AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EDT

Trump says top tech firms have signed accord to ‘self-police’ AI development

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that he and a large group of leaders of artificial intelligence companies had signed a voluntary accord that will include internal and external reviews during a meeting at the White House aimed at addressing Americans’ fears about the technology.

“I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing. And they understand that they have to self-police,” Trump told reporters during an impromptu press conference outside the West Wing.

Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson met with leading executives from top tech firms that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build out AI infrastructure, including data centers in communities across the country, which have sparked grassroots, bipartisan opposition.

The accord was signed by Trump, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk, founder of xAI, which is now part of SpaceX.

The accord, which Trump posted on his social media site, Truth Social, late Tuesday, opened the door to future regulation but focused on four voluntary steps for the companies to take.

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The US military says its withdrawal of troops from Iraq is complete

BAGHDAD (AP) — The U.S. military announced on Wednesday that it has completed the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq, ending a 12-year mission to fight the Islamic State group. The last U.S. troops left an air base in northern Iraq under a deal between Baghdad and Washington.

The withdrawal, agreed on two years ago, comes against the backdrop of the ongoing war between the United States and Iran that has also sometimes spilled over into Iraq, with Iran-backed militias firing on U.S. troops and the U.S. striking the groups’ strongholds.

Baghdad touted the end of the U.S. mission as a sign of the country’s increasing strength and sovereignty.

The withdrawal was also celebrated by Iran-backed groups but raised concerns among some other Iraqis, particularly in the Kurdish region. Meanwhile, questions loom around the future of the Iraqi militias, which the Baghdad government has sought — with little success so far — to disarm.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement that U.S. troops and equipment had completed an “orderly departure” from the air base in Irbil, in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.

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Republican redistricting in Texas and Florida may not turn out as Trump had hoped

HARLINGEN, Texas (AP) — Eric Flores, a former federal prosecutor and Army National Guard infantry captain, was one of the Republican Party’s prized recruits in this year’s midterm elections. With help from a redrawn congressional map in Texas, he seemed primed to dislodge longtime Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in a region that swung toward Donald Trump in the last presidential election.

Now he’s one of several candidates locked in a tougher race than originally envisioned as Republican-run states heeded Trump’s call to begin an unusual round of redistricting to help retain control of the U.S. House.

Republicans hoped to pick up as many as nine seats between Texas and Florida. However, even though the districts were redrawn to make them easier to win, the party remains weighed down by dissatisfaction with Trump, the economy, the war with Iran and the president’s deportation agenda.

The political landscape remains competitive enough that Vice President JD Vance is traveling to Texas on Wednesday, where he’ll appear with Flores, and then visit Florida on Thursday.

House Democrats’ national campaign chair, Rep. Suzan DelBene, recently circulated through Florida districts that Republicans were hoping to claim for themselves.

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Supreme Court lets quick deportations to third countries resume for now while it weighs Trump policy

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday let President Donald Trump’s administration continue swiftly deporting people to countries other than their own for now, while the justices consider whether the policy is legal.

The apparent 6-3 order temporarily lifts lower court requirements for migrants to get a chance to object before being sent to countries to which they have no ties.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have kept the lower court order in place.

The Trump administration said last week the lower court order forced the cancellation of a deportation flight carrying about 70 people bound for three countries.

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Burundi says it will accept migrant deportees from the United States but details are vague

NGOZI, Burundi (AP) — Burundi has agreed to accept people deported by the United States who have no previous connection to the East African country, a spokesperson for the country’s president said Tuesday.

Nancy Ninette Mutoni said Burundi would accept only people who were not facing prosecution and had no links to terrorism. She spoke during an event attended by government officials in Ngozi.

Mutoni did not say when the deportees would arrive or how many people Burundi had agreed to receive. She said preparations were underway to provide accommodations and help the deportees live in local communities.

“Receiving them requires serious planning — where they will stay, what they will eat and how they will live alongside the local population,” Mutoni said.

The Trump administration has expanded third-country deportations as part of its immigration crackdown, sending people to countries where they are not citizens and may never have lived. The United States has sent deportees to several African countries, including Eswatini and South Sudan.

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Democrats want a blue wave. New Hampshire is Exhibit A for why that may not happen

HUDSON, N.H. (AP) — Five weeks before Election Day, Democratic enthusiasm is reaching a fever pitch.

With Republicans struggling to overcome President Donald Trump’s low standing, Democrats are on the offensive in Republican strongholds like Texas and Florida, and even eyeing contests in deeper-red Kansas and Mississippi. Many Democratic leaders predict that the House majority is all but theirs, and that the Senate majority, almost unthinkable a year ago, is nearly in their grasp as well.

