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ACROSS THE NATION

Iran fires on its Gulf neighbors, retaliating for US strikes after a wedding was hit

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- Iran fired on U.S. allies in the Gulf early Wednesday following a night of American bombardment that Iranian state media says included a deadly strike on a wedding party.

The latest violence came after a monthlong lull in fighting. The six-month war has led to a spike in oil prices, roiled the global economy and posed increasing political problems for U.S. President Donald Trump's Republican Party ahead of November midterm elections.

Fighting has escalated since the American military hit Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, saying Iran was planning to use them to lay mines. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at American bases in Jordan that were intercepted.

American military resources are stretched and political pressure in Washington is mounting, while Iran's economy has been battered by sanctions and an American naval blockade. Iran's currency hit another record low on Wednesday, with traders in Tehran exchanging 2.20 million rials for one U.S. dollar, a 10% hike from last week's record.

Neither side can continue indefinitely between full-scale war and a truce, said Hamidreza Azizi, senior Iran analyst at the Crisis Group, an international think tank.

"At some point, one of the sides may see a need to escalate in order to break this cycle," he cautioned. "So that could bring the two sides to a point that they have been trying to avoid until now, which is a full-scale war."

The latest flare-up in violence came as the standoff seemed to be shifting slightly more in the U.S. favor, with the price of oil hitting around $80 a barrel last month and Iranian leaders talking about growing economic hardships, said Sascha Bruchmann, an analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Middle East office in Bahrain.

"The U.S. is trying to reinstall some kind of confidence into the global oil markets ... and the Iranians had to respond to that by reinserting insecurity and doubt," Bruchmann said.

Since the fighting resumed over the weekend, the price of Brent crude oil, the international standard, has climbed to around $95, up more than 30% from the start of the war.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran will "continue to feel the squeeze" from the United States until it drops any nuclear weapons ambitions and ends support for armed groups in the Middle East. Iran has always insisted its nuclear program is peaceful.

Immigrant rights group seeks to block use of federal databases it says could purge legal voters

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- An immigrant rights group sued the Trump administration Wednesday to block the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from using federal databases that it alleged are being used to target naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, alleges that DHS and the U.S. Justice Department are interfering with fair elections by using inaccurate federal databases in an attempt to buttress allegations of voter fraud.

The federal government is engaging in an "attack on the freedom to vote," Angelica Salas, the coalition's executive director, said at a downtown Los Angeles news conference. "This is voter intimidation."

The lawsuit -- filed on behalf of the coalition by the UCLA Voting Rights Project -- becomes part of a swirl of legal moves that states, including California, have taken to fend off federal actions that threaten to create confusion during the midterms.

"It's not an accident the federal government is trying to interfere with the right to vote. … They believe they can intimidate naturalized U.S. citizens," said Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for California governor who is acting as a senior adviser to the voting project.

The lawsuit alleges that the administration might be comparing voter rolls with undisclosed government databases. Those systems can include outdated information and be riddled with errors, it said, and could produce inaccurate results that disproportionately affect naturalized voters.

"Comparing government databases to try and arrive at a list of noncitizen registrants has been shown to result in erroneous data," the lawsuit said. "Congress has never authorized such activities and in fact has … prohibited invasion of voter privacy through government data matches in this way."

The Trump administration has been targeting noncitizen voting to allege it could be a source of significant fraud during the midterm elections, even though actual voting by people who are not citizens is rare. He is pushing for the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters verified as U.S. citizens, and his Justice Department has sued to force the release of detailed voter data in 30 states and the District of Columbia, though it has not yet succeeded in those cases.

Heads or tails? $1 coin with Trump's face and gold finish to go on sale

The $1 coin designed to celebrate America's 250th birthday -- and seemingly President Donald Trump, whose face gazes from one side of the gold finish -- will go on sale Wednesday, according to the U.S. Mint.

The coin's design -- Trump's visage as "heads" and the Great Seal of the United States as "tails" -- received the stamp of approval this year from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members Trump appointed. In past comments, the president said that the idea to stamp his face on a coin was "very unusual" but that he was "honored by it."

The president's second term has brought several such brandings, or attempts at them, that have become tangled up in lawsuits. That includes moves to put Trump's name on the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace, as Trump works to leave his stamp on history and on Washington, D.C.

The coins, which can be used as legal tender, drew some criticism, particularly because of federal law that bars the depiction of a living president on U.S. currency. But in some circumstances, the Treasury Secretary does have authority to authorize the minting and issuance of special coins.

The coins were struck to "honor 250 years of great American heritage," the U.S. Mint wrote on its website. In an arc above Trump's face is written "LIBERTY," and below is "1776 (tilde) 2026." On the flip side is the Great Seal of the United States, with the bald eagle gripping arrows in one claw and an olive branch in the other. In a banner clutched in its beak is written "E PLURIBUS UNUM," Latin for "out of many, one."

A roll of 25 coins will cost $61, and a bag of 100 will cost $154.50, and the U.S. Mint said it randomly hid some special-issue coins among the rolls and bags. Those will be marked "July 4th" because they were struck on that day, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Households are limited to only two orders, the U.S. Mint wrote, but that cap will be lifted at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.

