homeless population in the United States, and wildfire victims still waiting on state permits to rebuild their homes and businesses,” Taylor wrote in an email.

Newsom has long been trying to counter Trump's climate approach

Newsom, a Democrat eyeing a 2028 presidential run, has sought to counter Trump’s stance on climate issues before. He went to the U.N. climate talks hosted in Belem, Brazil in 2025 when Trump skipped it.

Trump prioritizes fossil fuels to produce electricity. The Biden administration sought to ramp up clean energy as a climate change solution. Trump began reversing U.S. energy policies his first day back in office.

Last year at the UN, Trump called climate change the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He has hindered renewable energy, particularly offshore wind, while China and other countries invest heavily. China leads the world in adding wind and solar power, though it also added a lot of coal power last year.

Chinese President Xi Jinping begins his state visit to Washington Wednesday. As the economic and technological competition between the countries escalates, Newsom said the Chinese leader is "cleaning our clock from an economic perspective.”

Trump and Xi are expected to discuss artificial intelligence as they meet this week. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. has proposed a new “ notification mechanism ” for AI incidents that could affect national security.

Newsom also not happy with Trump AI stance

Newsom was critical of Trump for not doing more to add guardrails and instead listening to advice to let artificial intelligence “rip.” Newsom announced Wednesday a group of experts who will advise on oversight recommendations in California, including advancing the creation of a potential “kill switch” for rogue frontier models.

Trump was in New York on Tuesday. Unlike last year's climate-focused speech, Trump defended his actions against Iran as he spoke at the U.N. General Assembly and made the diplomatic rounds.

Newsom spoke at the United Nations on Wednesday alongside mayors grappling with the impacts of climate change and calling for collective action. He shared how the state is using renewables to change the way it produces and consumes energy, while reducing carbon pollution. While in New York, he also signed a new agreement with Spain's prime minister to strengthen collaboration on clean energy and climate issues and announced progress to link carbon markets with Washington state.

“California is not going to sit back and watch this guy roll back the last half century. We’re going to lead the next great revolution,” Newsom said.

“We’re going to dominate and we’re going to out compete and we are going to prepare the economy," he said, "not just in California, but the rest of the nation, for the fierce competitive fight against China as we move forward in this space.”

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

She’s Alive, the entity founded to manage and protect Parton’s estate, had filed the complaint against Seaver and Squadron Augmented Protection Services a day prior. The estate accused Seaver of threatening to commit violence and destroy his aunt’s legacy and business empire in court filings.

The order says the court took into account the repeated threats cited in the complaint, as well as the alleged demands for payment and Seaver’s “claimed access to weapons, experience with violence, and intention to retaliate.” It describes the communications as “concerning,” specifically noting the threat to use force.

As part of the order, Seaver and his company SAPS, which provided Parton’s security detail, must refrain from entering any She’s Alive property or talking with or being within 1,000 feet (305 meters) of She’s Alive employees and business partners. The order is also meant to keep Seaver from interfering with its business relationships.

A hearing is scheduled for Oct. 7.

Seaver, who was handpicked by the star to announce her death from cancer last month, did not respond to an email Wednesday from The Associated Press requesting comment on the order being granted.

Representatives for SAPS also did not respond, and no one was present at their office in downtown Nashville on Wednesday afternoon. No one came to the door at an address listed in court documents for Seaver in the semi-rural Nashville suburb of Fairview. A woman speaking to a reporter through a doorbell camera declined to comment.

In the temporary restraining order request filed by She’s Alive and other court documents, Seaver is accused of sending increasingly threatening messages over the last several weeks. She’s Alive is run by Danny Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager.

Last week, She’s Alive terminated Seaver and SAPS, saying his “terrorizing conduct made their continued retention untenable,” according to court documents.

The court documents showcase a series of messages She's Alive says were sent by Seaver, starting just before Parton's death. They start with threats to destroy Parton's brand, and then after her death, depict Seaver reveling in his newfound fame and calling himself an “international arms dealer.”

In one message written Sept. 1 and included in the court documents, he said: “I’m going to set up a podcast dedicated to ruining Dolly’s brand partnerships and telling the violations these people have done on us. It’s going to be great. Or f——— pay me.”

Seaver also claimed that he worked for private military contractors overseas during the Iraq War and used that experience as part of these threats, according to the complaint.

The messages have resulted in Parton’s trusts and estates attorney leaving and employees of She’s Alive resigning, according to the court documents. The entity has also had to hire private security for its employees, including at their homes, the documents state.

Kristin Mumford, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said in an email that there are no reports against Seaver in their system.

Parton was a beloved country music icon who wrote hundreds of songs, including classics like “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You,” that earned a total of more than 100 million worldwide sales and more than 1 billion online streams.

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Golden reported from Seattle.

Created to be a representation of hope and the “spirit of man,” the statue has become a nationally recognized landmark.

Similar to the RenCen, it’s featured in logos, websites, merchandise and more. Unlike the RenCen, the Spirit of Detroit is on the official logo for the city. Detroit is very careful with how the logo is used.

Created by sculptor Marshall Fredericks, The Spirit of Detroit is a 26-foot-tall bronze statue of a seated man holding an orb emanating rays in his left hand and three people in his right hand. The sphere represents God and the people represent humanity.

Fredericks never named the piece, but the public took its name from a Bible verse on the wall behind the sculpture. We’re lucky the internet didn’t exist in 1958 or it would be called Detroit’s Green Boi and his Chonky Orb or Yassified Shrek.

The sculpture, weighing roughly 20,000 pounds, is the largest cast bronze statue since the Renaissance. Sitting at Spirit Plaza, it overlooks Woodward Avenue.

Fredericks began work on the icon in Norway after being commissioned in 1955.

After the cast for the statue was constructed, artists working with Fredericks carefully applied acid to the surface of the bronze cast to oxidize the alloy and turn it green.

The statue was shipped from Norway to Detroit on the Thomas Schulte, a German freighter that was reportedly the only vessel large enough to ship the statue but also fit through the Saint Lawrence Seaway. It was transported face down, wrapped in protective fabric and surrounded by a supportive frame.

After arriving in Detroit, the sculpture was placed on a 60-ton marble base on Sept. 23, 1958.

The wall behind it includes the seals of Wayne County and the City of Detroit, and a bible verse that became the source of the statue’s name.

“Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”

II Corinthian 3:17

While the artwork features a verse from the New Testament of the Christian Bible, Fredericks met with multiple religious groups to reach a consensus on the design due to its spiritual nature.

Fredericks waived his fee for the sculpture, which cost him money to create, because he believed it was a part of his civic responsibility. In doing so, he created one of the most lasting and iconic symbols of the city.

The Spirit of Detroit is on police cars, manhole covers, city stationary -- it’s even the logo for the Detroit City Football Club. It gets dressed in sports jerseys to celebrate when one of our teams reaches the playoffs. It wore a tuxedo in 1999 when the Three Tenors visited the Opera House and it wore a medical scrub at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. During the 2024 NFL Draft, it wore a custom NFL draft jersey. It’s featured in music videos, movies, video games, commercials and more.

As soon as it was installed on Sept. 23, 1958, the community saw it as representing the city and its people.

Fredericks has artwork across the country, with statues in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and more. Within Michigan, he’s responsible for “The Poet, Lord Byron” at Saginaw Valley State University, “Boy and Bear,” which was originally homed at Northland Shopping Center before being moved to the Southfield Public Library, “Night and Day Fountain” in Port Huron, “Flying Pterodactyls” at the Detroit Zoo, the Memorial Fountain on Belle Isle, “Christ on the Cross” in Indian River, and several architectural sculptures across Metro Detroit.

When he died, his estate donated his studio contents to the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum at Saginaw Valley State University. It features hundreds of works from his more than seven-decade career, including The Spirit of Detroit’s original plaster head. Admission is free.

To help celebrate the Spirit of Detroit’s birthday, we’ll be showing off your best photos and videos uploaded to MIPics -- just click below to upload yours, and your pet could be on TV today!

