By DEREK GATOPOULOS and MENELAOS HADJICOSTIS

The European Union on Thursday handed Ukraine a long list of reforms needed to join the bloc, determined to push the process forward despite the ongoing war and objections from EU member Hungary.

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Top EU officials and diplomats meeting in Lviv, in western Ukraine, said a list of demands covering roughly half of the required reforms would allow progress while formal negotiations remain blocked by Budapest.

EU membership has become the central goal for Ukraine’s effort to anchor itself to the West as NATO prospects stall.

Here’s a look at the main challenges on Ukraine’s road to the European Union.

Orbán is an obstacle for Ukraine’s ambitions

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán insists accession talks shouldn’t proceed during wartime and has cited the rights of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine and economic risks. Despite being at odds with all other member states, Hungary has stuck to that position and did not send a representative to Thursday’s meeting. Breaking with the broader EU consensus, Budapest has also maintained close ties with Moscow.

Marie Bjerre, Denmark’s minister for European affairs, said the EU was moving ahead anyway. “It is very clear that we are 26 member countries that see a future with Ukraine in the EU. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when,” she told reporters in Lviv.

Cyprus takes up the challenge

Cyprus joined the EU in 2004 as a war-divided island and could offer Ukraine a blueprint for accession. The island will take over the EU’s rotating presidency from Denmark on Jan. 1 and has promised to continue work on Ukraine’s bid.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Cyprus’ deputy minister for European affairs, Marilena Raouna, praised Kyiv’s “extraordinary political will” to deliver on key reforms.

“Despite Russia’s ongoing war of aggression, the Ukrainian people continue to defend not only their sovereignty,” she said, “but also the very principles on which our union stands: democracy, freedom, human dignity and respect for fundamental rights.”

A long to-do list

Ukraine must align its administration with a host of EU systems, practices and rules before joining the bloc, and the required reforms are divided into six “clusters.” The process is expected to take at least two years.

Detailed requirements within three of those clusters were agreed with Ukraine on Thursday, covering the rule of law and democratic institutions, the internal market and external relations.

Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Taras Kachka, acknowledged that a recent corruption scandal that rocked the government had made rule-of-law reforms a priority, adding that the pace of alignment was now up to Kyiv.

“We found a way to ensure that the enlargement process continues with the same tempo, despite the fact that we still lack formal unanimity,” he said. “We have a very clear understanding of the benchmarks, what’s on the to-do list and everything else.”

The bloc’s biggest member?

Ukraine is in the official accession queue with eight other hopefuls — Albania, Bosnia, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey — but negotiations are at different stages and not all are active.

Counting territory occupied by Russia, Ukraine would be the EU’s largest member measured by land size if it joined, overtaking France.

An agricultural powerhouse and geographically important for energy, Ukraine as an EU member would also counter Russia’s influence and extend the union’s values eastward.

Marta Kos, the EU enlargement commissioner who led Thursday’s talks, said giving Kyiv a clear road map would help accelerate change.

“Reforms are at the center of this process, and nobody can veto Ukraine from doing these reforms,” she said. “Ukraine will become a member of the EU, and nobody can block it.”

Hadjicostis reported from Nicosia, Cyprus

Following an eight-hour meeting of the Forest Lake Area Schools board last week that failed to fill a vacancy — or accomplish other pressing board business — the board met again Wednesday and narrowed the candidate list down to three.

“What transpired last Thursday until two in the morning was extremely difficult,” board member Jill Christenson said during Wednesday evening’s meeting. “That meeting was incredibly difficult, unnecessary, and a lot of trust has been broken.”

During the Dec. 4 meeting, the board was unable to agree on one candidate to fill the vacancy and other agenda items had to wait as the result of language used in the Nov. 20 resolution defining the vacancy-filling process. That resolution was adopted as a special order of business and Board Chairman Curt Rebelein argued that no other business could be conducted until the special order was resolved.

During Wednesday’s meeting, the board voted unanimously to rescind the Nov. 20 resolution. Instead, candidates who received at least four votes would move forward in the process. The three candidates moving forward are Andi Courneya, Princesa Hansen and Paul Pease.

Candidates Scot Doboszenski, Laura Ndirangu and Jim Smith were eliminated from consideration before the voting took place “since they failed to secure majority support last week,” Rebelein said during the meeting. Candidates Kenneth Rutford and Daniel Tuott were removed from consideration after receiving fewer than four yes votes on Wednesday.

“I just want to say thank you to all the applicants in this process, and for your patience, because I know this has probably been a long week of not really knowing what’s happening,” board member Tessa Antonsen said during the meeting. “So we apologize for that unknown, and appreciate so much public involvement and interest in this whole process.”

