By ERIC TUCKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — A day after abandoning its efforts to enforce executive orders that targeted some of the world’s most elite law firms, President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly reversed course on Tuesday and said it would proceed with the court fight.

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The unexplained about-face represents the latest development in a yearlong effort by the Republican administration to impose sanctions against major law firms whose attorneys had done legal work Trump opposed or had been associated with prosecutors who investigated him.

Judges who received challenges to the executive orders from targeted firms uniformly ruled against the government, prompting an appeal from the Justice Department. In a brief filing Monday in the federal appeals court in Washington, the Justice Department withdrew its appeal, ending efforts to enforce executive orders against the firms of Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey and WilmerHale.

Then, on Tuesday, the Justice Department, without any explanation, submitted a new court filing saying that it was withdrawing its earlier one and was no longer giving up its appeal. It said that because the appeals court had not yet granted its motion to dismiss, the firms were not harmed by the department’s change in position. The department said that it had advised lawyers for the four firms of its change in position and that they objected.

The White House referred questions about the change in position to the Justice Department, where a spokesperson declined to comment.

In a statement, Perkins Coie said the Justice Department had “offered no explanation to either the parties or the court for its reversal.”

“We remain committed to defending our firm, our people, and our clients,” the firm said.

Susman Godfrey said in a statement that it “will defend itself and the rule of law — without equivocation.”

The succession of edicts, part of a broader Trump administration campaign of retribution, have ordered that the security clearances of attorneys at the targeted firms be suspended, that federal contracts be terminated and that their employees be barred from federal buildings. The punished firms have called the orders an unconstitutional affront to the legal system.

Other major firms sought to avert orders by preemptively reaching settlements that require them, among other things, to collectively dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services in support of causes the Trump administration says it supports.

Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.

By KELVIN CHAN, AP Business Writer

LONDON (AP) — Damage to three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East from Iranian drone strikes highlights the rapid growth of data centers in the region, as well as the industry’s vulnerability to conflict.

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The company’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, said late Monday that two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were “directly struck” and another facility in Bahrain was also damaged after a drone landed nearby.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said in an update on its online dashboard.

It said by late Tuesday that recovery efforts at the UAE data centers were making progress.

Unlike previous AWS disruptions involving software that resulted in widespread global outages, these attacks involving physical damage appear to have resulted only in localized and limited disruption.

Amazon Web Services hosts many of the world’s most-used online services, providing behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses.

The company advised customers using servers in the Middle East to migrate to other regions, and direct online traffic away from the UAE and Bahrain.

“Amazon has generally configured its services so that the loss of a single data center would be relatively unimportant to its operations,” said Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Other data centers in the same zone can take over, and most of the time this happens seamlessly every day to balance workloads, he said.

“That said, the loss of multiple data centers within an availability zone could cause serious issues, as things could reach a point where there simply isn’t enough remaining capacity to handle all the work.”

A plume of smoke rises following a U.S.-Israeli military strike in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Amazon doesn’t typically disclose the exact number of data centers it operates around the world.

It says only that its data centers are clustered in 39 geographic regions, with three such regions in the Middle East, covering the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel.

Each AWS region is split up into at least three data center availability zones, with each zone isolated and physically separated “by a meaningful distance,” although they are all within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of each other and connected by “ultra-low-latency networks” that reduce the time lag for data transmission.

AWS says its data centers have redundant water, power, telecom, and internet connections “so we can maintain continuous operations in an emergency.”

They also have physical security, but those measures, including security guards, fences, video surveillance and alarm systems, are designed to keep out intruders rather than defend against missile attacks.

Chapple said the attacks are a reminder that cloud computing isn’t “magical” and “still requires physical facilities on the ground, which are vulnerable to all sorts of disaster scenarios.”

Data centers run by AWS and other operators are massive facilities that are hard to hide, he added.

“Organizations using services from any cloud provider in the Middle East should immediately take steps to shift their computing to other regions,” Chapple said.

By STEVE KARNOWSKI and TIM SULLIVAN

A federal judge clashed Tuesday with Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor in what he called a series of “testy and frosty” exchanges, in an unusual contempt hearing that highlights a growing wave of confrontations across the U.S. between increasingly frustrated judges and Department of Justice officials.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Daniel N. Rosen at one point accused the judge of smearing him.

There has been a surge in recent weeks of judges issuing critical and sometimes scathing statements and rulings over fallout from the administration’s attempts at mass immigrant deportations, with the Department of Justice sometimes appearing unable to keep up with the flood of cases from the crackdown.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan called Tuesday’s hearing to decide whether Rosen, one of his top deputies and a top local ICE official should be held in contempt for failing to return the personal property of dozens of immigrants who had been detained and then ordered freed, as they had been ordered. The property ranges from cash to identity documents to clothing.