---> 📷 Upload your Spirit of Detroit photos to MIPics here

Republicans in key states like Iowa and Michigan called for ending exports of diesel refined in the United States to help boost domestic supply. President Donald Trump indicated he backs that step, though his energy secretary on Wednesday said a “blanket ban” won't happen. The U.S. has used 4.1 million barrels of diesel per day this year, and it has exported 1.5 million per day so far, according to S&P Global Energy.

The pain is obvious to anyone who drives a diesel-fueled vehicle or relies on a diesel generator to produce power. A gallon of diesel cost $6.52 Wednesday, up 73% from $3.77 right before the beginning of the war with Iran, according to AAA.

But the problem will likely spread to every consumer, fueling Democratic efforts to retake control of Congress by harnessing anger over runaway costs and an unpopular overseas conflict.

“The price of diesel touches everything in our economy that needs to move,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist for RSM. “That includes the thing we buy the most of, groceries.”

Diesel prices become the latest campaign issue

Although regular gas prices usually get more attention, diesel has swiftly become a hot issue on the campaign trail. Adam Hamilton, a Democratic Senate candidate who has mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to Republican Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, told supporters in a Topeka coffee shop this week that farmers are afraid that it's getting harder to make ends meet.

“A war has sent up the price of diesel,” Hamilton said. “These guys said, ‘We don’t know if we’re going to keep the farm.’”

Elaine Luria, a Democrat running for a southeastern Virginia House seat, cited the high price of diesel at a Virginia Beach roundtable Wednesday.

“Iran is no further from acquiring a nuclear weapon. And Iran’s proxy groups, such as the Houthis in Yemen, are now expanding the footprint,” she said in an interview, adding that the conflict is becoming “an expanding economic crisis.” Luria is a former congresswoman trying to reclaim her seat from Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans.

Republicans like Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running for Senate in Iowa, have called for an immediate end to the war and a ban on selling diesel overseas, hoping the extra fuel would then lower prices for Americans.

“Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” Hinton said. “We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices.”

The idea has split Republicans. Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said he's open to it. Sen. Chuck Grassley, who is also from Iowa, has become the proposal's strongest champion, rejecting criticism from his colleagues from fuel-producing states.

“IF U CAN EMBARGO CHIPS U CAN EMBARGO DIESEL,” Grassley posted on social media, referring to export controls on computer technology.

Trump on Tuesday told reporters that “I've called for that too,” although Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration was still exploring how it might lower diesel prices. Energy Secretary Chris Wright echoed that point Wednesday, telling a climate conference in New York that “nobody wants a full blanket ban of zero exports of diesel, that's not what's being discussed,”

Why diesel prices are so high compared to gasoline

Diesel prices have skyrocketed due to a collision of events.

The Middle East produces a disproportionate share of the oil used to refine diesel, leading its price to rise faster than gasoline since the conflict began in February. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the war took about 20% of the world’s oil off the market, which raised the prices of diesel, gasoline and jet fuel.

Some of that supply has come back, but it’s nowhere near prewar levels, said Debnil Chowdhury, who leads the Americas and Europe fuels and refining team at S&P Global Energy. Then there were significant attacks by Ukraine on refineries in Russia, taking 800,000 to 1 million barrels per day of diesel off the market, according to S&P.

“These attacks have been pretty prominent," Chowdhury said. "If there is a way to a peace deal or a peace agreement announcing that there will be no more attacks on Russian refineries, on Middle Eastern refineries ... that would obviously make the largest impact on the underlying price.”

“The last few months eroded everyone’s cushion, but the last few weeks? Diesel went from under $6/gallon to over $6.53. Again, that was just in the last two weeks. You tell me what business, small or even large, budgeted for that,” William Stern, chief executive officer of Cardiff, a San Diego-based small business lender that's seen requests for loans spike due to the price increase, wrote in an email.

An export ban could make an impact — in the wrong direction. The American Petroleum Institute warned that diesel prices would actually rise for most Americans if an export ban is enacted, a caution shared by several economists.

“That will result in Americans taking a one-two punch for food and fuel prices that just don't stop,” Brusuelas said.

Export ban could ultimately end American oil industry, cause global recession, analysts warn

If U.S. refineries, which take crude oil and turn it into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, stopped exporting diesel, they would wind up with a surplus of the material. They would need places to store it. Once those storage tanks filled up, analysts warn, refiners would have to stop making diesel. But they can’t just switch off diesel production without effectively cutting the supply of those other fuels and raising their prices.

“There really is no easy way to repair the kind of damage it would be to the global diesel supply chain,” Chowdhury said. “It really will have this effect across the entire global economy."

He added that "the chances of a global recession would increase massively as well.”

Phil Verleger, a longtime energy economist who advised the federal government during the 1970s oil shock, said he thought a diesel export ban could bring prices down but still have an extreme cost. ”In a couple decades," he warned, “the U.S. fossil fuel industry is dead.”

That's because the U.S. has been a reliable supplier of diesel to other countries that would likely look elsewhere if it cuts off supply. Verleger and other economists cited former President Richard Nixon's ban on the export of soybeans in 1973, which led to the rest of the world shifting to Brazil as a more reliable supplier. Now, the South American country is growing faster than the U.S.

But Verleger, who comes from an Iowa farming family, says he understands the visceral pain that a diesel spike causes, even though he also knows the dangers of trying to regulate it away.

“It’s terrible economics, the long-term consequences will be horrible,” Verleger said. “If I were an elected politician, I'd do it."

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Riccardi reported from Denver and Bussewitz reported from New York. John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, and Sarah Rankin in Virginia Beach, Virginia, contributed to this report.

The Panthers placed Brooks on injured reserve on Wednesday. He will have surgery on Thursday.

The expectation is that Brooks will return later in the season.

The injury occurred in the fourth quarter of Carolina's 34-3 win over the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday.

“It was a pretty significant groin injury,” Canales said following practice on Wednesday.

Canales said the Panthers received multiple medical opinions after Brooks had an MRI on Monday.

“The timeline for return with surgical versus nonsurgical was going to be similar. We agreed this would be the best course of action to get him back,” Canales said.

Brooks has struggled with knee injuries in the past, limiting his playing time to only five of 36 games since joining the league as a second-round pick in 2024.

He tore his ACL during his final season at Texas and then reinjured the same knee during his rookie season with the Panthers. That caused him to miss the remainder of the 2024 season, and all of 2025.

Brooks was used sparingly in Carolina's first two games of the season as the Panthers were looking to slowly ramp him back up.

Brooks had been slowed by a groin injury in training camp.

“He was bummed,” Canales said of Brooks. “This hit him hard. Particularly after the game. The guys (in the locker room) could feel it too. We were just trying to encourage him. It's part of this process where your body figures out how you're going to go forward in this new mode. This is a part of it.”

Chuba Hubbard is Carolina’s starting running back and A.J. Dillon is third on the depth chart. Canales said Anthony Tyus will be promoted from the practice squad and is expected to suit up on Sunday at Cleveland.

Quarterback Bryce Young said he feels for Brooks because he's been through so much adversity.

“I am going to be praying for him,” Young said. "He works so hard. It’s tough. He’s a soldier and I know he will bounce back and do the work.”

The Panthers signed safety Isaiah Simmons from the practice squad to take Brooks’ spot on the 53-man roster.

Ekeler works out for team, does not sign

The Panthers worked out free agent running back Austin Ekeler on Wednesday, but did not sign him.

Ekeler spent last season with the Washington Commanders.

Dillon said he's friends with Ekeler and has had him on his podcast. He said they often get confused for each other on social media because they look so much alike.

"It's kind of like twins,” Dillon said with a laugh.

Dillon said he's not worried about if the Panthers sign another running back and how that might impact him.

“I don't really focus too much on who is coming in,” Dillon said. “I believe in myself and trust in myself and my ability to go play football. I'm always prepared to step on the field (like) I'm number one.”

Injuries on defense

The defense forced five turnovers against the Falcons in a dominant performance in Week 2, but came away a little banged up.

Inside linebacker Devin Lloyd sat out practice with a calf injury following a big game against the Falcons that included nine tackles, three pass breakups, a sack and two interceptions with one touchdown that earned him NFC Defensive Player of the Week honors.