Along with thanking members of the public for their participation in the election process, multiple members of the board also apologized to those who witnessed the tension during the Dec. 4 meeting.

“We do not want that to happen again,” board member Gail Theisen said during the meeting. “That was stressful, that was exhausting, and it was so void of why we’re here. We’re here for our students and our district, and we’re very passionate about that, so let’s just continue down that road of positivity and trying to build relationships with each other.”

Rebelein also spoke to his role as chairman in the events that occurred in the previous meeting.

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“I’ll be the first to say it’s much easier to preside over a meeting where there’s agreement rather than disagreement and gridlock,” Rebelein said during the meeting. “That gets difficult, especially when you’re in a position where you need to enforce the rules and the resolutions and stuff that have been put forward. That put me in a tough position as well because I wanted to see it get done last week, but at the same time, I had to meet the directive of the board’s will as a majority. Now that the majority’s changed that will and we’ve resolved that resolution, that will make that much easier moving forward.”

Rebelein suggested that now that the candidates have been narrowed down to three, the board and public can take time to reflect on the finalists. Rebelein said next steps would be defined by Friday to be presented at the next board meeting on Dec. 18.

By MEAD GRUVER

Getting trapped in quicksand is a corny peril of old movies and TV shows, but it really did happen to one unfortunate hiker in Utah’s Arches National Park.

The park famous for dozens of natural, sandstone arches gets over 1 million visitors a year, and accidents ranging from falls to heat stroke are common.

Quicksand? Not really — but it has happened at least a couple of times now.

“The wet sand just kind of flows back in. It’s kind of a never-ending battle,” said John Marshall, who helped a woman stuck in quicksand over a decade ago and coordinated the latest rescue.

On Sunday, an experienced hiker, whose identity wasn’t released, was traversing a small canyon on the second day of a 20-mile (32-kilometer) backpacking trip when he sank up to his thigh, according to Marshall.

Unable to free himself, the hiker activated an emergency satellite beacon. His message got forwarded to Grand County emergency responders and Marshall got the call at 7:15 a.m..

“I was just rolling out of bed,” Marshall said. “I’m scratching my head, going, ‘Did I hear that right? Did they say quicksand?’”

He put his boots on and rendezvoused with a team that set out with all-terrain vehicles, a ladder, traction boards, backboards and a drone. Soon, Marshall had a bird’s-eye view of the situation.

Through the drone camera he saw a park ranger who’d tossed the man a shovel. But the quicksand flowed back as soon as the backpacker shoveled it away, Marshall said.

The Grand County Search and Rescue team positioned the ladder and boards near the backpacker and slowly worked his leg loose. By then he’d been standing in near-freezing muck, in temperatures in the 20s (minus 6 to minus 1 Celsius), for a couple of hours.

Rescuers warmed him up until he could stand, then walk. He then hiked out on his own, even carrying his backpack, Marshall said.

Quicksand is dangerous but it’s a myth total submersion is the main risk, said Marshall.

“In quicksand you’re extremely buoyant,” he said. “Most people won’t sink past their waist in quicksand.”

This image taken from drone footage provided by Grand County Search and Rescue shows a man, right, stuck in quicksand on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025 in Arches National Park in eastern Utah.

Marshall is more or less a quicksand expert.

In 2014, he was a medic who helped a 78-year-old woman after she was stuck for over 13 hours in the same canyon just 2 miles (3 kilometers) from where Sunday’s rescue took place.

The woman’s book club got worried when she missed their meeting. They went looking for her and found her car at a trailhead. It was June — warmer than Sunday but not sweltering in the canyon’s shade — and the woman made a full recovery after regaining use of her legs.

“Both had very happy endings,” Marshall said.

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By COLLIN BINKLEY, AP Education Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some of the country’s most prestigious colleges are enrolling record numbers of low-income students — a growing admissions priority in the absence of affirmative action.

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America’s top campuses remain crowded with wealth, but some universities have accelerated efforts to reach a wider swath of the country, recruiting more in urban and rural areas and offering free tuition for students whose families are not among the highest earners.

The strategy could lead to friction with the federal government. The Trump administration, which has pulled funding from elite colleges over a range of grievances, has suggested it’s illegal to target needier students. College leaders believe they’re on solid legal ground.

At Princeton University, this year’s freshman class has more low-income students than ever. One in four are eligible for federal Pell grants, which are scholarships reserved for students with the most significant financial need. That’s a leap from two decades ago, when fewer than 1 in 10 were eligible.

