New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he disagrees with it, but he will comply with a state Supreme Court ruling that makes same-sex marriage legal in the state starting Monday.

Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak says in a statement that the governor “firmly believes that this determination should be made by all the people of the state of New Jersey.”

But he says the state Health Department will help towns carry out Friday’s state Supreme Court ruling.

The court denied the Christie administration’s request to delay a lower-court order that the state recognize same-sex marriage beginning Monday.

“The state has advanced a number of arguments, but none of them overcome this reality: Same-sex couples who cannot marry are not treated equally under the law today,” the court said in an opinion by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner. “The harm to them is real, not abstract or speculative.”

A judge on the lower court had ruled last month that New Jersey must recognize same-sex marriage and set Monday as the date to allow gay weddings. Christie, a Republican who is considered a possible 2016 presidential candidate, appealed the decision and asked for the start date to be put on hold while the state appeals.

The state’s top court agreed last week to take up the appeal of the lower-court ruling by Judge Mary Jacobson. Oral arguments are expected Jan. 6 or 7.

In Friday’s opinion, Rabner wrote that the state has not shown that it is likely to prevail in the case, though it did present some reasons not to marriage to move forward now.

“But when a party presents a clear case of unequal treatment, and asks the court to vindicate constitutionally protected rights, a court may not sidestep its obligation to rule for an indefinite amount of time,” he wrote. “Under these circumstances, courts do not have the option to defer.”

Rabner also rejected the state’s argument that it was in the public interest not to allow marriages until the court has had more time to rule fully on the issue.

“What is the public’s interest in a case like this?” he wrote. “Like Judge Jacobson, we can find no public interest in depriving a group of New Jersey residents of their constitutional right to equal protection while the appeals process unfolds.”

On Thursday, some communities started accepting applications for marriage licenses from same-sex couples so that they would pass the 72-hour waiting period by 12:01 a.m. Monday.

Several communities, including Asbury Park and Lambertville, are holding ceremonies for multiple couples then.

Meanwhile, the gay rights group Garden State Equality said it was lining up judges who could waive the 72-hour waiting period. Also, the state’s marriage law says there is no waiting period for couples already married to reaffirm their vows. Some couples wed in New York or other places that already recognize gay marriages are expected to do that.

Despite the uncertainty before Friday’s ruling, couples — some of whom have been together for decades — have been planning to have ceremonies as soon as they would be recognized by the state government. Lambertville Mayor David DelVecchio said he’s planning to lead one of the state’s first legally recognized same-sex weddings, between Beth Asaro and Joanne Schailey. DelVecchio also performed the ceremony in 2007 when the couple became among New Jersey’s first to be granted a civil union.

“The applications should be flowing and the licenses should be granted and people should be allowed to marry freely,” said Hayley Gorenberg, a Lambda Legal lawyer who is working on the case. “The court has unanimously said my clients and the people of New Jersey don’t need to wait.”

The court did not address the question of what would happen to the status of same-sex marriages entered into next week if it later decides that the state does not have to grant the marriages.

Whether gay couples should have the right to marry in New Jersey has been the subject of a battle in the state’s courts and Legislature for a decade. There has been a flurry of movements in both venues since June, when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated key parts of a federal law that prevented the federal government from recognizing same-sex unions.

Since then, gay rights advocates have asked New Jersey judges to force the state to recognize same-sex marriage, arguing that the state’s current policy of granting gay couples civil unions but not marriage licenses amounts to denying them federal protections such as Social Security survivor benefits and the right to file tax returns jointly.

Since July, gay rights groups have also engaged in an intense campaign aimed at persuading lawmakers to override Christie’s 2012 veto of a bill that would have allowed gay marriage. To get an override, the Legislature must act by Jan. 14. The bill spells out details that likely would not be covered in a court ruling. For instance, civil unions would automatically be converted to marriages unless couples opted out and dissolved their civil unions, and there would be a religious exception that would allow not only clergy but also others such as caterers or florists not to be involved with gay weddings.

Thirteen other states, including most in the Northeast, recognize gay marriage.

Christie says he favors civil unions and says that allowing same-sex marriage is something that should be done only by a public vote, not the state’s judges or lawmakers.

He didn’t immediately comment on the ruling.

Sheila Oliver, speaker of the state Assembly, issued a statement blaming Christie for not having gay marriage sooner in New Jersey.