Edge rusher Jaelan Phillips (back), safety Nick Scott (ribs) and reserve linebacker Claudin Cherelus (shoulder) also did not practice.

Canales said all four players will be evaluated later in the week.

On the positive side for the Panthers, defensive tackle Bobby Brown III (back) and outside linebacker Patrick Jones II (back) were listed as full participants. Jones had missed the team's first two games and Brown sat out last week.

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See AP’s full NFL coverage here

The problem, which officials in the Republican-controlled state have not publicly defined, also could have disenfranchised people who wanted to vote in the state's March primary but whose registration applications were never processed, local election officials said during a news conference Wednesday.

“This is really out of left field. Knowing that this one element of (state) applications didn’t come through, and we had no insight on it,” said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials.

The size of the backlog statewide hasn’t been determined, but the association said it is in the tens of thousands for some of the state's most populous counties. In Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, the election office received about 45,000 backlogged voter registration applications.

Some election offices will need to hire temporary workers to handle the crush, officials with the association said.

The issue started last October in the Texas Department of Public Safety, which among other things allows people to register to vote or update their voter registrations when they renew their driver’s license.

An unspecified error failed to send a large number of records to applicants' home counties, where the applications are processed and verified. Those records could be a new voter registration application or an update to an existing registration, such as a change of address.

The association of local election officials said its members did not receive any communication from the Department of Public Safety about why the backlog occurred or why they were not informed of the issue for nearly a year.

In a statement, the Department of Public Safety said certain records submitted online “were incomplete and not fully transmitted” to the secretary of state’s office. It said the “system issue” had been resolved, without elaborating on the nature of the issue. The department did not immediately respond to a request for further explanation. County officials said the problem appeared to be with the department's online portal.

Counties have until early in-person voting starts on Oct. 19 to finish processing the late-arriving applications.

During their news conference, county election officials said it is possible that some people might have been prevented from voting in the state's primary earlier this year or initially turned away because there was no record of them registering to vote or updating their registration.

The unexpected backlog comes as counties are already inundated with tasks leading up to the November election in a state with a nationally watched U.S. Senate race between Democratic state Rep. James Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The Texas Secretary of State’s office and county election leaders say voters don’t need to worry about their registration as long as it is submitted by Oct. 5. If a person shows up to vote and they do not appear on the voter rolls, election officials said they can cast a provisional ballot.

They also can check whether they are registered on the state's online registration site or call their county election office.

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Wilder is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who was nominated by Trump in 2017, didn't rule from the bench after hearing arguments in an extraordinary showdown between Trump and media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

But the judge questioned whether the administration met its legal responsibilities and provided CNN, MS NOW and Politico with adequate due process before banning them, assailing what he called “fake news.” More recently, the president has said negative coverage was dangerous for the country.

The news outlets argued they were singled out because of their coverage content — in other words, viewpoint discrimination — and called the ban a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment.

Kelly said his decision must be guided by prior rulings in comparable First Amendment cases, even if the government disagrees with them.

“I think it is fair to say that the processes that the court laid out wasn’t followed here,” Kelly said.

It wasn't clear when Kelly, who ordered a CNN journalist’s access restored in a similar 2018 case, would issue a decision on the outlets’ request for a restraining order. But he said he’d rule as soon as possible.

“These are urgent matters," Theodore Boutrous Jr., attorney for the outlets, said. "We’re at war. We have world leaders coming to Washington.”

CNN, Politico and MS NOW each told The Associated Press they’d have no comment on the emergency hearing.

Prior rulings indicate journalists should be heard before press passes are revoked

Kelly opened by reminding both sides that he’s required to apply case precedent.

The rulings in two prior cases over press access — including one that went to the U.S. Supreme Court — made clear that journalists were entitled to an opportunity to be heard before they have their press passes revoked.

Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik argued that the rulings in the earlier cases were wrong.

“Access to the White House is a privilege, not a right,” Velchik said.

In arguing that Trump was not engaging in viewpoint discrimination, Velchik said the president had criticized other news organizations even more harshly — such as calling ABC “the worst” — but hadn’t banned them.

“The president should be able to take immediate action to protect national security,” Velchik told the court.

In response, Boutrous said, “Suddenly it’s a national security case,” arguing that the president brought up that point only after the lawsuit was filed.

Trump “keeps proving our point,” Boutrous said, describing how the president has consistently used negative coverage of him as justification for the ban.

Boutrous called the ban an “unprecedented, unreasonable punishment” and said there was “not a semblance of due process.”

The Trump administration outlined ‘reporting incidents’ of each news outlet

In a filing late Tuesday, administration lawyers argued that the ban does not violate the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to a free press. It contended that the outlets, in their reporting, violated “standards of professionalism and decorum.”

The administration went on to detail letters sent to each outlet that identified “a non-exhaustive list of reporting incidents, including those that have threatened national security and spread falsehoods.”

The “reporting incidents” cited in the filing included: CNN reporting on “‘top-secret' construction details related to the East Wing bunker”; MS NOW reporting “on an alleged leak investigation”; and Politico publishing “a document detailing funding for the White House ballroom containing intricate descriptions of how the Secret Service would invest in security improvements.”

Further examples were given in individual letters. Politico’s letter detailed six reporting instances, including in June citing a “senior administration official … granted anonymity” predicting whether a preliminary deal would end the conflict with Iran.

That item appeared to reference a background briefing set up by the White House, where an official briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House itself. Several other outlets also reported the official's remarks.

Major networks continue to refrain from covering Trump for the media pool

The ban prompted other media outlets to take action in solidarity. The five-network U.S. network press pool — a rotating cast of news outlets that covers the president, and to which CNN belongs — decided to suspend coverage of Trump events until further notice.

After the hearing Wednesday, the networks were poised to continue their ban on filming Trump coverage. At Joint Base Andrews, where the president was to formally welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping later, journalists from Fox News, CBS and NBC were present but not shooting video, and some appeared to be breaking down their cameras.

Other television outlets whose crews were present, according to signs on their tripods and cameras, were NewsNation, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting Network, One America News and LindellTV.

Ahead of Wednesday's hearing, an amicus brief was filed by other news groups, urging the court to immediately restore the three outlets' White House access.

The brief — filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the White House Correspondents' Association and 49 media outlets and industry groups, including The Associated Press, The New York Times and Reuters — says “the targeted expulsion of news media from White House grounds injures the public interest."

The proceedings are historic, said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“No president has taken this explicit of a step” to ban entire outlets because he doesn’t like their reporting, she said. “There have been various presidents throughout history who have grumbled about the press or threatened to take more major steps, but really there was nothing at this level before Trump.”

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Noveck reported from New York. Associated Press journalists Laurie Kellman in London and Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report.

Lawmakers have long found little downside to taking a hawkish tone on China, but the U.S.'s war with Iran has inflamed tensions as U.S. officials accuse China of propping up Iran's economy and supplying its military with components and intelligence, endangering U.S. service members in the Middle East.

In speeches, letters, press conferences and hearings, lawmakers from both parties aired criticism of Xi's visit. Their actions and events stand in stark contrast to the warm welcome that Trump gave Xi on Wednesday as he arrived in Washington for a lavish state visit.

Republicans air their dissenting views

Sen. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, took to the Senate floor Tuesday night, offering a list of issues for Trump to raise with Xi, but not before suggesting that Xi shouldn't have been asked to visit Washington at all.

“Quite frankly, had the White House asked me for advice, I would have suggested the president not invite Xi Jinping to Washington for such a lavish welcome here in the United States of America based on all of the troubling issues we have with President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party,” Wicker said.

Wicker seemed particularly taken aback by the honor of a state dinner. Over the salad course, Wicker said the president could ask Xi about the Chinese Navy's harassment of Filipino fishermen and sailors. Then, while the servers are “switching from chardonnay to cabernet at the fancy state dinner,” perhaps the president could turn to the issue of Taiwan, he said.

He went on to say he hopes some progress will be made when the president discussed trade and artificial intelligence with Xi. But concluded with this: “During every minute of dialogue, our commander in chief should keep in mind that his guest is a brutal, unelected, and oppressive dictator who seeks to dominate his neighbors and whose massive military arsenal is aimed directly at the United States of America.”