“The only way to increase socioeconomic diversity is to be intentional about it,” Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber said in a statement. “Socioeconomic diversity will increase if and only if college presidents make it a priority.”

Last year, Princeton set aggressive goals to recruit more low-income students in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in higher education. Without the ability to consider race, officials wrote in a campus report, focusing on economic diversity offers “the university’s greatest opportunity to attract diverse talent.”

The country’s most selective colleges still enroll large proportions of students from the wealthiest 1% of American families. Many of those campuses have tried for years to shed reputations of elitism, with only gradual changes in enrollment.

Colleges set records for enrollment of low-income students

Only a small fraction of the nation’s colleges have publicly disclosed their low-income enrollments this year, and national data won’t be released by the federal government until next year. But early numbers show a trend.

At 17 highly selective colleges that have released new data, almost all saw increases in Pell-eligible students between 2023 and this year, according to an Associated Press analysis. Most saw increases in consecutive years, and none saw a significant decrease in aggregate over the two years.

Yale, Duke, Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all have set enrollment records for Pell-eligible students in the past two years.

Part of the uptick owes to a federal expansion that made more students eligible for Pell grants last year. But campus leaders also believe the increases reflect their own efforts.

The numbers in MIT’s freshman class have climbed by 43% over the past two years, and low-income students account for more than a quarter of this year’s class. MIT officials cited its policy providing free tuition for families that earn less than $200,000 a year.

“MIT has always been an engine of opportunity for low-income students, and we are dedicated to ensuring we can make an MIT education accessible for students from every walk of life,” Stu Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions, said in a statement.

Nationwide, roughly a third of undergraduate students have received Pell grants in recent years.

Two years ago, Amherst College in Massachusetts made tuition free for students in the bottom 80% of U.S. earnings. It also started covering meals and housing for those below the median income, and it stopped prioritizing children of alumni and donors in admissions decisions. Since then, low-income enrollment has risen steadily, reaching 1 in 4 new students this year.

At the same time, the admissions office has stepped up recruiting in overlooked parts of the country, from big cities to small towns.

“When we go out and talk to students, it’s not in the fanciest ZIP codes,” said Matthew McGann, dean of admissions. “It’s in places where we know there’s a lot of talent but not a lot of opportunity.”

Racial diversity does not necessarily follow economic diversity

On many campuses, officials hoped the focus on economic diversity would preserve racial diversity — Black, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans have the country’s highest poverty rates. But even as low-income numbers climb, many elite campuses have seen racial diversity decrease.

Without the emphasis on income, those decreases might have been even steeper, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute who advocates for class-based affirmative action. He called the latest Pell figures “a significant step in the right direction.”

“Economic diversity is important in its own right,” he said. “It’s important that America’s leadership class — which disproportionately derives from selective colleges — include people who’ve faced economic hardships in life.”

Swarthmore College saw the most dramatic leap in Pell enrollment, jumping from 17% to 30% last year.

While many campuses were delaying scholarship decisions until the government resolved problems with a new financial aid form, Swarthmore used other data to figure out applicants’ financial need. That allowed Swarthmore to offer scholarships to students while they were still awaiting decisions from other schools.

More financially disadvantaged students ended up enrolling at Swarthmore than officials expected. College leaders also credit their work to reduce campus costs — laundry is free and students get yearly credits for textbooks, for example.

Yet Swarthmore saw its Black enrollment fall to 5% of its freshman class this year, down from 8% the year before.

“In a race neutral environment, those numbers are likely to drop,” Jim Bock, the admissions dean, said in a statement. “Not all minority students are low-income, and not all majority students have significant financial means.”

The approach risks federal scrutiny

In legal memos, the White House has alleged that prioritizing students based on earnings or geography amounts to a “racial proxy” in violation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision against affirmative action.

In a June letter, Trump officials accused the University of California-Los Angeles of “race-based admissions in all but name.” It criticized UCLA for considering factors like applicants’ family income, ZIP code and high school profile.

Colleges often weigh that kind of information in admissions decisions. Yet the Trump administration has declared that the Supreme Court decision outlaws a wide range of long-accepted education practices, including scholarships targeting students in underserved areas.

Already, there are signs of an impact.

Earlier this year the College Board — the nonprofit that oversees the SAT — suddenly discontinued an offering that gave admissions offices a wealth of information about applicants, including earnings data from their neighborhoods.

Kahlenberg and others see it as a retreat in the face of government pressure. The College Board offered little explanation, citing changes to federal and state policy around the use of demographic information in admissions.

The Associated Press’ education 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.