“It’s a shame it took this long to get to this point and that it took a court fight for same-sex couples to gain equal rights,” she said. “New Jersey could have had marriage equality already if it wasn’t for Gov. Christie, who has done everything he could to prevent this from happening, including wasting money and time continuing this court battle.”

NEW YORK (AP) — The Standard & Poor’s 500 index is rising further into record territory as investors turn their attention from politics to profits.

General Electric, Morgan Stanley and Google all rose after reporting higher profits than financial analysts were expecting. Google topped $1,000 a share for the first time.

Traders were relieved that Washington reached a deal Wednesday to avoid a U.S. debt default and reopen the government after a partial shutdown that ran 16 days.

The S&P 500 rose 11 points, or 0.7 percent, to 1,744 Friday, its second record close in as many days.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 28 points, or 0.2 percent, to 15,399. The Nasdaq composite was up 51 points, or 1.3 percent, at 3,914.

The gains were broad. Volume was heavy at 3.6 billion shares.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — When we sleep, our brains get rid of gunk that builds up while we’re awake, suggests a study that may provide new clues to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders.

This cleaning was detected in the brains of sleeping mice, but scientists said there’s reason to think it happens in people too.

If so, the finding may mean that for people with dementia and other mind disorders, “sleep would perhaps be even more important in slowing the progression of further damage,” Dr. Clete Kushida, medical director of the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center, said in an email.

Kushida did not participate in the study, which appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

People who don’t get enough shut-eye have trouble learning and making decisions, and are slower to react. But despite decades of research, scientists can’t agree on the basic purpose of sleep. Reasons range from processing memory, saving energy to regulating the body.

The latest work, led by scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center, adds fresh evidence to a long-standing view: When we close our eyes, our brains go on a cleaning spree.

The team previously found a plumbing network in mouse brains that flushes out cellular waste. For the new study, the scientists injected the brains of mice with beta-amyloid, a substance that builds up in Alzheimer’s disease, and followed its movement. They determined that it was removed faster from the brains of sleeping mice than awake mice.

The team also noticed that brain cells tend to shrink during sleep, which widens the space between the cells. This allows waste to pass through that space more easily.

Though the work involved mouse brains, lead researcher Dr. Maiken Nedergaard said this plumbing system also exists in dogs and baboons, and it’s logical to think that the human brain also clears away toxic substances. Nedergaard said the next step is to look for the process in human brains.

In an accompanying editorial, neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro said scientists have recently taken a heightened interest in the spaces between brain cells, where junk is flushed out.

It’s becoming clearer that “sleep is likely to be a brain state in which several important housekeeping functions take place,” she said in an email.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. In a statement, program director Jim Koenig said the finding could lead to new approaches for treating a range of brain diseases.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress’ debt-and-spending breakthrough crystalized a political contradiction.

House Republicans refuse to let their supposed leader, Speaker John Boehner, steer them toward big policy decisions, leaving him to endure repeated public embarrassments. Yet they rally around Boehner as much as ever, affirming his hold on the speakership Wednesday even as they choked down a Democratic-crafted bill to reopen the government, lift the debt ceiling and give Republicans only a few small concessions.

“He’s done a good job keeping us together,” said Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C.

“I think his stock has risen tremendously, and certainly he has great security as our leader and our speaker,” said Rep. John Fleming, R-La.

Imagine the praise from Republicans who voted in favor of the bill, which Boehner described as the best deal he could get under the constraints his colleagues handed him. Hudson and Fleming were among the 144 House Republicans who voted “no,” forcing their leader once again to pass a high-profile measure that most GOP members opposed. Eighty-seven Republicans voted for it, joining all the Democrats in the chamber.

Hudson and Fleming also are among the House’s dozens of tea party-backed Republicans, whose disdain of compromise has vastly complicated the speaker’s job. Even before Wednesday, House Republicans’ habit of praising but not heeding Boehner reflected the tea party’s devotion to putting principle above deal-making.

Boehner is a seasoned legislator. He constantly seeks 218 votes needed to pass House bills and scraps for the best bargains he can cut with Senate Democrats and President Barack Obama.

Ho-hum, say many rank-and-file Republicans. While polls show Americans chiefly blame Republicans for the debt-and-shutdown gridlock — and GOP Sen. John McCain declared “we have lost this battle” — many of them seemed satisfied with the stand they made. That philosophy surely would have baffled many predecessors in Congress.

