By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Princeton University doctoral student who was kidnapped in Iraq in 2023 while doing research there has been freed and turned over to U.S. authorities, her family and President Donald Trump said Tuesday.

Elizabeth Tsurkov, who holds Israeli and Russian citizenship, spent more than 900 days in custody after being kidnapped in March 2003 in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

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In the past few months, officials from several countries, including the Iraqi foreign minister and deputy prime minister, have confirmed she was alive and being held in Iraq by a Shiite Muslim militant group called Kataeb Hezbollah, according to her sister. The group has not claimed the kidnapping nor have Iraqi officials publicly said which group is responsible.

“My entire family is incredibly happy. We cannot wait to see Elizabeth and give her all the love we have been waiting to share for 903 days,” said a statement from her sister Emma in which she thanked, among others, Adam Boehler, the U.S. special presidential envoy for hostage affairs.

Emma Tsurkov said she lost contact with her sister in late March 2023, after Elizabeth went to meet sources in a coffee shop in Baghdad’s central neighborhood of Karradah. Elizabeth Tsurkov had back surgery eight days before her kidnapping for a slipped disc and was more vulnerable, her sister said. She was supposed to get her stitches removed two days after her kidnapping and faced a long road of physical therapy back in Princeton, New Jersey.

The only direct proof of life of Elizabeth Tsurkov during her captivity was a video broadcast in November 2023 on an Iraqi television station and circulated on pro-Iranian social media purporting to show her.

Sharon Anderson sometimes took her meals at the Salvation Army on West Seventh Street or passed time with friends and acquaintances at the downtown St. Paul City Passport Senior Center before it closed in 2016. The fact that she had once declared her Summit Avenue home to be her church — and herself its high minister — as a way of voiding back taxes never seemed to bother most of her peers in either setting, where she developed something of a following.

Sharon Anderson on July 17, 2012. (Chris Polydoroff / Pioneer Press)

Anderson, arguably St. Paul’s most colorful Republican gadfly, claimed to have run for public office — from the St. Paul City Council, to St. Paul mayor, to state attorney general and president of the United States — almost every year since 1970, while representing herself in court in so many lawsuits against the city and elected officials that in 1984 a state judge barred her from ever suing the city again.

Her campaigns survived at least two political primaries and made national news for her off-color remarks during a 2013 mayoral debate, but she never won a general election, which to her seemed besides the point.

Her greater goal? Serving as a thorn in the side of institutions she held in contempt, from the state court system to city inspections. “I have to make the city accountable,” said Anderson, during one of many unsuccessful runs for city council in 2019. “I want my home back on Summit Avenue.”

‘A different perspective on politics’

Following months of living in a senior rehabilitation center, Anderson, 86, died at 11 a.m. on Sept. 15 at United Hospital in downtown St. Paul. A cause of death has yet to be determined, said her former sister-in-law, Charlotte Peterson of Sarasota, Fla. Members of Anderson’s family have requested an autopsy.

Charlotte Peterson, who is divorced from Anderson’s brother, Billy Peterson, said she had not heard from Anderson in 30 years but received a plaintive phone call several months ago. Anderson was estranged from most of her siblings and other relatives.

“The last six months of her life she was completely blind, and she suffered a lot because of that,” Charlotte Peterson said. “She really was a good person. She just had her own politics, and they didn’t conform. She spent too much of her time doing that, instead of concentrating on other things she should have concentrated on. But let’s face it. Nobody’s politics conform anymore.”

“I had tried to help her over this past six months,” Peterson added. “She was just a very unique person, and she had a different perspective on politics than a lot of people did. She was constantly fighting the system, so to speak.”

A celebrity of sorts

To the general public, Anderson’s eccentricities as a perennial political candidate may have been hard to fathom, but to peers who struggled to make do from one Social Security check to the next, she became a celebrity of sorts — a constant reminder that not every friend and neighbor would fit neatly into the modern economy.

Arturo Lee recalled thinking to himself “I better get this job done, get the money, and never look back” after Anderson hired him to add new tarp over the failing roof of her Dayton’s Bluff home, despite his protests that the pink stucco structure needed to be re-shingled.

