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.

By JANIE HAR, Associated Press

DANVILLE, Calif. (AP) — At age 106, Alice Darrow can clearly recall her days as a nurse during World War II, part of a pioneering group that dodged bullets as they hauled packs full of medical supplies and treated the burns and gunshot wounds of troops.

Some nurses were killed by enemy fire. Others spent years as prisoners of war. Most returned home to quiet lives, receiving little recognition.

Darrow sat with patients, even after-hours. One of them had arrived at her hospital on California’s Mare Island with a bullet lodged in his heart. He was not expected to survive surgery, yet he would change her life.

“To them, you’re everything because you’re taking care of them,” she said, sitting at her home in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Danville.

Eighty years after the war ended, a coalition of retired military nurses and others is campaigning to award one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, the Congressional Gold Medal, to all nurses who served in WWII. Other groups, such as the Women Airforce Service Pilots of WWII and the real-life Rosie the Riveters, have already received the honor.

“The general public doesn’t often recognize, I think, the contribution that the nurses have made in pretty much every war,” said Patricia Upah, a retired colonel who served as an Army nurse in conflicts abroad, and whose late mother was also a Army nurse in the South Pacific in World War II.

Only a handful, like Darrow, are still alive. The coalition knows of five World War II nurses who are still living — including Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo, 107, who became the first Chinese American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps. They fear time is running out to honor the trailblazers.

“It’s high time we honor the nurses who stepped up and did their part to defend our freedom,” U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, said in a statement.

Baldwin and U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, have sponsored legislation to award the medal, but it faces steep odds. It needs two-thirds of each chamber — 67 cosponsors in the Senate and 290 in the House — and so far, the bills have eight and six cosponsors, respectively.

Saving lives in the face of danger

Before the war, there were fewer than 600 nurses with the U.S. Army and 1,700 with the U.S. Navy. By the end of the war, those numbers had ballooned to 59,000 in the Army and 14,000 in the Navy.

The Congressional bills cite harrowing examples of bravery. Some nurses served on Navy hospital ships treating patients as the vessels came under fire. Sixty nurses landed off the coast of North Africa on Nov. 8, 1942, to set up shop and care for invading troops.

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“Without weapons, they waded ashore amid enemy sniper fire and ultimately took shelter in an abandoned civilian hospital,” the legislation states.

The nurses saved lives. Fewer than 4% of U.S. soldiers in WWII who received medical care in the field or underwent evacuation died from wounds or disease, the legislation states.

“They probably saw more infections. They probably saw more chemical casualties. Remember, they didn’t have disposable products, so they had to sterilize everything,” says Edward Yackel, a retired colonel and president of the Army Nurse Corps Association, of World War II nurses.

“Without them,” he says, “we would not have the knowledge base we need now to fight the wars of today.”

Some nurses endured harsh captivity. In 1942, nearly 80 military nurses were captured when the U.S. surrendered the Philippines to Japan. Held as prisoners of war, the women endured starvation rations and disease but continued to work until their liberation three years later.

Nurses played outsized roles in 600 U.S. Army hospitals worldwide and 700 prisoner-of-war camps at military bases in the U.S., said Phoebe Pollitt, a retired nurse and professor of nursing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. But their role has largely gone unrecognized.

“Within even women’s history and health care history, nurses are kind of at the bottom of the barrel,” she said.

This photo provided by Elaine Yuen shows her mother, Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo, next to a photo of herself at an exhibit at the Army Historical Foundation in Arlington, Va., in May 2017. (Elaine Yuen via AP)

Breaking color barriers

The majority of military nurses were white, and those who were not often had to fight for the right to serve.

In 1941, only 56 Black nurses were allowed into the U.S. Army. Japanese American applicants, whose families were incarcerated during the war, were not accepted into the Army Nurse Corps until 1943.

Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo was born in Stockton, California, but spent her teens China. She joined the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps in unoccupied China after fleeing Japanese forces in Hong Kong.

She later applied to the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, but they said she had an obligation to serve her country — and that meant China.

An indignant Chinese American medical officer fired off a letter on Seetoo’s behalf, stating that she was a U.S. citizen. She became the first Chinese American nurse to join the Army Nurse Corps, working in China and India before returning to the U.S.

She already has a Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Chinese Americans for their service in the war despite the discrimination they faced.