“The dynamics got much better,” Fleming said, when Boehner “quit going to the White House to negotiate and he began to listen to us, to what we thought would work.” Fleming called the debt and spending outcome an acceptable “stalemate.” Democrats weren’t able to reduce the “sequester” spending cuts they oppose, he said, and Republicans failed to delay or defund Obama’s health care overhaul.

Republicans “lost the battle, but we’re going to win the war,” Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., said of plans to keep attacking “Obamacare.” In January, Huelskamp voted to dump Boehner as speaker. But he joined in Wednesday’s standing ovation for Boehner in a closed-door caucus gathering.

“This is probably the best example of him following the 200 folks in our caucus who are conservative and are worried about Obamacare,” Huelskamp said after the meeting.

Boehner said in a subdued statement, “Our drive to stop the train wreck that is the president’s health care law will continue.”

Boehner lost control of the debt-and-shutdown debate weeks ago, when tea party-backed Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas launched a national drive to close much of the government if Democrats didn’t agree to “defund Obamacare.”

Senior Republicans called the mission hopeless. Boehner urged his colleagues to focus on the debt ceiling instead. The threat of government default, he said, would give them greater leverage to demand spending cuts from Democrats.

It’s the same advice Boehner gave in January at a widely praised House GOP retreat in Williamsburg, Va. Republicans, he said then, must decide “where’s the ground that we fight on? Where’s the ground that we retreat on?”

Whatever progress Boehner made in Virginia was apparently lost this month, when scores of House Republicans joined Cruz’s ultimately doomed crusade.

GOP lawmakers would have fared better “had we let the speaker pick the battlefield and the battle,” said Republican strategist Mike McKenna. He said Boehner and his team did the best they could “with the mess that Ted Cruz’s dead-end strategy left them.” He said House Republicans appreciate that Boehner didn’t say, “I told you so.”

Boehner confirmed his coziness with those why defy him by appointing three high-profile budget conferees who voted against the debt-funding bill. They include former vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who will lead House budget talks with the Senate in the coming weeks. A fourth GOP conferee, Boehner ally Tom Cole of Oklahoma, backed the compromise debt-funding bill.

With the government now funded through mid-January, and the debt ceiling lifted a few weeks beyond that, some lawmakers say Congress is headed toward renewed partisan brinksmanship this winter.

“All this does is delay this fight four months,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala.

Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., said Republicans erred by focusing on the government funding bill instead of the debt. But he doesn’t blame Boehner.

“We’re a body of independent contractors, each with his own constituency,” Kingston said. Boehner, he said, “is going to be OK. You know, it’s a pretty tough job.”

Previous House speakers found that to be true, even when their caucuses followed their advice.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Barriers came down at federal memorials and National Park Service sites and thousands of furloughed federal workers — relieved but wary — returned to work across the country Thursday after 16 days off the job due to the partial government shutdown.

Among the sites reopening were Yosemite National Park in California, the Smithsonian Institution’s network of popular museums, and the World War II memorial in Washington, which had been the scene of protests over the shutdown.

“Just to be able to get back to serving the public is so important,” said Greg Bettwy, preparing to return to work with the Smithsonian’s human resource department.

For other returning workers, shutdown-related frustration turned to elation at being back on the job. Some confronted backlogs of email and paperwork; others voiced concern that a gridlocked Congress might trigger another shutdown in January.

“The phrase everyone is talking about is ‘kicking the can down the road,’” said Richard Marcus of Silver Spring, Md., who has worked at the National Archives and Records Administration for 29 years. “We’d hate to have to live through this all over again.”

National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis said all 401 national park units — from Golden Gate National Recreation Area in California to Acadia National Park in Maine — were expected to reopen Thursday. The reopenings include tour roads, trails, visitor centers and other facilities at the park sites. Educational programs will resume, and permits will again be issued for special activities, Jarvis said.

Also reopening are dozens of programs that preserve nature and historic sites and improve access to outdoor recreation in local communities. And the U.S. Forest Service started lifting a ban on national forests. American Forest Resource Council President Tom Partin said national forest campgrounds would reopen as soon as employees could visit to make sure they’re clean and safe.

The federal workers who were furloughed or worked without pay during the shutdown will get back pay in their next paychecks, which for most employees come Oct. 29.

At the Labor Department, Secretary Thomas Perez greeted workers with an email telling them he understood how much the furlough disrupted their lives.

“Unfortunately, as President Obama correctly noted, you are occasionally called on to perform your remarkably important work in a climate that too often treats federal employees and contractors as a punching bag,” Perez said.