That was a decade ago, and the taciturn Anderson soon hired him again and again, eventually winning him over as a friend by offering life lessons that Lee said he said he came to appreciate.

“We got pretty close,” said Lee on Monday. “I assumed at first she was a little crazy, but she was kind of a brilliant crazy. She was smart financially. She gave me a lot of sound advice over the last 10 years, just talking about real estate and little tidbits here and there. Sometimes it didn’t add up until later on in life and then it was like oh, I can apply this here.”

Declaring home a church

In 1988, Anderson declared her Summit Avenue home to be her church and thus exempt from property taxes, a strategy that did not protect her from eviction. She continued to use the same address across decades of election filings, even after a fellow city council candidate in 2019 challenged her residency status in court.

To the dismay of party insiders, Anderson slipped through the 1994 Republican primary to win the GOP nomination for state attorney general. Even many among her own party were relieved when she lost to DFL incumbent Hubert H. Humphrey III in the general election. Still, she got nearly half a million votes.

In 2013, Anderson drew national attention to St. Paul’s four-way mayoral debate when she likened St. Paul and Minneapolis to Sodom and Gomorrah and compared the city’s new light rail corridor to Nazi train cars carrying Holocaust victims to concentration camps.

“The city of St. Paul, they’ll come, they’ll steal your car, they’ll shut your water off,” said Anderson, who wore bulky sunglasses and a jacket adorned with a large dollar sign on the back.

A political win toward the end

Chris Coleman, who handily won re-election as mayor that year, recalled how Anderson declared before the rolling cameras that she was not “Ciley Myrus” but she was indeed “a wrecking ball” — a reference to Miley Cyrus, who was famous at the time for the pop song “Wrecking Ball.”

“Like I could ever forget that debate,” said Coleman on Monday. “I played that clip when I became president of the National League of Cities. That debate captured Sharon in all of her Sharon-ness because she would just go off on things. She could laugh at herself, and that was the thing I really liked about her. As out there as she was, she really could laugh at herself.”

In August 2024, to her own surprise, Anderson won the Republican primary for the House 67B seat on St. Paul’s East Side by 13 votes, defeating fellow Republican AJ Plehal 52% to 48%. It would take days for news of her primary win to trickle over to Anderson — a self-proclaimed “political prisoner” — who was hospitalized against her will around the same time.

State Rep. Jay Xiong, a DFLer, won re-election to the seat with 75% of the vote that November, which still resulted in more than 3,500 votes for Anderson.

Lee would sometimes visit Anderson at the Highland Chateau health and rehabilitation center in Highland Park, where she had been relocated with some objection after her Surrey Avenue property was deemed unfit for human habitation. He told her the new placement was probably for the best.

She disagreed. “I’m not going to lay here and die,” said Anderson, in a three-minute voicemail left for a reporter on the Pioneer Press news tip line on July 17, one of many lengthy messages over the past year. “I still have purpose. I still have meaning.”

To Lee’s frustration, he discovered last month that she’d been moved to the building’s psychiatric unit and he was not allowed to see her.

“Just by looking at the pod, it was gloomy, very quiet,” said Lee, who was surprised to soon discover that she had been transferred again, this time to United Hospital, where she died last week. “She was upstairs in the pod for maybe 2 1/2 days, and that was it.”

“I just didn’t see her declining that fast,” Lee added. “She would never not want me to see her.”

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By JOSEPH KRAUSS, Associated Press

An Israeli strike that targeted top Hamas leaders Tuesday as they gathered in the Gulf nation of Qatar marked a major escalation against the group and could upend negotiations aimed at ending the war in Gaza and returning Israeli hostages.

It could also spark a diplomatic crisis with Qatar, a U.S. ally hosting thousands of American troops that has served as a key mediator between Israel and Hamas for several years, even before the latest war.

Hamas said its top leaders survived, while acknowledging the deaths of two lower-ranking members and three bodyguards. The group, which has sometimes only confirmed the killing of its leaders months later, offered no immediate proof that senior figures were still alive.