House committee weighs in with a critical video

Ahead of Xi's visit, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released a highly critical video that had been viewed more than 245,000 times on X. In the video, the committee details Xi's rise to power starting in 1974 and ends by labeling him "the biggest opponent of freedom and liberty in the world.”

The House created the panel in 2023. It's held several hearings on human rights issues in China and advocates for legislation on an array of economic and military issues. For example, the committee's chairman, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., recently introduced a bill that would prohibit the manufacture or sale of Chinese cars in the U.S.

Republican senators press for Taiwan aid

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and three other Republican senators used the Xi visit to press the Trump administration to move ahead with aid and arms sales to Taiwan.

In a letter, they reminded Secretary of State Marco Rubio that he had previously stated that “deterring an invasion of Taiwan must be our top priority.” And they noted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had once declared that the U.S. ”will not let our allies and partners be subordinated and intimidated."

China has pressed Washington to halt the arms sales, most prominently during a summit in May between Trump and Xi in Beijing. After that meeting, the United States paused the sale of a record-breaking $14 billion package — and Trump described arms sales to Taiwan as a “very good negotiating chip” with China.

“It is difficult to imagine how the United States might credibly project influence deterrence in the Indo-Pacific,” the senators wrote, “if the price of keeping up diplomatic appearances is denying our partners key deterrent capabilities.”

Democrats pile on the criticism

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and three other Democratic senators held a press conference to warn against the U.S. weakening export controls for advanced semiconductor chips and equipment. They're concerned that such exports could erase the U.S.'s lead in artificial intelligence over China.

They touched on voter concerns about the safety of artificial intelligence and contrasted Democrats’ call for greater regulation with the president’s call to “encourage it, not rein it in.”

“We must reject the false choice Trump keeps making,” Schumer told reporters. “We can and must both maintain our lead on AI by restricting China’s access to our technology and put up guardrails to mitigate AI’s risk."

Meanwhile, on the Senate floor, Democratic senators urged Trump to confront Xi directly about the support his country is providing Iran.

“If we want to bring this war to an end, we need to cut off the outside support that allows Iran to keep fighting, and that starts with China,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democratic lawmaker on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.

Council Member Angela Whitfield Calloway said the policy is intended to give the city more information before deciding whether to approve tax breaks that can total millions of dollars each year.

“We award tax abatements, tax incentives like we hand out Skittles and Starburst,” said Calloway, who has taken issue with the number of approvals.

The City Council has the final say on tax abatements and tax incentives for development projects in Detroit.

“It’s our responsibility to do our due diligence on the front end to make sure that these folks are coming to the council with clean hands,” Calloway said.

The policy is modeled after practices used by the Michigan Economic Development Corp., which reviews applications and makes recommendations for financial incentives to the Michigan Strategic Fund.

That process is similar to the role the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. plays for the city.

Under the policy, each applicant, along with its key owners and personnel, will be subject to criminal and civil background checks for relevant convictions and civil liabilities in certain local jurisdictions within the past five years.

Any findings, along with mitigating circumstances, must be reported to the relevant city departments and the Law Department before a public hearing on the proposed incentive.

The same information must also be provided to City Council members before the public hearing.

“We’re going to give you a second look. You may not get the tax abatement that you’re requesting,” Calloway said.

The policy change came after a resident raised concerns with Calloway about the background of someone connected to a tax abatement request.

Detroit corporation counsel Conrad Mallett said in a memorandum to Calloway this month that the policy “represents a reasonable and significant step toward safeguarding the integrity of the City’s economic development programs and tax incentive determinations.”

The city says prior criminal convictions or civil misconduct do not automatically disqualify a tax incentive applicant under state law or Detroit’s ordinances.

“As a city, we have to be real careful about our willingness to grant or to award tax abatements and tax incentives to developers when they, some of them may not deserve these tax abatements,” Calloway said.

The charges are especially shocking, given that he was a teacher for years.

“You have to wonder how long has this been going on,” Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido said on Wednesday. “Who’s it been going on with?”

“All these questions are still being investigated because the investigation never closes until we receive everything back from the search,” he said.

The charges are connected to Mark Sharrow, a teacher at the Warren Consolidated School of Performing Arts in Sterling Heights since 2017. The allegations began nearly 200 miles away in Roscommon County.

Prosecutors there say that Sharrow, 37, sexually assaulted a teenager in 2025 in Denton, Mich., which is near Houghton Lake.

They say the assaults happened between April and September.

In Roscommon County, Sharrow has been charged with six felonies, including first and third-degree criminal sexual conduct.

According to court documents, an arrest warrant was first issued on Aug. 12.

During a search of Sharrow’s home in Warren on Aug. 18, police say they found sexually explicit videos of minors on his cell phone – along with methamphetamine and LSD – leading to his arrest.

He was then charged with nearly a dozen additional crimes in Macomb County.

In Macomb County, Sharrow is facing five counts each of possessing child sexually abusive material and using a computer to commit a crime.

He also faces one count each of possession of methamphetamine and LSD.

On Sept., 14, Sharrow was given three additional charges of Criminal Sexual Conduct, including two 4th-degree charges and an assault charge.

A spokesman for the Warren Consolidated School District said Sharrow was on administrative leave at the time of the arrest and that they are cooperating with the Macomb County Prosecutor.

In total, on the charges in Roscommon County alone, Sharrow could face life in prison on the 1st Degree CSC charge.

As for the charges in Macomb County, Lucido said the investigation continues and could yield more, while adding that Sharrow is innocent until proven guilty.

“Although the charges are monumental, he does have a right to defend himself,” Lucido said. “But at the end of the day, if he’s found guilty, that’s a whole nother world that plays out.”

Local 4 reached out to Joshua West, Sharrow’s attorney, but we have yet to get a response.

Sharrow is due back in 37th District Court on the new charges in Macomb County on Tuesday, Sept. 29.

He’s currently being held at the Macomb County Jail on a $1 million bond.

Jurors heard two weeks of evidence and must now decide whether Facebook violated the state's Unfair Practices Act and if so, how many times. It would then be up to the judge to determine how much the company would pay per violation.

New Mexico is the only state that has taken the data breach claims to trial as part of its go-it-alone approach to press for more accountability from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Earlier this year 48 states reached a landmark settlement with Meta that addressed child safety concerns and privacy issues surrounding the same data breach.

New Mexico is seeking the maximum civil penalties, up to $5,000 per violation, and an injunction to halt future breaches of user data.

The case centers on accusations that Facebook failed to protect users from a third-party personality quiz that harvested data from roughly 87 million profiles and sold it to a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to generate targeted ads. The now-defunct firm’s clients included the 2016 campaign for Donald Trump.

“We became the product for Facebook. They turned our dreams into data they could sell to advertisers,” said Randi McGinn, an attorney for the state.

Attorneys for the social media company disputed that claim, telling jurors the platform does not sell user information.

A majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, and McGinn argued that the company was incentivized to provide targeted advertising opportunities. She said there was limited enforcement if third-party apps harvested users’ personal information and the company did not investigate whether those apps were owned by foreign countries or organizations.

Dane Butswinkas, one of Facebook's lawyers, said the platform investigated suspicious third-party apps following the breach. He told jurors the company has improved safeguards and privacy policies significantly in the last five years, since the lawsuit was filed.

Butswinkas said Facebook’s revenue and product development teams were kept separate and that despite having five years to investigate the platform's privacy practices, the state identified only two data breaches.

“How many other Cambridge Analyticas have you heard about in the case? The answer is one,” he said.

Butswinkas also said evidence shows that Facebook protects users from 99% of content that violates its standards and it is in the platform's best interest to ensure that violent or hateful content is taken down.

The trial included a video deposition of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who answered questions about a list of thousands of accounts that required additional checks before any of their content was removed from Facebook or Instagram.

The prosecution pressed Zuckerberg about an email in which he requested that employees add podcaster Joe Rogan’s accounts to the list.

“It’s not treating people differently to say we have a policy that’s about broad misinformation and not parsing political speech,” Zuckerberg said during the deposition.