The Defense Department called back about 7,000 furloughed civilians. In an open letter to the workforce, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the department still faces budget uncertainty as Congress struggles to pass a 2014 spending bill and deal with automatic budget cuts. Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale said Thursday that the department lost at least $600 million worth of productivity during the four days that civilians were furloughed.

The National Institutes of Health also will see lingering after-effects — NIH warned university scientists not to expect a quick resumption of research dollars.

“As the shutdown drags on, the challenge of re-establishing normal operations quickly is growing,” NIH Deputy Director Dr. Sally Rockey emailed researchers.

Workers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services restarted the computerized worker verification system, e-Verify. The system used by business owners to verify the legal status of workers was the only USCIS program affected by the shutdown.

In Washington, the Capitol’s visitor center planned to resume tours Thursday, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was reopening, and the Smithsonian — overseer of many of Washington’s major museums — proclaimed on Twitter, “We’re back from the (hashtag)shutdown!”

The National Zoo was set to reopen Friday, though the popular panda cam went live Thursday morning — giving fans a view of a cub wriggling about as her mother, Mei Xiang, tucked her paws under her chin and watched.

At the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., email servers were slowly grinding back into gear.

Fire protection engineer Dan Madrzykowski had been in the office for about half an hour, and about 800 emails had popped into his inbox, but that covered only back to Oct. 13. Still, Madrzykowski said he was pleased to be back at work. “Nothing good was coming from keeping the government closed,” he said.

Patrice Roberts, who works for the Department of Homeland Security, said she wasn’t prepared for the emotional lows of the past 16 days.

“It’s just frustrating having that kind of control over your life and just having it taken away from me,” said Roberts, who is expecting another shutdown in January. “I’ll be better prepared next time.”

In Atlanta, tears welled in Denise Traicoff’s eyes as she talked about the work she missed doing for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Traicoff works with officials in other countries to improve disease investigation and health programs, and has been focusing on polio. The shutdown meant such communications were stopped and colleagues in other countries abandoned.

“I’m mostly really frustrated,” she said, walking into the CDC Thursday morning.

In Pottsville, Pa., several people waited outside the Social Security office ahead of its 9 a.m. opening. James Ulrich, an unemployed 19-year-old needed a replacement for his lost Social Security card to apply for jobs. He was told a replacement card would take another two weeks to arrive.

“I don’t have a really good outlook on the government,” Ulrich said.

In Cincinnati, Renee Yankey, a federal alcohol and tobacco tax specialist, was sleep-deprived after staying up late to watch news of the shutdown-ending deal, but otherwise glad to be back at work with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

“I can tell that the alcohol industry missed us,” said Yankey, a federal employee for 25 years. “The first thing I hear is ‘I’m so glad I got a person on the phone!’”

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street finally got the deal it’s been waiting for.

A last-minute agreement to keep the U.S. from defaulting on its debt and reopen the government sent the stock market soaring Wednesday, lifting the Standard & Poor’s 500 index close to a record high.

The deal was reached just hours before a deadline to raise the nation’s $16.7 trillion debt limit. Senate leaders agreed to extend government borrowing through Feb. 7 and to fund the government through Jan. 15.

The agreement follows a month of political gridlock that threatened to make America a deadbeat and derail global markets, which depend on the U.S. to pay its bills. American government debt is widely considered the world’s safest investment.

Markets stayed largely calm throughout the drama in Washington, with the S&P 500 actually gaining 2.4 percent since the shutdown began Oct. 1, after House Republicans demanded changes to President Barack Obama’s health care law before passing a budget.

Wall Street gambled that politicians wouldn’t let the U.S. default, a calamity economists said could paralyze lending and push the economy into another recession.

“We knew it was going to be dramatic, but the consequences of a U.S. default are just so severe that the base case was always that a compromise was going to be reached,” said Tom Franks, a managing director at TIAA CREF, a large retirement funds manager.

Congress was racing to pass the legislation before the Thursday deadline.

If the deal wraps up soon, investors can turn their attention back to economic basics like third-quarter earnings. Overall earnings at companies in the S&P 500 index are forecast to grow 3.1 percent from a year earlier, according to data from S&P Capital IQ. That’s slower than the growth of 4.9 percent in the second quarter and 5.2 percent in the first quarter.

It will be harder for Wall Street to get an up-to-date view of the economy because the partial government shutdown that began Oct. 1 has kept agencies from releasing key reports on trends like hiring. In general, though, the economy has been expanding this year.

