TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — A 13-year-old boy described by police as obsessed with school shooters was arrested on multiple firearms possession charges and causing a threat after they say they found social media posts about intentions to kill and seized 23 guns and ammunition from his home.

The boy pleaded not guilty to a total of five charges, four of them felonies, in juvenile court on Monday. He was arrested over the weekend in Washington’s Pierce County.

The boy’s name has not been released. It was not immediately known if he had a lawyer. Juvenile court records are generally confidential.

This image provided by Pierce County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025 shows weapons seized from the home of a 13-year-old boy in Pierce County, Wa., who authorities said had appeared to idolize school shooters. (Pierce County Sheriff’s Office via AP)

Firearms were mounted on walls and handguns were found unsecured throughout the home, sheriff’s Deputy Carly Cappetto said in a news release Monday.

“Several pieces of evidence from the suspect’s bedroom indicated he was obsessed with past school shooters and imitated similar behaviors with photos and inscriptions throughout his room,” she said. Loaded magazines with school shooter writings on them were removed.

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“It appeared the suspect had everything ready to go to commit a mass shooting type of incident. It is unknown who or what the intended target was going to be, but it’s clear it was a matter of time before a tragic incident occurred,” Cappetto said.

The boy’s parents said their son had no intention of harming anyone. His mother, who attended the court hearing, suggested in an interview afterward that the social media posts were an attempt to “be cool” among peers, KOMO-TV reported.

Cappetto said the boy was last enrolled in the Franklin Pierce School District in 2021. He was currently unenrolled and was not currently an active student in any school district.

By DAVID A. LIEB, Associated Press

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri’s Republican-led House turned aside Democratic objections Tuesday and passed a plan backed by President Donald Trump to redraw the state’s congressional districts so that Republicans could win almost all of them.

The rare mid-decade redistricting plan, which now heads to the state Senate, is aimed at bolstering Republicans’ national prospects in next year’s U.S. House elections. It comes after a similar move by Republican-led Texas and a counter-offensive in Democratic-led California, which still needs voter approval.

Other states, including Republican-led Indiana and Florida and Democratic-led Maryland and New York, could follow with their own revisions in what’s emerging as a national redistricting battle.

U.S. House districts were redrawn across the country after the 2020 census to account for population changes. The current redistricting push is being done for partisan advantage, a process known as gerrymandering.

“This is cheating,” said state Rep. Yolonda Fountain Henderson, one of many Democrats who denounced the measure. “It’s like when President Trump says, we jump.”

Trump wants to retain a congressional majority to advance his agenda. But historically, the party opposing the president has gained seats in the midterm elections, as Democrats did during Trump’s first term and then proceeded to impeach him.

Missouri lawmakers are meeting in a two-prong special session called by Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe.

The House on Tuesday also passed a measure that — if approved by the Senate and statewide voters — would make it harder to pass citizen-led initiatives amending the state constitution by requiring a majority vote from each congressional district instead of a simple statewide majority. That comes after Missouri’s initiative process has been used in recent years to win voter approval of amendments on abortion rights, marijuana legalization and Medicaid expansion.

Revised Missouri map could help Republicans gain a House seat

Missouri’s redistricting plan would give Republicans an improved chance to win seven of the state’s eight U.S. House seats, which is one more than they currently hold.

The plan targets a Kansas City district held by Democratic U.S. Emanuel Cleaver by stretching it eastward into Republican-heavy rural areas and reducing the number of Black and minority voters in the district. Other parts of Kansas City would be added to two predominantly rural districts represented by Republicans.

Cleaver, who turns 81 in October, is a Methodist pastor who served as Kansas City’s first Black mayor from 1991-1999 and won election to the U.S. House in 2004. He asserted that Republicans are creating an atmosphere of “intimidation” and “division” and pledged to challenge the new map in court.

“It’s one of those moments that, frankly, I never thought I would experience,” Cleaver said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Although the primary Kansas City district would expand significantly, the state’s congressional districts overall would be more compact — and competitive — under the revised map, Republican lawmakers said. Kehoe has defended the revised map as a means of amplifying conservative voices in Congress.

It’s “a congressional map that will better represent Missouri in Washington, D.C.,” said sponsoring state Rep. Dirk Deaton, a Republican.

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Some Republicans join Democrats in opposing new districts

The Missouri House passed the revised districts on a 90-65 vote. Thirteen Republicans, including House Speaker Jon Patterson of suburban Kansas City, joined Democrats in voting against the revised map. But only a couple spoke against it during two days of debate.

“Using our raw political power to tilt the playing field to our side, regardless of the party, is wrong,” Republican state Rep. Bryant Wolfin said.

Leading up to the House vote, three Democratic state lawmakers staged a sit-in in House chamber for several days and nights to protest that the special session began while most members were absent. Former Vice President Kamala Harris ordered pizza and chicken wings delivered to them in a show of support.

