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

Tehran residents woke to dawn blasts, and Iranian state television showed the ruins of building in the center of the capital. The Shiite seminary city of Qom and multiple other cities were also targeted.

With fighter jets roaring overhead, those still in Tehran looked anxiously to the skies. One man, who ran a clothing shop, said he didn’t know what to do.

“If I leave the city, how am I supposed to earn money and survive?” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The Israeli military said one of its F-35 stealth fighter jets shot down a piloted Iranian Air Force YAK-130 fighter over Tehran on Wednesday. It also said Israeli air defenses were activated to intercept Iranian missiles fired at targets around the country, and explosions were heard around Jerusalem.

Spain's Sánchez stands firm on opposition to war in Iran despite Trump's trade threat

MADRID (AP) — Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez once again criticized the U.S. and Israel's military actions in Iran, standing firm Wednesday against fresh trade threats from Washington and warning that the Iran war risked “playing Russian roulette” with millions of lives.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to end U.S. trade with Spain because of Spain's refusal to allow the U.S. to use joint military bases in the country in its attacks on Iran.

“We are not going to be complicit in something that is bad for the world and is also contrary to our values ​​and interests, just out of fear of reprisals from someone,” Sánchez said in a televised address.

It's not clear how Trump would cut off trade with Spain, a European Union member. The EU negotiates trade on behalf of all its 27 members.

The EU said Wednesday it would protect its interests and work to stabilize its trade relationship with the U.S, with which it struck a trade deal last year after months of economic uncertainty over Trump’s tariff blitz.

Talarico wins Texas Senate Democratic nomination while Cornyn and Paxton head to Republican runoff

DALLAS (AP) — State Rep. James Talarico topped Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett in an expensive and fiercely contested Texas Senate Democratic primary that once again has the party dreaming of a big upset in November.

Who Talarico will face depends on a May runoff between longtime Republican Sen. John Cornyn and MAGA favorite Ken Paxton — a race expected to get increasingly nasty over coming months and could hinge on whether or not President Donald Trump offers an endorsement.

Texas, along with North Carolina and Arkansas, on Tuesday kicked off midterm elections with control of Congress at stake and against the backdrop of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

No Democrat has won a statewide race in the reliably Republican state in over 30 years, but in a statement after his victory, Talarico proclaimed “We're about to take back Texas.”

Crockett’s campaign said she planned to sue over voting issues in Dallas and she spoke only briefly on Tuesday night to warn that “people have been disenfranchised."

Change in primary voting rules leads to confusion in 2 Texas counties as voters are turned away

A rule change for primary voting in two Texas counties created mass confusion Tuesday that eventually led to a state Supreme Court ruling, threats of more legal action and the potential that an untold number of voters could find themselves disenfranchised.

The chaos had the most direct potential impact on the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. The county with the greatest number of affected voters includes Dallas and is the home base for Rep. Jasmine Crockett, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump who was in a tight race with state lawmaker James Talarico.

Crockett told supporters Tuesday night that the race can’t be settled without the results from Dallas County.

“I can tell you, people were disenfranchised,” she said.

The unfolding chaos — first over the new voting rules, and then over the court decisions and whether late ballots would be counted — stemmed from a change by local Republicans that is unique to Texas' primary system, but also hinted at the type of uncertainty that many have feared lies ahead for November's midterm elections.

Markets in Europe gain while Asian shares swoon as the war with Iran widens and oil surges higher

BANGKOK (AP) — European shares opened higher on Wednesday after another day of sell-offs in Asia, where South Korea’s benchmark plunged more than 12%.

U.S. futures were 0.3% lower.

Oil prices climbed more than 3% as the United States and Israel war with Iran entered its fifth day, with Israel targeting the Iranian leadership and security forces and the Islamic Republic hitting back with missile barrages and drone attacks across the region.

Worries over the war, which U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested could last a month or longer, have hammered world markets, spooking investors who fear more spikes for oil prices may grind down the global economy and sap corporate profits.

“I think the Iran situation is getting out of hand, and I think that U.S. President Donald Trump miscalculated enormously," said Francis Lun, CEO of Venturesmart Asia. “The situation is very grim."

China to unveil priorities for coming 5 years at major annual political meeting

BEIJING (AP) — China's ceremonial legislature is set to meet Thursday, where it will unveil the country's policy direction and economic goals for the coming years.

The meeting is held in Beijing, where the National People's Congress and its advisory body gather. The National People's Congress will ratify new laws decided by China's Communist Party leadership. While the near-3,000-member body technically votes, the vote is always almost unanimous.

Also meeting is the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body composed of elite members of Chinese society, from business people to athletes. They also include representatives from China's minority groups, but the body has little power on issues of public policy.

The gathering is called the Two Sessions. The political meetings have changed under President Xi Jinping, with tighter scripts and less scope for debate.

“A long, long time ago, it was a venue for policy deliberation,” and even controversial things, said Alfred Wu, a professor of public policy at the National University of Singapore. “Now it's very much become a showcase, propaganda."