Despite broad confidence that the political parties would strike a deal, the Dow went through rough patches over the last month, at one point falling as much as 900 points below an all-time high reached on Sept. 18. The Dow has seen seven triple-digit moves in the last 10 trading days.

On Wednesday, the Dow Jones climbed 205.82 points, or 1.4 percent, to 15,373.83. The S&P 500 gained 23.48, or 1.4 percent, at 1,721.54. That’s only four points below its record close of 1,725.52 set Sept. 18.

The Nasdaq composite climbed 45.42, or 1.2 percent, to 3,839.43.

The feeling among stock traders in recent days was that panicking and pulling money out of stocks could mean missing out on a rally after Washington came to an agreement. Investors have also become inured to Washington’s habit of reaching budget and debt deals at the last minute.

“Investors have become, unfortunately, accustomed to some of the dysfunction,” said Eric Wiegand, a senior portfolio manager at U.S. Bank. “It’s become more the norm than the exception.”

In the summer of 2011, the S&P 500 index plunged 17 percent between early July and early August as lawmakers argued over raising the debt limit, and Standard & Poor’s cut the U.S. credit rating from AAA, its highest ranking. The market later recovered.

Stocks also slumped in the last two weeks of 2012 as investors fretted that the U.S. could go over the “fiscal cliff” as lawmakers argued over a series of automatic government spending cuts. Stocks rebounded and began a strong rally that has propelled the S&P 500 up almost 21 percent this year.

Some were glad that investors could now turn their focus back to the traditional drivers of the market rather than worrying whether the latest dispatch from Washington would shake stocks.

“It’s a little bit silly in the short term for markets to go down so much on press conferences and then to go up so much on rumors,” said Brad Sorensen, director of market and sector research at the Schwab Center for Financial Research. “We’ve urged investors to pull back a little bit and look at the longer term.”

The market for U.S. Treasury bills reflected relief among bond investors. The yield on the one-month T-bill dropped to 0.13 percent from 0.40 percent Wednesday morning, an extraordinarily large move. The decline means that investors consider the bill, which would have come due around the time a default may have occurred, to be less risky.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note edged down to 2.67 percent from 2.74 percent Tuesday. Yields on longer-term U.S. government debt haven’t moved as much as those on short-term debt because investors believed that the government would work out a longer-term solution.

Among stocks making big moves:

— Bank of America rose 32 cents, or 2.2 percent, to $14.56 after the second-largest U.S. bank reported a surge in third-quarter earnings.

— Stanley Black & Decker plunged $12.70, or 14.3 percent, to $76.75 after the company lowered its profit forecast for the year, citing slower growth in emerging markets and a hit from the U.S. government shutdown.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — From county chairmen to national party luminaries, veteran Republicans across the country are accusing tea party lawmakers of staining the GOP with their refusal to bend in the budget impasse in Washington.

The Republican establishment also is signaling a willingness to strike back at the tea party in next fall’s elections.

“It’s time for someone to act like a grown-up in this process,” former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu argues, faulting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and tea party Republicans in the House as much as President Barack Obama for taking an uncompromising stance.

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is just as pointed, saying this about the tea party-fueled refusal to support spending measures that include money for Obama’s health care law: “It never had a chance.”

The anger emanating from Republicans like Sununu and Barbour comes just three years after the GOP embraced the insurgent political group and rode its wave of new energy to return to power in the House.

Now, they’re lashing out with polls showing Republicans bearing most of the blame for the federal shutdown, which entered its 11th day Friday. In some places, they’re laying the groundwork to take action against the tea party in the 2014 congressional elections.

Iowa Republicans are recruiting a pro-business Republican to challenge six-term conservative Rep. Steve King, a leader in the push to defund the health care law. Disgruntled Republicans are further ahead in Michigan, where second-term, tea party-backed Rep. Justin Amash is facing a Republican primary challenger who is more in line with — and being encouraged by — Republicans more in line with pro-business Gov. Rick Snyder than Amash’s tea party base. And business interest groups, long aligned with the Republican Party, also are threatening to recruit and fund strong challengers to tea party House members.

Tea party backers are undeterred and assail party leaders.

“They keep compromising,” said Katrina Pierson, a former Dallas-area tea party organizer now challenging Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas in the 2014 GOP primary. “They all campaigned on fiscal responsibility. They just need to do what they campaigned on.”

