Best of the AP — First Winner

Taliban fighters patrol Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 19, 2021, four days after they seized the capital. AP journalists made rare video and photos of the Taliban patrolling among Afghan citizens on the street. , making The Taliban celebrated Afghanistan's Independence Day on Thursday by declaring they beat the United States, but challenges to their rule ranging from running a country severely short on cash and bureaucrats to potentially facing an armed opposition began to emerge. (AP Photo / Rahmat Gul)

At left, a Taliban fighter holds a machine gun in front of the main gate leading to the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul, Aug. 16, 2021, one day after the capital fell to the Taliban. At right, people carry a body recovered from the rubble of home in Les Cayes, Haiti, Aug. 15, 2021, one day after a magnitude 7.2 earthquake left some 2,000 people dead. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)

This undated photo provided by Jodie Gedeon shows David Lidstone, who lived in an isolated makeshift home in the woods of Canterbury, N.H., for nearly three decades, is shown in an undated photo by his friend Jodie Gedeon. “River Dave,” as he’s known locally, refused an order to leave the property and was jailed. While he was in jail his cabin burned to the ground. live out his days off the grid. (Jodie Gedeon via AP)

A pickup truck with a Confederate-themed sticker is parked outside the Reception and Medical Center, Florida’s prison hospital where new inmates are processed, in Lake Butler, Fla., April 16, 2021. In 2013, at a prison dorm room in the facility, Warren Williams, a Black inmate who suffered from severe anxiety and depression fought and bit Thomas Driver, a white prison guard. When Williams was released a few months later, Driver and two fellow members of the Ku Klux Klan conspired to kill him. The KKK man they enlisted to do the killing was an FBI informant. (AP Photo / David Goldman)

A security officer in protective gear gestures as he stands in a hallway with rooms for video meetings with inmates in the visitors' hall of the Urumqi No. 3 Detention Center in Dabancheng in western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, April 23, 2021. AP’s reporting suggests that while many of China’s “training centers” have closed, some like this one were simply converted into prisons or pre-trial detention facilities, largely for vast numbers of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities. (AP Photo / Mark Schiefelbein)

Members of the Ethiopian National Defense Force who were captured by Tigray forces gather inside a prison as prisoners of war, in Mekele, capital of the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, July 6, 2021. Debretsion Gebremichael, Tigray’s president, said more than 6,000 Ethiopian soldiers and officers had been detained. “We are committed to keep them well as long as they are with us,” he said. “And after a while, yes, our plan is ... they have to be free, wherever they want.” For the prisoners of war, many of whom the Tigray leaders have said will be released, conditions are challenging because of the destruction that Ethiopian and allied forces waged for months against almost all health centers across Tigray. (AP Photo)

Tshimologo Bonolo, 8, poses for a photograph at her house in Soweto, South Africa, Saturday, June 26, 2021. She lost her father to COVID-19 in July 2020, and is now looked after by her mother and her grandmother. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

Bill Cosby, center, listens to members of his team speak with the media outside his home in Elkins Park, Pa., June 30, 2021, after Pennsylvania's highest court overturned his sex assault conviction and released him from prison. From left are: spokesperson Andrew Wyatt, atttorney Jennifer Bonjean, Cosby, attorney Brian Perry and attorney Ashley Cohen. The court found that an agreement with a previous prosecutor prevented Cosby from being charged in the case. The 83-year-old Cosby had served more than two years at the state prison near Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

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)