Prosecutors said the list created a fact-checking backlog, allowing viral content to be seen by millions of users before being taken down.

Zuckerberg said the company needed to be careful about removing sensitive content and monitoring content is a challenging problem.

The state estimates that about 350,000 residents were exposed to the Cambridge Analytica breach, but McGinn asked jurors to consider that Facebook deceived all New Mexicans when making statements regarding privacy and violent content. Prosecutors estimated there were more than 1.3 million users in the state at the time of the breach.

If jurors agree, the company could potentially be forced to pay billions of dollars.

Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle the multistate suit surrounding child safety issues. Buried in the 130-page settlement was an agreement to release Meta from future liability related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, making New Mexico the only state to pursue a case. Florida was the only other state that did not sign the settlement, saying it was not tough enough on Meta.

Also this year, New Mexico won judgments totaling $942 million from Meta in a two-phase trial about the company’s safety protections for minors. Furthermore the court ordered Meta to implement new safeguards, including age-verification technology and time limits on its platforms.

The judgments are on hold pending an appeal.

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Associated Press writer Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed. ___

Schuettler is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

---> Check out all the episodes of the Local Blend podcast here.

It’s been a year since Chelsea was diagnosed with cancer. She shared about it last August on the air.

“I didn’t know if I was stage one or two. But I knew I was not three or four. So, I was OK with sharing it. There’s not a lot out there known about ovarian cancer. There is no test for ovarian cancer,” Chelsea said. “So, to me, I thought, ‘OK, there’s a why behind it.’ So, I’m not sitting there saying, ‘Why me?’ but also, ‘Why me?’ There is a reason, I have a voice. He has a platform, and we need to educate women.”

She said the scan showed that she had a tumor on her left ovary. She called her friend who had pancreatic cancer and went over everything with her. Then she called her gynecologist, who got her in within a couple of days and told her to see an oncologist.

Karen asked what Chelsea did to calm herself during that stressful time.

“Sit with it. During the scan, I pray, honestly. I pray that if there is something growing, let them find it, so we can deal with it. And that’s just all. I have learned that I am a control person. This is out of my control. And so that’s been a huge lesson for me.”

And as for what this experience taught Mojo about Chelsea ...

“I have learned, this is a big one, that sometimes it’s OK for her to just be upset and to let her be. As a guy, and this is one thing I’d give advice to any guy that’s dealing with, you know, being married, or girlfriend. You don’t always have to fix a problem. And the problem that we get into as guys, we’re fixers. We wanna fix the problem and move onto the next thing. This is not a problem that I can fix, but I can listen. And, I’m not a very good listener normally,” Mojo said.

Chelsea said she used to hate relaxing and that she always thought of it as wasted time, but this experience has made her love it.

“It is my favorite thing to do, is just relax. I’m getting back into reading books. I’m just ... I’m not taking that for granted anymore. Like, I’ve lived my life rushing raising three boys and now I’ve earned the time to just sit and be present with myself,” Chelsea said.

The couple also has their own podcast, the “Mojo’s We Do(n’t) Podcast.”

Tune in to Local 4 at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 23, to hear the full podcast.

This year, the nation of 41 million has a new posture on the planet's biggest diplomatic stage.

Since a watershed speech to the World Economic Forum in January, Prime Minister Mark Carney has become a leading voice of what he and some others call “middle powers.” He has urged them to band together to update and preserve the international order, and protect their own interests, in an era of flexes by the United States and other global giants.

And he has shown himself willing to walk the walk when faced with U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff's.insults and cavalier talk of annexation. Carney rejected what he said were unacceptable U.S. trade demands and walked away from talks last month. Bluntly hedging his country's decades-long bet on U.S. trade and partnership, he has been courting other prospects — Canada might even become the European Union's first associate member.

“Partners are working with Canada because Canada’s predictable, reliable and principled in a world that’s anything but,” Carney told Canadian media at a news conference at the U.N. Tuesday as the General Assembly's big meeting got into full swing.

It's the international community's premier gathering of the year. And to Carney, it's an opportunity to demonstrate Canada's vision of “values-based realism” that's “both principled and pragmatic” — part commitment to such values as freedom, human rights and sustainability, part clear-eyed, “calibrated alliances” with partners that won't sign onto the whole list.

That's frankly practical talk for a forum that's prone to either diplomatic caution or soaring rhetoric, be it doomsaying, idealistic or, often, both. And Carney is finding an ear.

He's moving fast and building coalitions

Canada and a half-dozen other countries launched a new group Monday meant to stand up for economic cooperation and U.N.-style international collaboration. An air traffic control mess at New York airports kept Carney from making it to the “partners for multilateralism” kickoff event at the U.N. Monday night, but his schedule Tuesday included personal meetings with Jordan's king, the presidents of Chile and Angola, and an Emirati cabinet minister.

He also co-hosted a meeting on the long-elusive two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and pledged 100 million Canadian dollars ($71 million) in humanitarian and security funding for Palestinians. Canada last year joined more than 150 countries that have recognized a Palestinian state, over the objections of Israel and its key ally, the U.S.

Asked whether he interacted Tuesday with Trump or members of his administration, Carney replied that he saw the huge meeting of world leaders as a chance to “meet those whom you don’t normally see.” He did attend Trump's speech at the assembly, where the president made no mention of Canada — the country on the other side of the world’s longest international border, and now on the other end of a deepening trade war.

Trump went on to criticize Canada on social media Wednesday, saying that immigration was “destroying” the country. Carney has said immigration levels have dropped during his tenure.

Meanwhile, Carney co-led a meeting Wednesday on the assembly sidelines about ocean monitoring and pledged $82 million Canadian dollars ($58 million) before heading back to Canada for other commitments. Foreign Minister Anita Anand is set to deliver the country's U.N. speech Saturday.

She said in an interview Tuesday that the address “will be very much about implementing the middle power strategy” that Carney has articulated — memorably when he told the World Economic Forum that as great power rivalries increasingly shake the international system, “middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” (There’s no official list of “middle powers,” but the term is often understood to mean countries that aren’t superpowers or their proxies but have some sway in global politics due to diplomatic or other strengths.)

Carney's “message resonates with many audiences, particularly those in the global North,” says University of Ottawa international affairs professor Srdjan Vucetic.

He noted that the prime minister's leadership is resonating at home, too. Carney, who took office in March 2025, enjoys high approval ratings from Canadians. Many are galled by Trump's remarks about making their country the U.S.'s “51st state,” his insistence on referring to Lake Ontario as “Lake America” and his trade policies. In Toronto, Canada’s most populous city, some neighborhoods are dotted with lawn signs encouraging eligible U.S. expatriates to vote absentee, and at least one coffee shop has crossed the Americano drink off its menu, substituting “Canadiano” instead.

Carney seeks to increase non-US trade

Carney, 61, a former central bank chief with a doctorate in economics, aims to double Canada's non-U.S. trade within a decade. He convened hundreds of international investment firm executives for a Canadian investment summit last week and is hoping for a trade deal with India, among others, by year’s end.

His government has touted security, defense and economic agreements with a roster of countries over the past year, and he has envisioned Canada as potentially forging an economic bridge of sorts between the EU and Pacific Rim countries.

His international efforts have drawn some questions, as when he became the first Canadian prime minister in over a quarter-century to visit Saudi Arabia. Predecessor Justin Trudeau's government had assailed Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, spurring a five-year diplomatic split. The two countries restored full diplomatic relations in 2023.

Carney said at the time of the July visit that he cares deeply about human rights, that there's no point in “lecturing countries from afar,” and that engaging with them doesn't convey approval of their every move.

At his U.N. news conference Tuesday, he said his approach “means actively, actively taking on the world as it is, not passively waiting for a world we wish to be.”

“We have a strategy that, I believe, has already made our country stronger,” he added, “but we’ve only just begun.”

The landmark New York prosecution began nearly a decade ago with multiple accusers, but after retrials, mistrials, acquittals and appeals, it was whittled to a single victim: Miriam Haley, who said the Oscar-winning producer forcibly performed oral sex on her at his Manhattan apartment. She had worked briefly on the Weinstein-produced reality series “Project Runway.”