The strike came as Hamas leaders based in the Qatari capital, Doha, were weighing a new ceasefire proposal from the Trump administration. The White House said Israel had informed the U.S. before the strike and that it had in turn warned the Qataris.

President Donald Trump viewed the strike as an “unfortunate incident” that did not advance peace in the region, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. He spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the attack and “made his thoughts and concerns very clear,” she said.

Here’s what to know:

Hamas’ exiled leadership

Nearly all of Hamas’ top leaders in Gaza, including the two architects of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that triggered the war, have been killed. But part of the group’s senior leadership, including Khalil al-Hayya, Mahmoud Darwish and Khaled Meshaal, have long resided abroad, mainly in Qatar and Turkey.

Israel has threatened to target Hamas leaders wherever they are, but until now had steered clear of Qatar, likely because of the Gulf nation’s close ties to the United States and its role as a mediator.

Hamas has survived the assassination of several top leaders since it was established in the 1980s, but it has never faced an onslaught on the scale of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack.

The war has killed over 64,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters or civilians but says women and children make up around half of the dead. Entire towns and neighborhoods have been bombed to rubble, 90% of the population of 2 million has been displaced, often multiple times, and parts of the territory are experiencing famine.

The Hamas-run government and police have largely vanished, but the group is still able to mount guerrilla-style attacks on Israeli forces. Four soldiers were killed Monday when a bomb was thrown into a tank.

Hamas-led fighters abducted 251 people in the Oct. 7 attack and killed some 1,200, mostly civilians. Forty-eight hostages are still inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefires or other deals.

They are Hamas’ last bargaining chip, and the group say it will release them only in return for Palestinian prisoners, a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal.

Impact on ceasefire negotiations

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war until all the hostages are returned and Hamas has been disarmed. Even then, he says Israel will maintain open-ended security control over Gaza.

Israelis have held mass protests accusing Netanyahu of prolonging the war for political reasons. They want a ceasefire that would return the hostages, and many fear that further escalation could doom the surviving captives, held in tunnels and other secret locations around Gaza.

Earlier this week, Trump said he was giving his “last warning” to Hamas, while Israel is in the initial stages of another major offensive in Gaza City. Hamas said it received a new U.S. ceasefire proposal calling for the immediate release of all the remaining hostages in return for talks on ending the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces.

Israel said it accepted the deal, while a senior Hamas official, Bassem Naim, described it as a “humiliating surrender document” offering no guarantees that Israel would end the war or leave Gaza. Still, Hamas said it would discuss the proposal with other armed groups and respond within days.

Those discussions were underway when the explosions rang out in Doha.

Hamas already harbored deep mistrust of Israel and the United States after Israel ended a ceasefire in March that Trump helped broker. The Doha strike plunges the talks into even greater uncertainty.

The final decision on the hostages, in any case, is likely to be made by Hamas’ battered but still intact armed wing inside Gaza that is holding them. It’s led by Ezzedin al-Haddad, a veteran commander who has gone deep underground.

Hamas’ surviving leaders are likely to further limit their communications in the wake of the strike, which could slow the negotiations even if they continue.

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Regional implications

Israel has carried out multiple strikes against top fighters, as well as Iranian generals and nuclear scientists, as the war sparked by the Oct. 7 attack has convulsed the region over the past two years.

But the strike in Qatar, a close U.S. ally that had cultivated close ties with Trump — even giving him a free replacement for Air Force One — shocked the region and could deepen Israel’s already unprecedented international isolation.

Key American allies, including Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, strongly condemned Tuesday’s strike.

In addition to hosting thousands of U.S. forces at the Al Udeid military base, Qatar has also served as a key mediator, not only with Hamas but the Afghan Taliban and other armed groups.

Critics accuse Qatar of bolstering Islamist groups across the region to extend its own influence. Qatari officials have denied those allegations, saying it is focused on regional stability and that its mediation efforts are undertaken with the full knowledge and support of the U.S.

