NASHVILLE (AP) — Dolly Parton ‘s estate accused the country music icon’s nephew of threatening to commit violence and destroy his aunt’s legacy and business empire in court filings submitted Tuesday and asked a judge to keep him away from its employees and business dealings.

Court documents filed in Nashville offer the first signs of discord in a carefully managed estate process for one of the most beloved personalities in music and beyond.

Bryan Seaver, who owns a company that provided Parton’s security detail and was handpicked by the star to announce her death from cancer last month, did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press requesting comment.

In the temporary restraining order request filed by She’s Alive, the entity that manages and protects Parton’s professional property and business, and other court documents, it claims Seaver sent increasingly threatening messages over the last several weeks. She’s Alive is run by Danny Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager.

Last week, “She’s Alive” terminated Seaver and Squadron Augmented Protection Services, saying his “terrorizing conduct made their continued retention untenable,” according to court documents.

The court documents showcase a series of text messages and emails She’s Alive says were sent by Seaver starting just before Parton’s death. The messages begin with threats to destroy the brand, and then after her death, depict Seaver reveling in his newfound fame and calling himself an “international arms dealer.”

In one message written on Sept. 1 and included in the court documents, he said: “I’m going to set up a podcast dedicated to ruining Dolly’s brand partnerships and telling the violations these people have done on us. It’s going to be great. Or f——— pay me.”

Seaver also claimed that he worked for private military contractors overseas during the Iraq War and used that experience as part of these threats, according to the complaint.

The messages have resulted in Parton’s trusts and estates attorney leaving and employees of She’s Alive resigning, according to the court documents. The entity has also had to hire private security for its employees, including at their homes, the documents state.

The restraining order is meant to stop Seaver from talking with or being within 1,000 feet (304.8 meters) of She’s Alive employees, attorneys and business partners. It also is meant to keep him from interfering with its business relationships.

Parton wrote hundreds of songs, including classics like “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You,” that earned a total of more than 100 million worldwide sales and more than 1 billion online streams.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — After a summer spent packing away sockeye salmon, Alaska’s heftiest brown bears are ready to throw their weight around.

Online voting began Tuesday for Fat Bear Week, the annual contest that pits the rotund residents of Katmai National Park and Preserve against each other for the title of most oversized ursine.

Last year’s winner, Chunk — known officially as Bear 32 — is hungry for a repeat. Chunk’s weight in 2025 was estimated at 1,200 pounds, which gave him a narrow victory. This year he’s back and facing corpulent competition like Gully — aka Bear 903 — the offspring of two-time champion Grazer.

The contest, which is in its 12th year, celebrates the resilience of the 2,200 brown bears that live in the preserve on the Alaska Peninsula, which extends from the state’s southwest corner toward the Aleutian Islands. The animals gorge on the abundant salmon that return to the Brooks River, sometimes chomping the fish in midair as they make their way upstream to spawn.

The event this year features 16 bears facing off in a single-elimination, bracket-style tournament. All voting is done online at www.fatbearweek.org, with the winner declared Sept. 29. The public can watch the bears on explore.org’s livestream cameras before deciding on their favorite.

“Fat bears are successful bears,” the nonprofit’s website says. They gorge on salmon starting in late June in order to accumulate fat reserves to prepare for winter hibernation, when they do not eat or drink and lose one-third of their body weight.

Adult male brown bears typically weigh 600 to 900 pounds (about 270 to 410 kilograms) in midsummer. By the time they are ready to hibernate after feasting on migrating and spawning salmon — each eats as many as 30 fish per day — large males can weigh well over 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms). Females are about one-third smaller.

Voters in the online contest can review before-and-after photos of the bears, lean at the start of summer and fattened at the end. The bears are not actually weighed — imagine that process — and some fans choose their favorite based on their looks or backstory.

To be featured in the contest, the bears must frequent the area around the river.

The live cameras at Brooks Falls captured the moments in 2024 when mother bear 128 Grazer ’s cub slipped over the waterfall and floated into the fishing spot occupied by Chunk, who attacked and injured the cub. Grazer fought Chunk, but the cub ultimately died. After the dramatic fight, voting fans handed Grazer a victory over Chunk. Then Chunk returned in 2025 to take the title.