Weinstein, 74, pleaded for mercy, citing his age and health issues, including cancer and congestive heart failure. He apologized “to anyone I have affected with my actions” and said he felt remorse for Haley. However, he added, “I have to reiterate my innocence.” His lawyers said he will appeal.

Once a towering figure in Hollywood, with such hits as “Shakespeare in Love,” “Pulp Fiction” and “Chocolat,” Weinstein’s downfall came quickly after sexual assault allegations in 2017 set off the #MeToo movement. Several of his dozens of accusers were in court on Wednesday.

Judge Curtis Farber said Weinstein wielded his power as a Hollywood kingmaker to prey on women looking to break into the industry, treating them as “mere objects to be played with and discarded with impunity.”

Farber said Weinstein’s refusal to accept responsibility, portraying himself as a victim during jailhouse interviews, weighed heavily on his sentencing decision. Weinstein had faced up to 25 years in prison.

Some of Weinstein's accusers attended the sentencing

Haley credited the swell of other accusers, some of whom she hugged afterward, for giving her the courage to come forward.

For years, she said, “it was like a dark and painful secret that ate away at my spirit, my enthusiasm and sense of self worth, that it took a long time to regain.”

Jailed since his original conviction, Weinstein has already served more than six years behind bars, leaving him with about nine years on his sentence. But a pending resentencing in Los Angeles, where he was originally ordered to serve 16 years in prison for a 2013 rape, could put him away for the rest of his life.

Farber said it'll be his counterpart in California who decides whether Weinstein can serve his sentences at the same time. If it were up to him, Farber said, he'd run them consecutively, stacking Weinstein’s New York punishment on top of his Los Angeles sentence.

Weinstein, seated in a wheelchair, was quickly moved out of the courtroom after the sentencing. In the gallery, Jessica Mann, a former aspiring actress whose rape allegations ended in an overturned conviction and two hung juries, wept profusely as prosecutors, Haley and other accusers consoled her.

Weinstein and Haley both spoke in court

Haley, 49, fought through tears herself as she spoke in court. After testifying at two of Weinstein’s trials — the original and last year's retrial — it was her second time confronting the ex-studio boss at a sentencing proceeding.

“Having been sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein has had a devastating effect on my life and sense of security that may never go away,” Haley said. “Making the decision to speak up will have me looking over my shoulder for years to come.”

Weinstein hired private investigators to keep tabs on her, she said, and his defense lawyers and supporters ridiculed her in the media.

“It’s a life sentence for me,” she said.

Minutes later, Weinstein apologized while underscoring his claims of innocence. He maintains that he never raped or sexually assaulted anyone.

It was also Weinstein’s second time speaking at his sentencing — the latest in a series of courtroom soliloquies filled with complaints about his lodging at New York City's notorious Rikers Island jail complex, boasts about his philanthropy and reminiscence about his moviemaking prowess.

“Reflecting on all that has happened since 2017 has helped me recognize how my past conduct has negatively affected others,” Weinstein said, some of his accusers shaking their heads as he spoke. “I live with many regrets and sincerely apologize to anyone I have affected with my actions.”

“I really do have remorse for Miriam Haley,” he added. “I am not a violent man. I ask for mercy. I promise I will pass it on.”

Haley says Weinstein 'still feels entitled'

Haley said afterward that she was happy with the sentence. But, she said, it's clear from Weinstein’s remarks that he does not acknowledge what he did.

“I think he still feels entitled, and that’s part of the problem,” said Haley, who has also gone by the name Mimi Haleyi.

Other accusers, including psychotherapist and former model Kaja Sokola, stood with her as she spoke outside the courthouse.

Haley’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, rejected any suggestion that Weinstein’s sentencing means the #MeToo era is over, telling reporters: “Women are empowered in a way they have never been before.”

“Today was about the survivors,” said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who sat in the courtroom alongside Weinstein’s accusers.

“I’m moved, as we should all be moved, by their courage and their steadfastness,” he added.

A retrial, a split verdict and another sentencing

Weinstein was originally sentenced in 2020 to 23 years in prison — 20 years for assaulting Haley and three years for raping Mann.

New York’s highest court erased those guilty verdicts in 2024, ruling that Weinstein was prejudiced by testimony from other women whose allegations weren’t part of the case.

Tried for a second time last year, Weinstein was again convicted of a first-degree criminal sex act for assaulting Haley. In a messy split verdict, the jury acquitted him of forcibly performing oral sex on Sokola and could not reach a verdict on a rape charge involving Mann.

After another retrial ended in a hung jury in May, Manhattan prosecutors dropped the rape charge rather than pursue a fourth trial after Mann said she could not bear to testify again.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Haley, Sokola and Mann have done.

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Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.

“The technology is more persuasive, more intimate, and more powerful,” the Duke of Sussex said. “AI is learning how to enter our relationships. It doesn’t just want your attention, it wants your attachment.”

Harry's presentation was part of CGI's focus on finding ways to support women and children at a time when funding for their well-being is being cut by several nations.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told The Associated Press in an interview that they are issues that need to be addressed even more urgently this year because of the cuts.

“What’s happening now under the guise of both stamping out diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also in the name of ‘efficiency,’ like we saw with DOGE when they destroyed government agencies, has our country back in so many ways,” she said.

Secretary Clinton said that it has only been in the last year or two that menopause has seen increased attention. “We have begun to make progress because I remember when I was first lady meeting with a group of women senators who told me that the early trials on breast cancer were done on men,” she said. “If you’re gonna do research on women’s health, guess what? You need to research women.”

She said CGI commitments like Tuesday's announcement of a $100 million venture fund by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation to speed potential therapies to patients show how nonprofits are stepping up to the current challenging environment.

“We don’t have time to waste because as you probably know cancer is striking earlier and earlier,” she said. “We feel really strongly about doing the accurate research to actually solve men and women’s problems and to get politics out of science, to get politics out of research.”

Harry's nonprofit faces ‘uphill battle’ working against social media

In 2024, Harry sounded the alarm at CGI about how social media has contributed to an “epidemic” of anxiety, depression and social isolation among today’s youth. Harry and his wife, Meghan, announced the founding of The Parents Network, through their Archewell Foundation.

Harry said that The Parents Network had made progress, but that technological developments had made an already “uphill battle” more difficult.

“There are major signals that families, young people, experts and advocates have finally shaken institutions awake to the reality that this technology can cause harm,” Harry said. “But bans, settlements and payouts are incomplete remedies.”

Last month Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion and add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms as part of a landmark legal settlement that ended a trial over teen social media addiction and settled claims filed by nearly every state.

The settlement resolved a pivotal case years in the making that sought to hold the tech giant accountable for the role its platforms played in undermining children’s mental health. The effort targeted features designed to hook young people’s attention.

Wednesday marked Prince Harry's first public appearance in the United States since he and his family returned to England in August for an extended stay.

Secretary Clinton also discussed the potential dangers of AI at the conference, adding that addressing risk through international agreements is something that President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping should discuss this week.

Economic and tech competition is only escalating between the U.S. and China, especially through an artificial intelligence race. Neither expects any grand bargain, but the leaders are expected to play nice in their third meeting since Trump returned to the White House. Still, developing AI technology has emerged as a key battleground, with both sides showing little interest in slowing down despite warnings from tech CEOs about threats that rogue AI could pose to humanity.

Speaking at CGI, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said he believes a proposed kill switch, which would require developers to have the capacity to shut down their systems if needed, is a good idea.

“It’s not a natural thing for a company to put in, so it’s a good intervention,” he said.

War Child Alliance announces $100 million plan to improve children's mental health

At CGI on Wednesday, War Child Alliance announced its new $100 million initiative, “Childhood Beyond Conflict,” a commitment to improve the mental health of 10 million children in conflict zones over the next decade.

Laura Miller, War Child's CEO, said that more than 520 million children are currently affected by conflict. The new initiative, she said, is the nonprofit's attempt to build a coalition around children's mental health, expanding the global footprint of its programs to help educate and support young people.