In more than a dozen interviews, Republican leaders, officials and strategists at all levels of the party blamed Obama for the shutdown but also faulted tea party lawmakers in the House, who have insisted that any deal to reopen the government be contingent on stripping money for the health care law.

An Associated Press-GfK poll released Wednesday showed why these party loyalists are so concerned: More Republicans told pollsters that the GOP is mishandling the shutdown than is handling it well. And among those who say it’s being poorly handled, twice as many Republicans say the party is not doing enough to negotiate with Obama than those who say the party is doing too much.

Party leaders interviewed said the tea party’s demands to defund the health care law — and the House leadership’s willingness to follow suit — were distracting from what they said is the GOP’s best strategy to recover from its 2012 losses: a focus on reducing long-term spending. They said defunding the health care law would not achieve that goal because the money was already flowing to the law.

“At the end of the day, you’re fighting legislation that’s already passed,” said former South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson, describing the fight to defund the health care law as a lost cause.

Republican activists around the country also said in interviews that the shutdown — and House Republicans’ demands — have deflected attention from problems with the launch of key parts to the health care bill.

Thousands of Americans were unable to shop for health insurance on the online marketplaces when they went live on Oct. 1 because of software glitches. And, these Republicans say, the GOP in Washington — and specifically tea party House members — got in the way of the troubled rollout, which the GOP could have seized on if the government were still open.

“We’re not saying Obama is right. We’re saying what Republicans are doing is wrong,” said Matt Cox, a former executive director of Ohio’s Cuyahoga County GOP. He said that instead of pursuing the shutdown strategy, Republicans in Washington could have passed — and taken credit for — a spending measure that kept dollar levels at those set by the automatic $1.2 trillion across-the-board cut approved last year, also called the sequester.

Generally, these Republicans said that because of the tea party’s effort to defund the health care law, the Republican Party had missed an opportunity to hammer Obama after he hit a rough patch over Syria just a month ago.

Former Illinois state Sen. Laura Douglas wants to believe that the holdouts can win. But she has her doubts.

“My heart says, ‘Keep fighting, don’t give up,’” said Douglas, a resident of Quincy in western Illinois. “But my head says, ‘If we keep this kind of thing up, we’re going to get creamed next year.’”

Her worries are reflected in the AP-GfK poll. Roughly three-quarters of Republicans nationally said their party in Congress deserves a moderate degree or most of the blame for the shutdown.

Even among Republicans, those who don’t support the tea party mostly disapprove of how the GOP is handling the budget issue. Just 17 percent of Americans overall consider themselves tea party backers.

And tea party allies are fighting back.

The Senate Conservatives Fund, an independent political action committee, has run ads asking tea party supporters to recruit primary election opponents for Republicans who voted for a measure that would have kept the government running with modifications in the health care law.

In South Carolina, Fairfield County Republican Chairman Kevin Thomas is among those on the side of tea party lawmakers.

“The only leverage we have is the budget,” he said.

MARYVILLE, Mo. (AP) — The Missouri Attorney General’s Office said Tuesday it has no power to reopen a northwest Missouri rape case, despite the pleas of a mother who says justice was denied when prosecutors dropped charges against teenage boys her 14-year-old daughter said sexually assaulted her and a 13-year-old friend.

The case in Maryville is drawing new attention after The Kansas City Star published the results Sunday of a seven-month investigation into the allegations.

The Star reported that few people dispute the basic facts of the Jan. 8, 2012, incident. A 17-year-old high school senior had sex with Melinda Coleman’s 14-year-old daughter, Daisy, while a 15-year-old boy had sex with the daughter’s 13-year-old friend. A third 17-year-old student recorded part of the incident on video. Coleman found her daughter the next morning outside their home, where the boys allegedly left her in freezing temperatures.

The daughter acknowledged she and the friend left her house to meet the boys but said they gave her alcohol and she doesn’t remember much of what happened next. The boys said the sex was consensual.

The two 17-year-old boys were charged as adults, but the Nodaway County prosecutor dropped felony counts against them two months later. A misdemeanor count against the teen accused of assaulting Daisy was dropped subsequently. The prosecutor cited a lack of evidence and the Colemans’ refusal to cooperate. The 15-year-old was charged in juvenile court.

The Associated Press does not generally name victims of sexual assault but is naming Coleman because she and her mother have been granting public interviews about the case. The AP is not naming the boys because there is no longer an active criminal case against them.

