By HANNAH SCHOENBAUM, Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Utah judge on Monday rejected a new congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers and adopted an alternate proposal creating a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

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Republicans hold all four of Utah’s U.S. House seats and had advanced a map poised to protect them.

Judge Dianna Gibson ruled just before a midnight deadline that the Legislature’s map “unduly favors Republicans and disfavors Democrats.”

She had ordered lawmakers to draw a map that complies with standards established by voters to ensure districts don’t deliberately favor a party, a practice known as gerrymandering. If they failed, Gibson warned she may consider other maps submitted by plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led her to throw out Utah’s existing map.

Gibson ultimately selected a map drawn by plaintiffs, the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government. It keeps Salt Lake County almost entirely within one district, instead of dividing the heavily Democratic population center among all four districts, as was the case previously.

The judge’s ruling throws a curveball for Republicans in a state where they expected a clean sweep as they work to add winnable seats elsewhere. Nationally, Democrats need to net three U.S. House seats next year to wrest control of the chamber from the GOP, which is trying to buck a historic pattern of the president’s party losing seats in the midterms.

The newly approved map gives Democrats a much stronger chance to flip a seat. The state last had a Democrat in Congress in early 2021.

“This is a win for every Utahn,” state House and Senate Democrats said in a joint statement. “We took an oath to serve the people of Utah, and fair representation is the truest measure of that promise.”

The state’s top election official said Monday was the last possible date to enact a new congressional map so county clerks would have enough time to prepare for candidate filings for the 2026 midterms. Gibson said in her ruling that she is obligated to ensure a lawful map was in place by the deadline.

Republicans have argued Gibson does not have legal authority to enact a map that wasn’t approved by the Legislature. State Rep. Matt MacPherson called the ruling a “gross abuse of power” and said he has opened a bill to pursue impeachment against Gibson.

In August, Gibson struck down the Utah congressional map adopted after the 2020 census because the Legislature had circumvented anti-gerrymandering standards passed by voters.

The ruling thrust Utah into a national redistricting battle as President Donald Trump urged other Republican-led states to take up mid-decade redistricting to try to help the GOP retain control of the House in 2026. Some Democratic states are considering new maps of their own, with California voters approving a map last week that gives Democrats a shot at winning five more seats. Republicans are still ahead in the redistricting fight.

Redistricting typically occurs once a decade after a census. There are no federal restrictions to redrawing districts mid-decade, but some states — more led by Democrats than Republicans — set their own limitations. The Utah ruling gives an unexpected boost to Democrats, who have fewer opportunities to gain seats through redistricting.

If Gibson had instead approved the map drawn by lawmakers, all four districts would still lean Republican but two would have become slightly competitive for Democrats. Their proposal gambled on Republicans’ ability to protect all four seats under much slimmer margins rather than create a single-left leaning district.

By LISA MASCARO, AP Congressional Correspondent

WASHINGTON (AP) — After refusing to convene the U.S. House during the government shutdown, Speaker Mike Johnson is recalling lawmakers back into session — and facing an avalanche of pent-up legislative demands from those who have largely been sidelined from governing.

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Hundreds of representatives are preparing to return Wednesday to Washington after a nearly eight-week absence, carrying a torrent of ideas, proposals and frustrations over work that has stalled when the Republican speaker shuttered the House doors nearly two months ago.

First will be a vote to reopen the government. But that’s just the start. With efforts to release the Jeffrey Epstein files and the swearing in of Arizona’s Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, the unfinished business will pose a fresh test to Johnson’s grip on power and put a renewed focus on his leadership.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Matthew Green, a professor at the politics department at The Catholic University of America.

“What Speaker Johnson and Republicans are doing, you have to go back decades to find an example where the House — either chamber — decided not to meet.”

Gaveling in after two months gone

When the House gavels back into session, it will close this remarkable chapter of Johnson’s tenure when he showed himself to be a leader who is quietly, but brazenly, willing to upend institutional norms in pursuit of his broader strategy, even at the risk of diminishing the House itself.

Rather than use the immense powers of the speaker’s office to forcefully steer the debate in Congress, as a coequal branch of the government on par with the executive and the courts, Johnson simply closed up shop — allowing the House to become unusually deferential, particularly to President Donald Trump.

Over these past weeks, the chamber has sidestepped its basic responsibilities, from passing routine legislation to conducting oversight. The silencing of the speaker’s gavel has been both unusual and surprising in a system of government where the founders envisioned the branches would vigorously protect their institutional prerogatives.

“You can see it is pretty empty around here,” Johnson, R-La., said on day three of the shutdown, tour groups no longer crowding the halls.

“When Congress decides to turn off the lights, it shifts the authority to the executive branch. That is how it works,” he said, blaming Democrats, with their fight over health care funds, for the closures.

An empty House as a political strategy

The speaker has defended his decision to shutter the House during what’s now the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. He argued that the chamber, under the GOP majority, had already done its job passing a stopgap funding bill in September. It would be up to the Senate to act, he said.