In the midst of such confidence, however, Democrats are ignoring glaring vulnerabilities that threaten to undermine the unstoppable blue wave they say is coming.

Look no further than swing-state New Hampshire, where Democratic leaders are sounding the alarm about political challenges that could jeopardize Rep. Chris Pappas’ campaign for an open Senate seat and undermine the party’s ability to win races around the country.

Democrats point to Republicans’ overwhelming financial advantage that is allowing them to dominate the airwaves in the closing days of the campaign. At the same time, the Democrats’ brand remains deeply unpopular, and they have virtually no margin for error in midterm races that are playing out largely in Republican-leaning states.

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Russia pounds the Kyiv region, killing 4 and targeting the power grid

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia pressed on with its weekslong missile and drone barrage of Kyiv and areas around the Ukrainian capital, killing four people including a child while targeting the power grid and a key internet exchange point, officials said Wednesday.

Moscow’s steep escalation of its aerial campaign since the end of August heaps pressure on Ukraine as it braces for winter, when Russia regularly bombards energy facilities to deny Ukrainians heating and running water.

Ukrainian officials say Moscow is not engaging with U.S. efforts to halt the fighting, 4 1/2 years after Russia invaded its neighbor. Moscow says it wants a comprehensive settlement rather than a temporary truce, although its demand for Ukraine to surrender land is unacceptable for Kyiv.

A child was killed and three other people were rescued from the rubble of a private home in Vyshhorod, in the wider Kyiv region, said Tymur Tkachenko, head of the regional military administration.

Russia has exploited gaps in Ukrainian air defenses by firing ballistic missiles and new jet-powered drones, both of which are hard to stop. Air raid alerts are disrupting daily life, sending people running for shelter and denting economic output.

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Ex-Trump prosecutor Smith forcefully defends investigations as Republicans assail his team’s tactics

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former special counsel Jack Smith forcefully defended his prosecutions of President Donald Trump and his investigative tactics, pushing back against repeated Republican criticism in a congressional hearing Tuesday that featured a senator’s bungled attempt to accuse him of lying about a basketball game.

The hearing offered a forum for Republicans to try to paint Smith as a political operative and assail him anew for what they contend were politicized prosecutions that unfolded during the 2024 presidential race. Democrats rallied in his defense, eliciting testimony on the legal and factual basis for the criminal cases against the then-candidate and decrying the Trump administration’s firing of prosecutors involved in the investigations.

Smith, for his part, defended his work in an hours-long Senate Judiciary Committee hearing — the latest congressional effort to revisit federal cases that accused Trump of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 race and of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“Anybody who has worked with me and knows me during the course of my career knows that I would not let politics play a role. And I would just add that if you knew the people I worked with, they would not either,” Smith said. He lamented what he called an unprecedented assault on the rule of law by the Trump administration, along with terminations of his team that he said had deprived the government of crucial expertise and made the country less safe.

“That has never happened in my career. I have never seen anything remotely like it in any Republican or Democratic administration,” he said.

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Trump touts America.gov, but its government-sourced AI answers undercut many of his statements

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has lauded its revamped website America.gov as a way to simplify Americans’ access to information and services scattered across a plethora of agency sites, but President Donald Trump probably won’t like some of the answers his new site says are sourced from government information.

Asking the site — which says it’s sourced via artificial intelligence from “official government sources” — questions about who won the 2020 election or about the name of the federal department that operates out of the Pentagon yields answers contrary to those Trump himself frequently proclaims.

As Trump was still speaking at Tuesday’s launch event, however, the site began modifying its answers. Asked again about the 2020 election, it replied that it couldn’t answer “political questions,” a response it also gave to inquiries about whether Trump had been impeached or convicted of felony charges.

The Associated Press asked about:

“Official federal sources do not show that widespread fraud changed the 2020 presidential election outcome. Isolated election crimes did occur and have been prosecuted.”

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AP investigation: Warnings ignored as Venezuela coastal towers faced quake forces they couldn’t take

CARABALLEDA, Venezuela (AP) — Scientists had warned the government not to build along Venezuela’s coastal strip of La Guaira.

The area’s seaside Caribbean communities, not far from Caracas, were near a major fault line and a mountain range that had unleashed repeated, destructive natural disasters. The soil was poor, a type of silt that would only amplify shaking in an earthquake.

Ignoring the advice, the government threw up exactly the wrong kind of buildings for that location: tall concrete apartment complexes.

It was all a recipe for destruction, according to an Associated Press investigation that relied on interviews with dozens of engineers, seismologists and former government officials.

The people of La Guaira never stood a chance on June 24 when powerful, back-to-back quakes struck.