Noem defends her portrayal of killed Minneapolis protesters as agitators, in her Senate hearing

WASHINGTON (AP) — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended her department's immigration enforcement tactics in front of a Senate committee on Tuesday and pushed back against criticism from Democrats who say she wrongly disparaged two protesters killed by federal officers in Minneapolis earlier this year.

It was Noem’s first congressional appearance since the shooting deaths of the two protesters galvanized widespread opposition to how the Trump administration is executing its mass deportation agenda, a centerpiece policy of President Donald Trump's second term. At the time, Noem portrayed the protesters, two U.S. citizens, as agitators, although accounts from local officials and bystander video contradicted assertions from her and other administration officials.

In one exchange, retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called her leadership a “disaster” and skewered her handling of the immigration crackdown and her management of emergency response.

In the hearing, which stretched nearly five hours, Noem defended her agency’s treatment of immigrants caught up in enforcement activities, and blamed activists and others for attacks against officers.

“I want to address the dangerous environment that our ICE officers face on the streets today," Noem said. “They are facing a serious and escalating threat as a result of deliberate mischaracterizations of their heroic work and rhetoric that demonizes our law enforcement.”

Father who gave gun to Georgia school shooting suspect for Christmas is guilty of 2nd-degree murder

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia man who gave his teenage son the gun he's accused of using to kill two students and two teachers at a high school was convicted Tuesday of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.

Jurors took less than two hours to find Colin Gray guilty of all charges in the September 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, northeast of Atlanta. Gray now joins a growing number of parents being held responsible in court after their children were accused in shootings.

Colin Gray was found guilty of second-degree murder in the deaths of two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. Georgia law defines second-degree murder as causing the death of a child by committing the crime of cruelty to children. Gray was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the killings of teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53.

Another teacher and eight other students were wounded. Gray was also convicted of multiple counts of reckless conduct and cruelty to children.

Gray showed little emotion as the verdict was read and each juror was polled by the judge. Deputies then cuffed his hands behind his back as he stood at the defense table, speaking with his lawyer. He will be sentenced at a later date. Second-degree murder is punishable by at least 10 but no more than 30 years in prison, while involuntary manslaughter carries a penalty of one to 10 years in prison.

Elon Musk to take stand in Twitter shareholder trial accusing him of deflating stock before purchase

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk is expected to take the stand in a shareholder trial on Wednesday in San Francisco, where he's accused of making false and misleading statements that drove down Twitter's stock price before he bought the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022.

The lawsuit was filed in October 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of Twitter shareholders who sold the stock between May 13 and Oct. 4, 2022, a few weeks before Musk's purchase of Twitter was finalized. It claims Musk violated federal securities laws by making false, public statements that “were carefully calculated to drive down the price of Twitter stock.”

The billionaire Tesla CEO reached a deal to buy Twitter and take it private in April 2022. On May 13, however, he declared his plan “temporarily on hold” and said he needs to pinpoint the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform. Twitter's stock tumbled as a result. A few days later, he tweeted that the deal “cannot go forward” and claimed that almost 20% of Twitter accounts were “fake,” according to the lawsuit.

Musk's May 13 tweet — “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” — was “false because the buyout was not, in fact, ‘temporarily on hold,’” the lawsuit says. That's because Twitter did not agree to put the deal on hold, and there was nothing in the merger agreement the two parties signed that allowed Musk to put it on hold, according to the lawsuit.

In the following weeks, Musk continued to try to delay or get out of the deal, which the lawsuit claims he did in the form of false, disparaging statements about Twitter's business that drove the San Francisco company's stock down sharply.

Pentagon dispute bolsters Anthropic reputation but raises questions about AI readiness in military

Anthropic's moral stand on U.S. military use of artificial intelligence is reshaping the competition between leading AI companies but also exposing a growing awareness that maybe chatbots just aren't capable enough for acts of war.

Anthropic's chatbot Claude, for the first time, outpaced rival ChatGPT in phone app downloads in the United States this week, a signal of growing interest from consumers siding with Anthropic in its standoff with the Pentagon, according to market research firm Sensor Tower.

The Trump administration on Friday ordered government agencies to stop using Claude and designated it a supply chain risk after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to bend his company's ethical safeguards preventing the technology from being applied to autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance. Anthropic has said it will challenge the Pentagon in court once it receives formal notice of the penalties.

And while many military and human rights experts have applauded Amodei for standing up for ethical principles, some are also frustrated by years of AI industry marketing that persuaded the government to apply the technology to high-stakes tasks.

“He caused this mess,” said Missy Cummings, a former Navy fighter pilot who now directs the robotics and automation center at George Mason University. “They were the No. 1 company to push ridiculous hype over the capabilities of these technologies. And now, all of a sudden, they want to be for real. They want to tell people, ‘Oh, wait a minute. We really shouldn’t be using these technologies in weapons.’”