Republicans are “bending a knee to Donald Trump and pushing through these racist, gerrymandered districts,” said Rep. Ray Reed, of St. Louis, one of those who slept in the chamber.

The Missouri NAACP has sued seeking to invalidate the special session. The state lawsuit asserts there is no extraordinary circumstance to justify the session and that the state constitution prohibits redistricting without new census data or a ruling invalidating the current districts.

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, who took office Monday, said she doesn’t think there is any constitutional prohibition on mid-decade redistricting.

Associated Press writer Heather Hollingsworth contributed from Kansas City, Missouri.

PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron late Tuesday appointed Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu as France’s new prime minister, the country’s fourth in about a year.

Lecornu, 39, is the youngest defense minister in French history and architect of a major military buildup through 2030, spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

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A former conservative who joined Macron’s centrist movement in 2017, he has held posts in local governments, overseas territories and during Macron’s yellow vest “great debate,” where he helped manage mass anger with dialogue. He also offered talks on autonomy during unrest in Guadeloupe in 2021.

His rise reflects Macron’s instinct to reward loyalty, but also the need for continuity as repeated budget showdowns have toppled his predecessors and left France in drift.

Legislators toppled Lecornu’s predecessor Francois Bayrou and his government in a confidence vote on Monday, a new crisis for Europe’s second-largest economy.

Bayrou gambled that lawmakers would back his view that France must slash public spending to rein in its huge debts. Instead, they seized on the vote to gang up against the 74-year-old centrist who was appointed by Macron last December.

The demise of Bayrou’s short-lived minority government heralds renewed uncertainty and a risk of prolonged legislative deadlock for France as it wrestles with pressing challenges, including budget difficulties and, internationally, wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the shifting priorities of U.S. President Donald Trump.

By R.J. RICO, Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia judge on Tuesday said he will toss the racketeering charges against all 61 defendants accused of a yearslong conspiracy to halt the construction of a police and firefighter training facility that critics pejoratively call “Cop City.”

Fulton County Judge Kevin Farmer said he does not believe Republican Attorney General Chris Carr had the authority to secure the 2023 indictments under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, or RICO. Experts believe it was the largest criminal racketeering case ever filed against protesters in U.S. history.

Farmer said during a hearing that Carr needed Gov. Brian Kemp ‘s permission to pursue the case instead of the local district attorney. Prosecutors earlier conceded to the judge that they did not obtain any such order.

“It would have been real easy to just ask the governor, ‘Let me do this, give me a letter,’” Farmer said. “The steps just weren’t followed.”

Five of the 61 defendants were also indicted on charges of domestic terrorism and first-degree arson. Farmer said Carr also didn’t have the authority to pursue the arson charge, though he believes the domestic terrorism charge can stand.

Farmer said he plans to file a formal order soon and is not sure whether he would quash the entire indictment or let the domestic terrorism charge stand, though he said he expects the prosecution to appeal regardless.

Deputy Attorney General John Fowler told Farmer that he believes the judge’s decision is “wholly incorrect.”

The long-brewing controversy over the training center erupted in January 2023 after state troopers who were part of a sweep of the South River Forest that killed an activist who authorities said had fired at them. Numerous protests ensued, with masked vandals sometimes attacking police vehicles and construction equipment to stall the project and intimidate contractors into backing out.

The defendants faced a wide variety of allegations — everything from throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers, to supplying food to protesters who were camped in the woods and passing out fliers against a state trooper who had fatally shot the protester known as “Tortuguita.” Each defendant faced up to 20 years in prison on the RICO charge.

Carr, who is running for governor, had pursued the case, with Kemp hailing it as an important step to combat “out-of-state radicals that threaten the safety of our citizens and law enforcement.”

But critics had decried the indictment as a politically motivated, heavy-handed attempt to quash the movement.

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Emerging in the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests, the “Stop Cop City” movement gained nationwide recognition as it united anarchists, environmental activists and anti-police protesters against the sprawling training center, which was being built in a wooded area that was ultimately razed in DeKalb County.

Activists argued that uprooting acres of trees for the facility would exacerbate environmental damage in a flood-prone, majority-Black area while serving as an expensive staging ground for militarized officers to be trained in quelling social movements.

The training center, a priority of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, opened earlier this year, despite years of protests and millions in cost overruns, some of which was due to the damage protesters caused, and police officials’ needs to bolster 24/7 security around the facility.

But over the past two years, the case had been bogged down in procedural issues, with none of the defendants going to trial. Farmer and the case’s previous judge, Fulton County Judge Kimberly Esmond Adams, had earlier been critical of prosecutors’ approach to the case, with Adams saying the prosecution had committed “gross negligence” by allowing privileged attorney-client emails to be included among a giant cache of evidence that was shared between investigators and dozens of defense attorneys.

Prosecutors had repeatedly apologized for the delays and missteps, but lamented the difficulty of handling such a sprawling case, though Farmer pointed out that it was prosecutors who decided to bring this “61-person elephant” to court in the first place.