When the Senate failed over and over to advance the House bill, more than a dozen times, he refused to enter talks with the other leaders on a compromise. Johnson also encouraged Trump to cancel an initial sit-down with the Democratic leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to avoid a broader negotiation while the government was still closed.

Instead, the speaker, whose job is outlined in the Constitution, second in line of succession to the presidency, held held almost daily press conferences on his side of the Capitol, a weekly conference call with GOP lawmakers, and private talks with Trump. He joined the president for Sunday’s NFL Washington Commanders game as the Senate was slogging through a weekend session.

“People say, why aren’t you negotiating with Schumer and Jeffries? I quite literally have nothing to negotiate,” Johnson said at one point.

“As I’ve said time and time again, I don’t have anything to negotiate with,” he said on day 13 of the shutdown. “We did our job. We had that vote.”

And besides he said of the GOP lawmakers, “They are doing some of their best work in the district, helping their constituents navigate this crisis.”

Accidental speaker delivers for Trump

In many ways, Johnson has become a surprisingly effective leader, an accidental speaker who was elected to the job by his colleagues after all others failed to win it. He has now lasted more than two years, longer than many once envisioned.

This year, with Trump’s return to the White House, the speaker has commandeered his slim GOP majority and passed legislation including the president’s so-called “one big beautiful bill” of tax breaks and spending reductions that became law this summer.

Johnson’s shutdown strategy also largely achieved his goal, forcing Senate Democrats to break ranks and approve the funds to reopen government without the extension of health care subsidies they were demanding to help ease the sticker shock of rising insurance premium costs with the Affordable Care Act.

Johnson’s approach is seen as one that manages up — he stays close to Trump and says they speak often — and also hammers down, imposing a rigid control over the day-to-day schedule of the House, and its lawmakers.

Amassing quiet power

Under a House rules change this year, Johnson was able to keep the chamber shuttered indefinitely on his own, without the usual required vote. This year his leadership team has allowed fewer opportunities for amendments on legislation, according to a recent tally. Other changes have curtailed the House’s ability to provide a robust check on the executive branch over Trump’s tariffs and use of war powers.

Johnson’s refusal to swear-in Grijalva is a remarkable flex of the speaker’s power, leading to comparisons with Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision not to consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, said David Rapallo, an associate professor and director of the Federal Legislation Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. Arizona has sued to seat her.

Marc Short, who headed up the White House’s legislative affairs office during the first Trump administration, said of Johnson, “It’s impressive how he’s held the conference together.”

But said Short, “The legislative branch has abdicated a lot of responsibility to the executive under his watch.”

Tough decisions ahead for the Speaker

As lawmakers make their way back to Washington, the speaker’s power will be tested again as they consider the package to reopen government.

Republicans are certain to have complaints about the bill, which funds much of the federal government through Jan. 30 and keeps certain programs including agriculture, military construction and veterans affairs running through September.

But with House Democratic leaders rejecting the package for having failed to address the health care subsidies, it will be up to Johnson to muscle it through with mostly GOP lawmakers — with hardly any room for defections in the chamber that’s narrowly split.

Jeffries, who has criticized House Republicans for what he called an extended vacation, said, “They’re not going to be able to hide this week when they return.”

By SAM McNEIL

YPRES, Belgium (AP) — Red poppy flowers were dropped onto soldiers, politicians and onlookers from across the world gathered in western Belgium on Tuesday to commemorate the end of World War I.

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They laid wreaths at a newly renovated memorial for the fallen in Ypres, the Belgian town that earned the grim honor of being synonymous with the brutality of conflict.

Tuesday is known as Armistice Day — or Veterans Day in the United States and Remembrance Day in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa — marking the end of WWI.

Soldiers from New Zealand to Canada paraded through town toward the Menin Gate, a massive stone memorial inscribed with the names of tens of thousands of soldiers who were killed but left without graves.

Bagpipes and bugles rang out alongside an electric guitar that played “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan in Flemish and English. A choir sang John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

A pipe band marches during an Armistice Day ceremony at the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres, Belgium, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

In Britain, many people paused for two minutes of silence at 11 a.m., marking the moment the war ended in 1918, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron attended the traditional ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe and lit the eternal flame at the memorial engraved with the words: “Here rests a French soldier who died for the nation.”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that the nation’s minute of silence was “a noiseless echo of the hush that fell across Europe when the guns stopped in 1918.”

From 1914-1918, the armies of France, the British Empire, Russia and the U.S. fought against a German-led coalition that included the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The war killed almost 10 million soldiers, sometimes tens of thousands on a single day.

Three Australian soldiers stand next to names of World War I missing during an Armistice Day ceremony at the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres, Belgium, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

Hundreds of thousands died in Ypres alone.

The blood-soaked fields of the Flanders region saw the development of more modern ways to kill. Horses galloped next to tanks. Poison gas was introduced. Aerial surveillance provided precision to artillery that overwhelmed medieval fortifications.

In the wake of “the war to end all wars” and then WWII, a modern geopolitical system was forged with an aim to avert future conflicts, giving birth to the United Nations and the European Union.