By JOHN LEICESTER, Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — French authorities say they’re bracing for possible acts of sabotage and other violence when tens of thousands of protesters are expected to respond to online calls to disrupt the country on Wednesday, potentially compounding France’s latest political crisis triggered by the government’s collapse.

The “Bloquons Tout” (Block Everything) movement gathered steam on social media and in encrypted chats over the summer, before François Bayrou’s ouster as prime minister in a parliamentary confidence vote on Monday.

Its called-for day of blockades, strikes, demonstrations and other acts of protest on Wednesday is now falling as President Emmanuel Macron — one of the movement’s targets — is installing a fourth prime minister in 12 months. Sébastien Lecornu, the outgoing defense minister, was named as Macron’s latest new prime minister on Tuesday evening.

A leaflet pinned on a window reads “September 10, answer the national call and join the general strike” in Paris, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025, at the eve of a national protest. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)

Although ostensibly unrelated to the planned protests, the discovery of severed pigs’ heads — five of them written with Macron’s name — near nine Paris-area mosques on Tuesday added to unease, bearing possible hallmarks of previous suspected Russian-linked acts of attempted destabilization that have targeted France and other allies of Ukraine.

Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said that although investigations are still underway, “we cannot help but draw links with previous acts that happened, often at night, and which later proved to be acts of foreign interference.”

He said the depositing of pigs’ heads — near four mosques in Paris and five others in its suburbs — appeared to have been “carried out simultaneously, necessarily by several people.”

French authorities have characterized other suspected Russian-linked acts as being part of a sustained effort to sow discord, unrest and disinformation. Coffins left near the Eiffel Tower — some draped in the French flag and inscribed with the words “French soldiers of Ukraine” — in 2024 were linked by French authorities to Russian intelligence services. So, too, was an attack on a Holocaust memorial in Paris, daubed with blood-red hands.

‘Massive’ police deployment

The “Block Everything” movement, which has grown virally with no clear identified leadership, has a broad array of demands — many targeting contested belt-tightening budget plans that Bayrou championed before his demise — as well as broader complaints about inequality. Calls online for strikes, boycotts, blockades and other forms of protest on Wednesday have been accompanied with appeals to avoid violence.

A man walks past a graffiti that reads, “September 10, all-out strike” in Paris, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025, at the eve of a national protest. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)

French authorities said they were unsure how many people might take part Wednesday. French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said that as well as peaceful protests, “there are other actions that could be far more intense — blockages, possible acts of sabotage, acts that could be far more violent.”

Potential targets could include oil refineries, fuel stocks, train stations and ring roads, he said. He warned of “small groups that aren’t very numerous but which are very determined, very organized, very, very seasoned and are looking for violence.”

The police response would be “absolutely massive,” he said, with 80,000 police and gendarmes deployed to keep order, backed by helicopters, drones, and armored vehicles.

Paris transport authorities said Metro, train and bus services were expected to run largely as normal, with only moderate disruptions on some lines. Aviation authorities warned of possible disruptions and delays to flights.

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‘It won’t be a riot’

The spontaneity of “Block Everything” is reminiscent of the “Yellow Vest” movement that rocked Macron’s first term as president. It started with workers camping out at traffic circles to protest a hike in fuel taxes, sporting high-visibility vests. It quickly spread to people across political, regional, social and generational divides angry at economic injustice and Macron’s leadership.

Fédérico Tarragoni, a researcher of protest movements at the University of Caen in Normandy, said “Block Everything” supporters appear to believe that protest marches aren’t effective and so are looking for more radical ways to attract Macron’s attention, including blockades and other tactics used by the Yellow Vests.

He described the planned security deployment as war-like. “They’re anticipating blockades of roads, banks, production sites, everything — and there will doubtless be some,” he said.

Wednesday’s protests will test the popularity of both Macron and the movement, he said.

“It won’t be a riot. And it won’t be the Capitol after the election of (Joe) Biden,” he said, referring to the mob that stormed the seat of the U.S. Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

“But it will be potentially unmanageable,” because of the possibility of blockades, he said. “Managing that with police forces isn’t necessarily going to be easy.”