“We answered the call to duty when our country faced threats to our freedom,” she said in video recorded remarks at the 2020 ceremony.

A love story

Among the patients Darrow cared for was a young soldier wounded in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Before surgery to remove the bullet in his heart, he asked if she would go on a date with him, if he made it through.

“I said, ‘Well sure, you can count on me,’” she says, and laughs. “I couldn’t say, ‘No, I don’t think you’re going to make it.’”

Dean Darrow did survive and they did go out. The couple kept the 7.7 mm bullet. They married and raised four children. He died in 1991.

In September, Alice Darrow took a cruise to Hawaii with her daughter and son-in-law, where she donated the bullet to the Pearl Harbor National Memorial so visitors from around the world could learn of its significance and the love story behind it.

Darrow said she’s looking forward to seeing the bullet on display. The Congressional Gold Medal would be another treasure to look forward to.

“It would be an honor,” she said.

Terry Tang of AP’s race and ethnicity team contributed from Phoenix, Arizona.

By MARK KENNEDY, AP Entertainment Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Sally Kirkland, a one-time model who became a regular on stage, film and TV, best known for sharing the screen with Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “The Sting” and her Oscar-nominated title role in the 1987 movie “Anna,” has died. She was 84.

Her representative, Michael Greene, said Kirkland died Tuesday morning at a Palm Springs hospice.

Friends established a GoFundMe account this fall for her medical care. They said she had fractured four bones in her neck, right wrist and left hip. While recovering, she also developed infections, requiring hospitalization and rehab.

Kirkland acted in such films as “The Way We Were” with Barbra Streisand, “Revenge” with Kevin Costner, “Cold Feet” with Keith Carradine and Tom Waits, Ron Howard’s “EDtv,” Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” “Heatwave” with Cicely Tyson, “High Stakes” with Kathy Bates, “Bruce Almighty” with Jim Carrey and the 1991 TV movie “The Haunted,” about a family dealing with paranormal activity. She had a cameo in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles.”

Her biggest role was in 1987’s “Anna” as a fading Czech movie star remaking her life in the United States and mentoring to a younger actor, Paulina Porizkova. Kirkland won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nomination along with Cher in “Moonstruck,” Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction, Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News” and Meryl Streep in “Ironweed.”

“Kirkland is one of those performers whose talent has been an open secret to her fellow actors but something of a mystery to the general public,” The Los Angeles critic wrote in her review. “There should be no confusion about her identity after this blazing comet of a performance.”

Kirkland’s small-screen acting credits include stints on “Criminal Minds,” “Roseanne,” “Head Case” and she was a series regular on the TV shows “Valley of the Dolls” and “Charlie’s Angels.”

Born in New York City, Kirkland’s mother was a fashion editor at Vogue and Life magazine who encouraged her daughter to start modeling at age 5. Kirkland graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and studied with Philip Burton, Richard Burton’s mentor, and Lee Strasberg, the master of the Method school of acting. An early breakout was appearing in Andy Warhol’s “13 Most Beautiful Women” in 1964. She appeared naked as a kidnapped rape victim in Terrence McNally’s off-Broadway “Sweet Eros.”

Some of her early roles were Shakespeare, including the lovesick Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for New York Shakespeare Festival producer Joseph Papp and Miranda in an off-Broadway production of “The Tempest.”

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“I don’t think any actor can really call him or herself an actor unless he or she puts in time with Shakespeare,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “It shows up, it always shows up in the work, at some point, whether it’s just not being able to have breath control, or not being able to appreciate language as poetry and music, or not having the power that Shakespeare automatically instills you with when you take on one of his characters.”

Kirkland was a member of several New Age groups, taught Insight Transformational Seminars and was a longtime member of the affiliated Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, whose followers believe in soul transcendence.

She reached a career nadir while riding nude on a pig in the 1969 film “Futz,” which a Guardian reviewer dubbed the worst film he had ever seen. “It was about a man who fell in love with a pig, and even by the dismal standards of the era, it was dismal,” he wrote.

Kirkland was also known for disrobing for so many other roles and social causes that Time magazine dubbed her “the latter-day Isadora Duncan of nudothespianism.”

Kirkland volunteered for people with AIDS, cancer and heart disease, fed homeless people via the American Red Cross, participated in telethons for hospices and was an advocate for prisoners, especially young people.