Fat Bear Week was started in 2014 as an interactive way to inform the public about brown bears, the coastal cousins of grizzlies.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Under a global cloud of wars and bitter divisions, world leaders meet at the United Nations this week facing new fears that runaway artificial intelligence could threaten humanity even as climate shocks and escalating prices are already making life much tougher for hundreds of millions of people.

The annual high-level gathering at the U.N. General Assembly will also be consumed with major wars in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine,Sudan, Congo and Myanmar and a persisting question: Can the leaders do anything to end them?

And what can they do about the relentless rise of global warming threatening the future of the planet, the growing inequalities within and among nations, and shocks to the global economy as blocked shipping routes and supply chains increase the cost of living and slow growth?

The future of the United Nations will also definitely be on the agenda. At 81, its powers are still the victorious nations from World War II, not the 21st century’s major global players. The U.N.’s 193 member nations have agreed to a wide-ranging reform package that includes updating key institutions such as the powerful U.N. Security Council, where the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France hold inordinate sway because of their veto power. Reform, however, is easier said than implemented.

Behind the scenes, there will be speculation about who will lead the United Nations next. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ second five-year term ends Dec. 31 and no clear successor has emerged.

This meeting is still pivotal

There is still no question that the U.N. remains THE gathering place for its 193 member nations and their leaders. Some 130 heads of state and government are expected to speak at the General Assembly starting Tuesday along with dozens of ministers.

Among the headliners will be U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emanuel Macron. Both will speak Tuesday after Guterres’ opening “state of the world” address. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian speak Wednesday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — whom New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani wanted arrested for his treatment of Palestinians in Gaza until he learned he has no such authority — will address the assembly on Thursday. For a second year, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas won’t be coming to the U.N. because the U.S. has refused to give him a visa. He will nonetheless address the assembly by video the same day.

The United States, under its agreement with the U.N. to host the organization, is required to allow diplomats from all member nations to attend meetings.

Equally telling is who else isn’t coming. China’s President Xi Jinping is meeting Trump in Washington on Wednesday, yet he is skipping — some diplomats say snubbing — the U.N. gathering and sending a vice president instead. Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t coming either, and Indian President Narendra Modi has backed out.

France’s U.N. ambassador, Jerome Bonnafont, said it is “extremely critical” for world leaders this week to support the U.N. as the place where the world’s nations meet — especially at a time of such polarization.

“We believe in multilateralism,” he said, “and we believe that the high-level week is the occasion for countries in the world to reaffirm that they prefer cooperation and dialogue to confrontation.”

United Nations has not had a great year

There is no doubt it’s been a tough year for the world body. It has been pushed to the sidelines when it comes to its key responsibility of ensuring international peace and security and trying to end major conflicts in the Mideast and Ukraine. The U.S. failure to pay billions of dollars in outstanding arrears has left the organization’s finances in rocky shape.

But veteran U.N. watcher Richard Gowan, the International Crisis Group’s global issues and institutions program director, says 2025 was even worse.

A year ago, he said, people were contemplating that Trump would use his U.N. speech to announce that the United States would leave the world organization. Trump didn’t announce a pullout last September and the U.N. muddled through the past 12 months with financial troubles that forced cutbacks to its peacekeeping operations and humanitarian aid.

In recent days, the U.S. paid $725 million of its dues to the U.N.’s regular operating budget for this year, enough to keep the Trump administration from losing its vote in the General Assembly. The payment was a strong indication Trump will keep the U.S. in the United Nations.

The U.N. is no longer “in freefall,” Gowan said, but it “is stuck in an open-ended or permanent crisis.” Put more graphically, he said, “The U.N. may not be in emergency care like it was last year, but it does seem to be trapped in a trauma center for the foreseeable future.”

Former U.N. deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch-Brown, a United Nations Foundation board member, said, “While the world still trusts the U.N., the global public is eager for change.”

AI is pushing toward the center of the agenda

The future of artificial intelligence has pushed to the forefront of global concerns, with its speeding advances and the dawning recognition that there are no industry controls, let alone any global guardrails for a technology that has many advantages but also many disadvantages and unknowns.

Days before the global gathering, leaders of three major AI companies warned about the technology getting out of human control and called for a pause, but Trump dismissed their concerns as “a hoax,” and urged continued advances to keep the U.S. ahead of China.

The U.N. Security Council added a high-level meeting on AI to its agenda on Wednesday afternoon, a sign of the growing apprehension and need to address the issue. It was already slated to hold a high-level meeting on Ukraine with Zelenskyy on Wednesday morning.

