Best of the AP — First Winner

FILE - In this Sunday, March 15, 2020, file photo, people wait in line People wait to enter a gun store in Culver City, Calif., March 15, 2020. FBI data released to the AP reveals that background checks blocked nearly twice as many gun sales in 2020 as in the year before, largely tracking with the record-setting surge in sales that took hold along with the coronavirus pandemic and has continued into this year. Nearly half the denied sales were for people with felony convictions.After a year of pandemic lockdowns, mass shootings are back, but the guns never went away. As the U.S. inches toward a post-pandemic future, guns are arguably more present in the American psyche and more deeply embedded in American discourse than ever before. The past year's anxiety and loss fueled a rise in gun ownership across political and socio-economic lines. (AP Photo / Ringo H.W. Chiu, File)

A photo illustration combines a defendant’s letter to a judge in the case of weapons he stole from a Massachusetts armory and an evidence photo of an M4 carbine rifle. In the first public accounting of its kind in decades, an AP investigation has found that at least 1,900 U.S. military firearms were lost or stolen during the 2010s, with some resurfacing in violent crimes. AP’s total is an undercount of a problem some armed services have downplayed. (AP Illustration / Nat Castañeda)

Emely, left, is reunited with her mother, Glenda Valdez and sister, Zuri, at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Sunday, June 6, 2021, in Austin, Texas. It had been six years since Valdez said goodbye to her daughter Emely in Honduras. Then, last month, she caught a glimpse of a televised Associated Press photo of a little girl in a red hoodie and knew that Emely had made the trip alone into the United States. On Sunday, the child was returned to her mother’s custody. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

A fighter loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front walks along a street in the town of Hawzen, then under the control of the TRLF, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, May 7, 2021. While the government now holds many urban centers, fierce fighting continues in remote rural towns like Hawzen. Hours after this photo was made, government troops shelled the town; by the following day the town was back in government hands. (AP Photo / Ben Curtis)

In this March 27, 2021 image from video obtained by The Associated Press, A motorbike ridden by 17-year-old Kyaw Min Latt and two companions passes a vehicle carrying security forces, seconds before a soldier in the bed of the truck fired, mortally wounding the teen, in Dawei, Myanmar, March 27, 2021, in an image from security video obtained by the AP. Analysis of this and other online video by the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab reveals a pattern of indiscriminate killings by Myanmar’s military, and mistreatment of bodies intended to terrorize civilians, human rights activists say. (AP Photo)