Academy Award-nominated actress Carey Mulligan, who serves as global ambassador for the War Child Alliance, told The Associated Press in an interview that the organization is trying to reverse a shift around the world that the physical survival of a child in a conflict zone was an adequate outcome.

“A child who is traumatized, illiterate, and wounded from an experience in conflict really has their hands tied behind their back for the rest of their lives in terms of rebuilding any kind of real, dignified future for themselves," Mulligan said. “Children deserve more than physical survival. A child who goes through a conflict has the right to proper psychosocial support.”

Mulligan said that the $100 million announcement was special because it can actually solve a problem, despite the issue of a global lack of empathy.

“We are coming to say, ‘Guess what, guys, you don’t need to feel overwhelmed because we’ve got these amazing evidence-based methodologies that have been rigorously, scientifically tested,’ ” she said. “We know that they work and they improve outcomes for children who’ve been affected by conflict.”

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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

Brown is scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 30 to make the deal final. Defense attorney Mark Eiglarsh said Brown will plead no contest to aggravated assault. He will be sentenced to probation, and adjudication will be withheld, meaning Brown will not be considered a convicted felon, the attorney said. Brown could have faced up to 30 years in prison if convicted of the original attempted murder charge.

Brown is accused of grabbing a handgun from a security staffer after a celebrity boxing match in Miami on May 16, 2025, and firing two shots at a man he had gotten into a fistfight with earlier, according to an arrest warrant. Zul-Qarnain Kwame Nantambu told investigators that one of the bullets grazed his neck.

Attorney insists that Brown would have prevailed at trial

“This was not an easy decision,” Eiglarsh said in a statement Wednesday. “Antonio believes in his innocence. He believes strongly in his Stand Your Ground defense, and he believes he would ultimately prevail at trial. But when prosecutors put an offer on the table that transforms a potential decades-long prison sentence into a significantly reduced charge and probation, there was simply no way he could reasonably turn it down.”

Florida’s so-called Stand Your Ground law allows people who believe they face death or serious injury to use deadly force to defend themselves without a duty to retreat.

Richard Cooper, an attorney for Nantambu, called the plea deal fair.

“We are satisfied that justice is served. My client maintains what he said previously: that he forgives Brown and will not cooperate with law enforcement,” Cooper said in an email Wednesday. “We wish Mr. Brown good health and that he grows from this event.”

Nantambu's attorneys have said he'd decided to forgive Brown

In a previous statement, his attorneys said Nantambu, a devout Muslim, had made the decision to forgive Brown after “considerable reflection, prayer, and consultation with his family and counsel.”

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office declined to comment on Wednesday, with spokesperson Ed Griffith saying the details would be “fully clarified” at next week's hearing.

Brown has said on social media that he was defending himself from an attack and that others were trying to steal jewelry from him.

Brown, 38, spent 12 years in the NFL and was an All-Pro wide receiver who last played in 2021 for Tampa Bay, including winning a Super Bowl championship with quarterback Tom Brady. He spent much of his career with Pittsburgh. For his career, Brown had 928 receptions for more than 12,000 yards and accounted for 88 total touchdowns, counting punt returns and one pass.

Brown has faced legal problems over the years

Brown was extradited in November 2025 from Dubai, where he has business interests, after an arrest warrant on the attempted murder charge was issued in June 2025.

Brown has dealt with several legal problems over the years. He previously had been accused of battery of a moving truck driver, several domestic violence charges, failure to pay child support and other incidents. During a 2021 game with Tampa Bay against the New York Jets, Brown took off his jersey, shoulder pads and gloves and ran off the field, leading to his release by the Buccaneers and effectively ending his football career.

In a separate case, Nantambu was found guilty earlier this year of a misdemeanor charge of resisting an officer after police said he disrupted Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance in 2025. Nantambu was among dozens of dancers on the field at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans when he ran across the field with a Sudanese flag that read “Sudan and Free Gaza.” He surrendered to authorities after an arrest warrant was obtained.

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Associated Press writer Christopher Weber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

The grim warning by the University of Chicago-based Climate Impact Lab says that as many as 451,000 more heat-related deaths between June and the end of February could be attributed to El Nino, compared with heat deaths expected in a typical year.

The heaviest toll, the group says, is expected in poorer countries, already struggling with food insecurity and high energy costs, partly due to climate change and the fallout of the war in Iran.

Michael Greenstone, a co-founder of the group and the study's co-author, said the heat danger will likely persist beyond February — even though this El Nino is expected to end by then. The fallout of the weather phenomenon could be felt well into next summer, he added.

The research, he said, shows that heat is most dangerous in places that are already hot and relatively poor.

“If you’re already in a hot place, the extra couple of degrees are going to be much more dangerous,” he said. Wealthier places, he added, generally have greater access to air conditioning, reliable water supplies and functioning health systems.

The study combined seasonal temperature forecasts with localized estimates of how high temperatures affect mortality across more than 24,000 regions worldwide.

Researchers estimated the additional heat-related deaths by comparing deaths expected under El Nino-driven high temperatures with deaths expected if temperatures remained similar to what they have been in the last three decades. The projected fatalities are for the entire El Nino period, from June 2026 until the end of February 2027.

The report says the Global South will see more heat-related deaths

The study by Greenstone and his colleagues also warns that the Global South — a term that isn't geographical but a reference to developing countries in general — will bear the heaviest burden of the excessive heat.

The researchers behind the report found that the Sahel region in Africa — countries along the semiarid southern fringe of the Sahara Desert — is expected to be the hardest-hit, with about 66,800 additional deaths caused by El Nino-driven heat.

Other major hot spots include South and Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America, according to the report. The researchers project about 19,400 additional heat-related deaths across the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, as well as 19,300 in Indonesia, 15,800 in India and 13,300 in Brazil.

Heat warnings and cooling centers could prevent thousands of deaths

With such staggering numbers, there are recommended measures that governments can take, the report says. They include heat-warning systems, cooling centers, hydration stations, protections for outdoor workers, expanded hospital capacity and targeted outreach to elderly people and other vulnerable groups.

The authors also call for what they describe as anticipatory financing, so governments can move resources before dangerous heat peaks.

Abhiyant Tiwari, a heat expert at NRDC India who was not involved in the study, said the report’s projections should serve as a call to action rather than be another reason for alarm.

But while it's one thing to have well thought-out plans — as India does — implementing these plans and raising needed funds remains a challenge, he said.

"The real measure of our preparedness is not how many heat warnings we issue, but how effectively we protect people and reduce preventable deaths,” Tiwari added.

Climate change is amplifying El Nino’s record heat

El Nino is a natural climate pattern, but this year’s unusually strong event is occurring on a planet already warmed by human-caused climate change, increasing the risks from extreme heat.

The Climate Impact Lab said global land temperatures during this El Nino could be higher by about 1.2 Celsius (2.1 Fahrenheit), producing 44% more extremely hot days than in a typical year. The report said those temperature increases may mirror conditions that climate change could make common some 20 years from now.

That's why this El Nino could offer a preview of what's ahead as the planet continues to warm, the report said. It's also an opportunity for decision-makers "to see exactly where emergency actions can be taken now to save tens of thousands of lives,” the authors say.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Jaquoya Wix, 34, was killed in a random attack in an alley near Woodward Avenue and E Congress Street at around 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026.

Wix worked at the nearby Chipotle and was working her regular shift when she was killed.

The suspect, Devon Watson, 42, of Detroit, was tracked to the area of Woodward Avenue and State Street, where he was arrested.

He has been charged with one count of premeditated first-degree murder and was arraigned Wednesday afternoon.

Read more --> Family remembers woman killed in random downtown Detroit stabbing

A mental health petition filed in Wayne County probate court on July 3, 2026, reveals that a nurse had observed Watson and said he appeared psychotic and needed to be hospitalized.

Watson had been brought to the emergency department by police for “acting out at a coffee shop.

Patient not making sense, appears psychotic. Does not know where he is, making nonsensical statements, like ‘I’m on menopause.’”

Those court records show that on July 13, 2026, Watson had been ordered to receive mental health treatment at Havenwyck Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Auburn Hills.

A doctor at a hospital in Trenton stated that, “Patient exhibiting acute psychosis and does not understand compromise of his mental state and make appropriate decisions.