Lawmakers ask Army to explain why it told a military unit to stop specializing in drone warfare

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers is pressing the Army to explain why it told a unit based in Europe to stop specializing in drone warfare, an order that comes as the world's battlefields rapidly evolve and military tactics increasingly rely on uncrewed systems to fight.

The 173rd Airborne Brigade was building its own drones and practicing the kind of warfare that Ukraine has pioneered against Russia and that Iran has fought against the U.S. -- warfare that has killed and wounded American troops. The brigade of 600 soldiers was set up in November to be deployed anywhere that drones were needed.

"We have deep concerns that eliminating this specialized drone unit will limit our ability to learn from allies, particularly the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and hinder our efforts to modernize drone warfare at the speed necessary to compete on the modern battlefield," the lawmakers said in a letter shared with The Associated Press.

It requests a briefing from the Army to explain its decision and was sent Tuesday to departing Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the Army's acting chief of staff. It was signed by Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, independent Sen. Angus King of Maine and Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio.

"This specialized unit was a prudent response in a moment when the character of warfare is changing faster than a conventional formation's ability to adapt," the lawmakers say.

They said they were particularly keen to understand the data, analysis and process behind the change after less than a year of the drone unit being active. They also want to know if the decision was based on guidance from Pentagon leadership or made internally by the Army.

LaNeve, who is filling in as the Army's top uniformed officer, recently ordered the battalion to refocus on its core mission of being an airborne infantry unit. The move followed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's sudden ousting of the Army's prior chief of staff, Gen. Randy George.

A 120-foot burst of genius: Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' scroll and its wild afterlife

NEW YORK (AP) -- In the spring of 1951, the muse landed so hard in the caffeinated mind of Jack Kerouac that within three weeks he had hurried out a full-length, single-spaced manuscript -- a draft for "On the Road" that he taped together into a scroll some 120 feet long.

Published six years later to instant acclaim and notoriety, "On the Road" may not be the Great American Novel, but Kerouac's epiphany surely stands as the Great American Manuscript.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-century achievement. In short, a literary singularity," says the author and editor Gerald Howard.

Kerouac was among the novelists who embodied the mad American quest to "say it all," to somehow capture the country's spirit within a single narrative -- the kind of epic ambition behind such canonical books as Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." In "On the Road," the raw, wild energy that drove Kerouac to type down his thoughts as quickly as they came to him would inspire one of the defining tales of the post-World War II era -- two young Beats out for adventure, for kicks, "desirous of everything at the same time."

Howard says Kerouac had been working on the book for three years before his sudden inspiration. The 29-year-old author was in the Manhattan apartment of then-wife Joan Haverty, with rolls of architectural tracing paper that fit seamlessly into his manual typewriter.

"He realized that by feeding the paper in it would prevent him from having to change a sheet of paper over and over, which would pretty much guarantee a higher level of spontaneity," Howard says.

The scroll is now a piece of literary history, but it initially helped delay the novel's release. His publisher, upon seeing Kerouac unfurl his draft, allegedly told him it couldn't be edited. Kerouac stormed out.

Kennedy Center disassembles 'Blue' sculpture from its grounds

The Kennedy Center took down a sculpture known as "Blue" Wednesday, the latest change to the cultural and performing arts center that stirred some pushback in President Donald Trump's second term.

The sculpture, a tall, blue stick figure poised in action -- as if to kick a ball or, from a different angle, having just kicked one -- was designed by sculptor Joel Shapiro and installed in 2019.

The removal follows a longer-running saga with the Kennedy Center, where the Trump-aligned board is fighting in court for the right to plaster the president's name on the historic institution. It falls within a broader effort to reshape Washington to Trump's liking, including demolishing the White House's East Wing to build a ballroom, a proposed triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery and a renovated golf course.

Shapiro, known for breathing life into otherwise minimalist stick figures, described "Blue" in a video posted to the Kennedy Center's YouTube years ago as being "about action and risk and performance and energy. It's a celebration of possibility."

Shapiro died in 2025, and "Blue" will no longer celebrate possibility at the Kennedy Center, though it may be reinstalled elsewhere through the Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation.

A crane could be seen Wednesday taking down the sculpture's appendages, the arms and legs wrapped protectively, as people in hi-vis vests worked around it in the sun.

"We are deeply grateful to Joel Shapiro for the years Blue has spent animating our campus and connecting visitors to his vision," the Kennedy Center said in an emailed statement. "We are honored to have been stewards of his vibrant work and a part of his enduring legacy."

Michael Sebastiani stood nearby as "Blue" was disassembled or, as he put it, "dismembered." Sebastiani is part of the group Hands off the Arts, partly formed to push back against the Trump administration's changes to the Kennedy Center.

"Art is what makes you think, and that's its role in life," he said, saying the sculpture was "a very welcoming fixture, if you will, for folks coming into the city, and we're just really sad to see her gone."

Sebastiani said "Blue" was the mascot for National Dance Day on Sept. 19, with events held near it on a 2019 addition to the Kennedy Center campus called The REACH. "Blue," said Sebastiani, "brings the joy and happiness that is part of that celebration."