Nanci Gonder, a spokeswoman for Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, said in a statement Tuesday that the office has received petitions in the case but that “the Attorney General’s Office does not have the authority under the laws of the state of Missouri to review a prosecutor’s discretionary decisions in particular cases.”

Melinda Coleman, who now lives in Albany about 40 miles east of Maryville, appeared with her daughter on CNN Monday. She hoped the attention would prompt another investigation.

“I’d like to see some justice,” said Coleman, adding that her daughter would be willing to testify in court if the case is reopened.

Robert Sundell, an attorney who represented the teen accused of assaulting Daisy, said in a written statement that while many may find his former client’s behavior “reprehensible,” the legal issue is whether a crime occurred. He said the investigation raised questions about whether the 14-year-old was “incapacitated during the encounter.”

He also said the accusers refused to participate in a May 2012 deposition, citing their Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate themselves, and offered inconsistent testimony during a July 2012 deposition. Sundell said his former client wouldn’t talk to the media.

Missouri has a law that criminalizes sexual intercourse involving a person under the age of 14. A provision for second-degree statutory rape makes it a crime for a person 21 or older to have sex with a person under the age of 17. A third provision makes it a crime for someone to have sex with another knowing that he does not have consent.

According to the Star’s report many residents of Maryville, about 100 miles north of Kansas City, turned on the Coleman family. Melinda Coleman was fired from her job and the harassment became so bad that the family moved back to Albany. In April, the family’s home in Maryville was damaged in a fire; the cause has not been determined.

Many in the town seemed to close ranks around the accused and suggested the girls were somehow responsible for the attack, the Star reported. The case has drawn comparisons to a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, where two 17-year-old high school football players were convicted of raping a West Virginia girl after an alcohol-fueled party in 2012. The case was furiously debated online and led to allegations of a cover-up to protect the city’s celebrated football team.

Nodaway County Prosecuting Attorney Robert Rice said Tuesday there was “insufficient evidence” to prove the case and that “the State’s witnesses refused to cooperate.” He also disputed the Star’s story and suggestions he downplayed the case, saying “personal attacks made against me are malicious, wrong and never happened.”

One of the accused boys was the grandson of a prominent local politician. The grandfather denied to the Star that he brought any influence to the case, insisting that any contact with law enforcement “would have been bad for me and bad for the case.”

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — A police officer responding to the deadly Colorado theater shooting says he asked James Holmes twice whether he had an accomplice.

Officer Justin Grizzle says all he got was “self-satisfying offensive smirk.”

Another officer who was also trying to figure out what was going on in the chaos testified Tuesday that Holmes told him he was the only shooter.

They testified that screaming and bloodied victims were still fleeing as they handcuffed and searched Holmes.

The hearing is about whether statements Holmes made before he was read his rights can be used during his trial next year.

Police say they had to find out if someone else was involved in the attack that killed 12 people. Prosecutors contend the questions were legal under a public-safety exemption to the Miranda rule.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A marine science instructor snorkeling off the Southern California coast spotted something out of a fantasy novel: the silvery carcass of an 18-foot-long, serpent-like oarfish.

Jasmine Santana of the Catalina Island Marine Institute needed more than 15 helpers to drag the giant sea creature with eyes the size of half dollars to shore on Sunday.

Staffers at the institute are calling it the discovery of a lifetime.

“We’ve never seen a fish this big,” said Mark Waddington, senior captain of the Tole Mour, CIMI’s sail training ship. “The last oarfish we saw was three feet long.”

Because oarfish dive more than 3,000 feet deep, sightings of the creatures are rare and they are largely unstudied, according to CIMI.

The obscure fish apparently died of natural causes. Tissue samples and video footage were sent to be studied by biologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Santana spotted something shimmering about 30 feet deep while snorkeling during a staff trip in Toyon Bay at Santa Catalina Island, about two dozen miles from the mainland.

“She said, ‘I have to drag this thing out of here or nobody will believe me,’” Waddington said.

After she dragged the carcass by the tail for more than 75 feet, staffers waded in and helped her bring it to shore.

The carcass was on display Tuesday for 5th, 6th, and 7th grade students studying at CIMI. It will be buried in the sand until it decomposes and then its skeleton will be reconstituted for display, Waddington said.

The oarfish, which can grow to more than 50 feet, is a deep-water pelagic fish — the longest bony fish in the world, according to CIMI.

They are likely responsible for sea serpent legends throughout history.