Patient hyperverbal and unable to properly communicate.”

The doctor continued, writing that Watson was having “active delirium and tangential thinking and unable to cooperate or answer questions correctly.”

The day of the July 13 hearing, staff at Havenwyck said that Watson insisted on not appearing and that transporting him against his will to the video courtroom may place him and others at risk for serious harm.

They requested that his appearance be waived.

It was during that hearing that a Wayne County judge granted the petition, ordering treatment of up to 180 days, not to exceed 60 days.

The Investigators at Local 4 were able to find an address for Watson and went to that home on the west side of Detroit.

It was a boarding house where Watson was a former tenant. A person at the boarding house told us he was aware of his challenges.

Other residents in the area said they saw ambulances arrive to that home frequently.

One woman said he approached her while she was gardening and she felt uneasy.

A background check on Watson revealed that in 2010 he pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct and was sentenced to four years’ probation.

He’s not on Michigan’s public sex offender registry.

In 2016, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault. He was sentenced to pay $275 and spend 10 days in jail.

Update: Downtown Detroit stabbing suspect court ordered to undergo mental health treatment before deadly attack

Devon Jason Watson was charged with first-degree murder.

Jaquoya Wix, 34, was stabbed to death in an alley near Woodward Avenue and E Congress Street on Sept. 20 at around 2:30 p.m. Wix was working a regular shift at Chipotle on Sunday when she was attacked.

Related --> Family remembers woman killed in random downtown Detroit stabbing

The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office said Watson approached Jaquoya while she was sitting in an alley on break from work and stabbed her multiple times with a knife before running away. Watson and Jaquoya did not know each other.

Officers used surveillance cameras to track Watson to the area of Woodward Avenue and State Street, where officers took him into custody.

“The alleged actions of this defendant appear to be random, but we are confident that we will be able to sustain the charge of First-Degree Premeditated Murder in a court of law. We will work hard to bring justice to Jaquoya and hold him accountable for her death,” said Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy in a statement Wednesday.

Watson was arraigned in court via Zoom on Sept. 23 and was denied bond.

According to the arraigning judge, Watson was previously convicted of assault charges in Wayne County in 2010 and in Louisiana in 2024.

He is expected to return to court on Sept. 30 for a probable cause conference.

The S&P 500 fell 0.8% after finishing the prior day just 0.4% below its record set last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 352 points, or 0.7%, while the Nasdaq composite sank 1.1% from its own all-time high.

Stocks wilted after the yield on the 10-year Treasury jumped to 5.10% from 4.96% late Tuesday, which is a considerable move for the bond market. High yields undercut prices for stocks and other investments, while also slowing the economy by making it more expensive for everyone to borrow money.

Wednesday’s jump briefly sent the 10-year yield near 5.14%, back to where it was in 2007 before the global financial crisis caused yields to crater. Yields have been climbing since bottoming out in the COVID pandemic, and they’ve accelerated recently because of worries about high inflation, the U.S. government’s heavy debt and other concerns.

Worries about inflation got a jolt Wednesday morning after a preliminary report suggested growth in U.S. business activity surged to its strongest level in more than five years. That’s an encouraging signal, to be sure, but it indicates the economy may have plenty of fuel for more inflation.

The report also suggested costs for businesses are leaping at the fastest rate in four years, in part because of more expensive oil, according to Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence. That could mean businesses will pass those higher costs onto their customers in coming months.

Oil prices are high because of worries that the war with Iran will keep oil bottled up in the Middle East for a long time.

The price for a barrel of Brent oil to be delivered in November rose 3.9% to $103.08 on Wednesday. That reversed a decline for Brent, which had been falling since it neared $110 last week. Talks are continuing with mediators between U.S. and Iranian officials, but nothing concrete has come from it yet.

Brent oil to be delivered in December, where most of the trading in the market has moved, rose 2.8% to $98.12 per barrel.

Even with its recent decline, the price for a barrel of Brent remains much higher than the roughly $72 it cost before the war with Iran began.

Inflation has remained so stubbornly high that the Federal Reserve raised its short-term interest rate last week for the first time in three years in hopes of slowing down increases in the cost of living.

Fed Gov. Michael Barr said in a speech on Wednesday that further hikes “are likely to be needed” to get inflation to the Fed’s 2% target. Traders now see better than a 50% probability that the Fed will hike its federal funds rate at each of its next two meetings, in October and December, according to data from CME Group.

So far, strong growth in profits for U.S. companies has helped support the U.S. stock market despite higher interest rates and more expensive oil.

KB Home became the latest to deliver a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. But its stock nevertheless swung between losses and gains after the homebuilder’s executive chairman said conditions got even tougher for the industry over the last three months. It finished with a loss of 3%.

Potential customers are becoming more cautious because of higher mortgage rates caused by the rise in the 10-year Treasury yield. They also are feeling pressure from “geopolitical uncertainty and broader economic headwinds,” Jeffrey Mezger said.

General Mills likewise reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. But the company behind the Cheerios and Progresso brands said it also expects growth this fiscal year to fall below its historical track record “driven by a continued challenging consumer backdrop,” and it did not raise its forecast for profit over the full fiscal year.

Its stock flipped between gains and losses before rising 1%.

All told, the S&P 500 fell 58.61 points to 7,706.03. The Dow dropped 352.10 to 51,511.59, and the Nasdaq composite sank 308.24 to 26,936.04.

In stock markets abroad, indexes slipped across much of Europe and Asia.

Stock indexes fell 1% in Hong Kong and 0.4% in Shanghai ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington, which is kicking off Wednesday.

The leaders are expected to attempt to steady fragile ties in their third meeting since Trump returned to the White House. That is despite the world’s two largest economies seeking the upper hand on artificial-intelligence developments and trade, while pushing for leverage in persistent hot spots like Iran and Taiwan.

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AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Michelle Chapman contributed to this report.

They reached out to Local 4 for help. Reporter Kyla Russell has spoken with more than a dozen people impacted.

A few months ago, Stephanie Campbell’s storage unit was filled to the brim with items from her late fiancé, David.

But, earlier this month, she found out about a mold issue. When she walked in, things were covered. Now, there are only a handful of priceless items she’s able to keep.

“This may seem insignificant to some people, but this was his racing number for one of his races he was in. I know it’s covered. It’s gotta be,” Campbell said, holding a race bib of David’s.

Last year, David died in a tragic accident.

Pregnant with their child, she packed away their most precious possessions in this Public Storage unit while she moved.

“All of my furniture,” Campbell said. “My late fiancé’s clothes, items, kids toys and whatnot that I planned to unpack when I moved into a new home.”

She pays $224 a month. She says she specifically chose this unit because it is climate controlled.

“When did you first hear about the mold?” Local 4 asked Campbell.

“I found about it on the fourth of September,” she said.

She tells me she wasn’t notified by Public Storage, but found out about this on Facebook.

“There was mold all over my car seat I had in here,” she said.

That was just the start. She had to get rid of nearly everything.

“I found a lot of his stuff was covered in mold – his shirts that I planned to make blankets out of. Stuff that may not hold a lot of monetary value, but a lot of sentimental,” she said.

On Wednesday, she was there while it was all put in this dumpster.

She started to connect with other people in the same boat.

“In this? There’s 16,” she said, speaking about a group chat those impacted by the mold are communicating in.

Local 4 talked to over a dozen people who say the same thing.

When they reach out to management and ask what caused the mold, they say they hear the same thing.

“They are quiet about it until they finish their investigation,” she said.

There’s an insurance agreement that may help cover some of the expenses for them, but they each tell me it’s not nearly what they’ve lost.

“I want to say at least $15,000,” Campbell said about what she’s lost.

Local 4 has been trying to get answers for them. We emailed their corporate office and went in person.

While in person, the property manager said Local 4 needed to call the chief legal officer, but did not have a number.

So, Local 4 called a number they could find. There was no answer.

Local 4 also messaged the company’s Chief Legal Officer on LinkedIn.

Campbell says she wants other people to know what they’re facing.

“It’s insignificant to some people, but it’s really important to me and his kids,” Campbell said.