For the U.N. chief, this will be his last assembly meeting with global leaders. He previewed his speech last week, telling U.N. reporters that power is shifting in “an era of deep uncertainty.”

“At a time when the world faces three existential threats,” he said, “international cooperation is more necessary than ever.”

Others will be vying for the spotlight on issues from rising sea levels and funding education to the fight for gender equality. Hundreds of private meetings will also convene in U.N. cubicles, hotels, diplomatic missions and restaurants.

Esther Brimmer, a senior fellow in global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs in the Obama administration, said in-person meetings can help countries hash out ideas that get implemented months later.

She called the situation in 2026 “much more serious and complex than in decades past.”

“With that said, I’m also not without hope as well,” Brimmer said. “Over the past decades we’ve learned a lot about international cooperation.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave the keynote address Thursday at a conference of an anti-vaccine activist group he once chaired, telling the hundreds in attendance that they had a friend in President Donald Trump’s White House.

It was Kennedy’s first time appearing at the Children’s Health Defense conference since he became secretary. Kennedy took leave from the group when he launched his bid to become president in 2023, but his speech Thursday served as a sort of homecoming, offering him a platform from which to hail the administration’s steps to scale back vaccine guidance and reassure the activists in attendance that he was working to turn their priorities into policy.

“Let me be clear: You have a strong and steadfast friend in the White House. We’ve accomplished in 19 months things that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago,” he said.

The speech, peppered with questions about long established vaccine safety, also highlighted how once fringe views on vaccines have been given a prominent pulpit under the Trump administration.

Kennedy boasted about the administration’s moves to downsize the childhood vaccination schedule and reshape a key vaccine advisory board — steps that have since been halted by a judge.

Kennedy lauded Trump for pushing ahead with attempts to overhaul vaccine guidance, including an executive order last month calling for spacing out the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, against medical groups’ recommendations.

That executive order and now Kennedy’s keynote speech at the Children’s Health Defense conference mark a pivot by the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, who earlier this year had appeared to be moving beyond vaccine efforts and toward a less contentious agenda on healthy food ahead of November’s midterm elections. HHS promoted the speech on its social media channels.

Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, chaired Children’s Health Defense for years. He served as the group’s chief legal counsel and expanded it. After becoming health secretary last year, Kennedy moved at a blistering pace to overhaul public health guidance and revamp long-held precedents in vaccine policymaking.

Critics, among them many of the country’s top medical associations, have said the moves risk stoking vaccine hesitancy and sowing confusion among Americans who endured a crisis of trust in their public health agencies following the COVID-19 pandemic. That public confidence continues to erode.

“We have not taken vaccines away from anybody. We have preserved access. But we have started asking the questions that you and millions of American parents have been asking for years,” Kennedy told the group.

Mary Holland, the CEO of Children’s Health Defense, referred to Kennedy as “Bobby” and said the group has “gratitude beyond words” to the HHS secretary for “recognizing there are real consequential issues around childhood vaccinations.”

Kennedy’s appearance Thursday comes as the country faces its worst year for measles since 1991 and has seen seven reported measles-associated deaths in the last two years — more than the combined total of reported deaths over the previous three decades.

Pennsylvania officials have reported four measles-associated deaths this year. None of the four were vaccinated, according to the state health department. When state officials last month announced the first two of those deaths, it ignited a public feud between Gov. Josh Shapiro and Kennedy.

Shapiro blasted Kennedy’s appearance on the social media site X Thursday, saying Kennedy “chose to spend his time today addressing the premier vaccine-denial conference in America.”

Shapiro said the HHS secretary should have encouraged people to get vaccinated for measles, “yet he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he pushed a narrative that continues to stoke fear and mistrust.”

A representative from the White House did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment on Kennedy’s appearance at the event.

Following Kennedy onstage Thursday was Andrew Wakefield, an author of a since-discredited study that linked the MMR vaccine to autism, which has fueled the anti-vaccine movement even though it was retracted.

Widespread scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded there is no link between vaccines and autism.

Shaughnessy Naughton, founder of 314 Action, a group that recruits scientists to run for public office, said Kennedy’s decision to give a speech at the conference shows “the lack of seriousness he brings to HHS.”

“With a deadly measles outbreak killing people in Pennsylvania, the best thing Kennedy can do for Americans is step aside.”