Decades later, across once-devastated Europe, nations are again rearming, plowing investments into the defense industry in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Red paper poppies fall from the ceiling during an Armistice Day ceremony at the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres, Belgium, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

The 27-nation EU has been worried by a series of airspace violations, some of them close to its borders with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Western officials have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of incidents of sabotage.

Aside from Europe, wars in places as distant as Gaza and Sudan have had impact well beyond their borders. Tensions in Asia have led Japan and others to increase military spending. And around the world, ascendant political movements challenge the democratic order, with authoritarianism on the rise.

Associated Press writers Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Jill Lawless in London, and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

By BARBARA ORTUTAY and MATT O’BRIEN, AP Technology Writers

The tech industry is moving fast and breaking things again — and this time it is humanity’s shared reality and control of our likeness before and after death — thanks to artificial intelligence image-generation platforms like OpenAI’s Sora 2.

The typical Sora video, made on OpenAI’s app and spread onto TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook, is designed to be amusing enough for you to click and share. It could be Queen Elizabeth II rapping or something more ordinary and believable. One popular Sora genre is fake doorbell camera footage capturing something slightly uncanny — say, a boa constrictor on the porch or an alligator approaching an unfazed child — and ends with a mild shock, like a grandma shouting as she beats the animal with a broom.

But a growing chorus of advocacy groups, academics and experts are raising alarms about the dangers of letting people create AI videos on just about anything they can type into a prompt, leading to the proliferation of nonconsensual images and realistic deepfakes in a sea of less harmful “AI slop.” OpenAI has cracked down on AI creations of public figures — among them, Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mister Rogers — doing outlandish things, but only after an outcry from family estates and an actors’ union.

The nonprofit Public Citizen is now demanding OpenAI withdraw Sora 2 from the public, writing in a Tuesday letter to the company and CEO Sam Altman that the app’s hasty release so that it could launch ahead of competitors shows a “consistent and dangerous pattern of OpenAI rushing to market with a product that is either inherently unsafe or lacking in needed guardrails.” Sora 2, the letter says, shows a “reckless disregard” for product safety, as well as people’s rights to their own likeness and the stability of democracy. The group also sent the letter to the U.S. Congress.

OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

“Our biggest concern is the potential threat to democracy,” said Public Citizen tech policy advocate J.B. Branch in an interview. “I think we’re entering a world in which people can’t really trust what they see. And we’re starting to see strategies in politics where the first image, the first video that gets released, is what people remember.”

Branch, author of Tuesday’s letter, also sees broader concerns to people’s privacy that disproportionately impact vulnerable populations online.

OpenAI blocks nudity but Branch said that “women are seeing themselves being harassed online” in other ways, such as with fetishized niche content that makes it through the apps’ restrictions. The news outlet 404 Media on Friday reported on a flood of Sora-made videos of women being strangled.

OpenAI introduced its new Sora app on iPhones more than a month ago. It launched on Android phones last week in the U.S., Canada and several Asian countries, including Japan and South Korea.

Much of the strongest pushback has come from Hollywood and other entertainment interests, including the Japanese manga industry. OpenAI announced its first big changes just days after the release, saying “overmoderation is super frustrating” for users but that it’s important to be conservative “while the world is still adjusting to this new technology.”

That was followed by publicly announced agreements with Martin Luther King Jr.’s family on Oct. 16, preventing “disrespectful depictions” of the civil rights leader while the company worked on better safeguards, and another on Oct. 20 with “Breaking Bad” actor Bryan Cranston, the SAG-AFTRA union and talent agencies.

“That’s all well and good if you’re famous,” Branch said. “It’s sort of just a pattern that OpenAI has where they’re willing to respond to the outrage of a very small population. They’re willing to release something and apologize afterwards. But a lot of these issues are design choices that they can make before releasing.”

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OpenAI has faced similar complaints about its flagship product, ChatGPT. Seven new lawsuits filed last week in California courts claim the chatbot drove people to suicide and harmful delusions even when they had no prior mental health issues. Filed on behalf of six adults and one teenager by the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project, the lawsuits claim that OpenAI knowingly released GPT-4o prematurely last year, despite internal warnings that it was dangerously sycophantic and psychologically manipulative. Four of the victims died by suicide.

Public Citizen was not involved in the lawsuits, but Branch said he sees parallels in Sora’s hasty release.

He said they’re “putting the pedal to the floor without regard for harms. Much of this seems foreseeable. But they’d rather get a product out there, get people downloading it, get people who are addicted to it rather than doing the right thing and stress-testing these things beforehand and worrying about the plight of everyday users.”

OpenAI spent last week responding to complaints from a Japanese trade association representing famed animators like Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli and video game makers like Bandai Namco and Square Enix. OpenAI said many anime fans want to interact with their favorite characters, but the company has also set guardrails in place to prevent well-known characters from being generated without the consent of the people who own the copyrights.

“We’re engaging directly with studios and rightsholders, listening to feedback, and learning from how people are using Sora 2, including in Japan, where cultural and creative industries are deeply valued,” OpenAI said in a statement about the trade group’s letter last week.