“The court cannot ignore the respondents’ unlawful conduct,” Bryan said when he ordered the hearing, noting there had been “numerous unlawful violations of court orders”

Bryan started the hearing by calling it “an extraordinary measure,” and said it would be a “historic low point” for the U.S. attorneys office if he held anyone in contempt.

“Your honor has made a remark smearing myself,” Rosen shot back.

Later, as the judge called a break, he acknowledged the two had “been a little testy and frosty with each other.”

The hearing was set to resume Tuesday afternoon.

Among other cases across the country, a district judge in Minnesota took the rare step last month of finding an administration lawyer in contempt for failing to return identification documents to an immigrant, and a judge in West Virginia chastised U.S. and state officials for jailing noncitizens indefinitely, saying it violates their constitutional right to due process.

“Continued detention without individualized custody determinations, after this court’s repeated holdings that such detention violates the Fifth Amendment, will result in legal consequences,” U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin said in his order.

But the chief federal judge for Minnesota has repeatedly grabbed national attention with his warnings. Last week, Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz said Rosen and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials must comply with court orders or risk criminal contempt charges.

“The Court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders,” wrote Schiltz, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush and is seen as a conservative.

The administration has blamed judges for the crisis, accusing them of failing to follow the law and rushing cases.

___

Sullivan contributed from Minneapolis.

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By ELENA BECATOROS and BASSEM MROUE

BEIRUT (AP) — The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in U.S.-Israeli strikes over the weekend did not just shake Iran. It has reverberated across the Shiite Muslim world, raising the specter of a broader backlash in the Middle East and beyond.

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For the Muslim world’s Shiite minority, 86-year-old Khamenei was more than just Iran’s theocratic ruler since 1989. He was also one of their most prominent religious and political figures. His death at the hands of a joint U.S.-Israeli operation has stoked fury across the Shiite world.

“There is reason to be concerned about how Shia minorities across the Middle East, and in particular … the Shia majority in Iraq might respond to this,” said Burcu Ozcelik, senior research fellow for Middle East security at the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, a UK-based defense and security think tank.

Shiite Muslims make up around 10% to 15% of the world’s Muslim population, concentrated mainly in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and Azerbaijan, while there are also significant communities in Pakistan, Lebanon and Yemen.

For Mamoona Shirazi, a Shiite activist in Pakistan’s Punjab province, Khamenei “was not only our leader but a leader for all. He raised his voice against oppression. He never bowed to anyone; he spoke the truth and was like a father to us.”

Protests erupt

Within hours of Khamenei’s death, thousands of infuriated protesters took to the streets in Pakistan. They tried to storm the U.S. Consulate in the southern city of Karachi and clashed with police outside the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad where the U.S. Embassy is located, while also attacking United Nations offices in northern cities. At least 34 people were killed in clashes with security forces. More than 120 were injured.

“If the United States and Israel are not stopped, the entire world will turn into ruins. Peace-loving people must awaken,” said Syed Hussain Muqaddasi, head of the Pakistani Shiite political party Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Fiqh-e-Jafariya.

In Iraq, demonstrators clashed with police near the U.S. Embassy, while in Lebanon, the Iran-affiliated Hezbollah group fired missiles towards Israel for the first time in over a year. It triggered intense Israeli airstrikes on the country that killed dozens of people. Tens of thousands of people fled their homes in the predominantly Shiite areas of southern and eastern Lebanon as Israel threatened more strikes, called up 100,000 reservists and sent troops into southern Lebanon.

“I think there’s a psychological, emotional aspect to the killing of Khamenei and we are very much in the early days of trying to make sense of what that might look like,” said Ozcelik of the UK-based think tank.

Members of an Iraqi Shiite militant group attend a funeral of a fighter of the Kataib Hezbollah, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike, in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, March 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

Frustration at Iran’s meddling in other countries

Still, Ozcelik noted the potentially violent backlash could be tempered by growing frustration, even among Shiite populations, at Iran’s meddling in other countries’ affairs.

Over the last five to 10 years, the young generation in Iraq in particular, she said, has shown resistance to Iran’s “overwhelming penetration” of Iraqi domestic affairs, including its security services, judiciary, politics and economy.

Involvement in countries with a significant Shiite population has been a defining feature of Iran’s foreign policy for decades. Tehran adopted a strategy of building alliances not only with states, but also with armed groups — the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, being just two, as well as armed groups in Iraq and Syria.

Its interventions, generally presented as seeking to protect Shiites’ interests, often drew criticism of undermining countries’ sovereignty and fostering instability. One of the Trump administration’s key demands of Iran ahead of this conflict had been that it sever support to proxy groups in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen — a demand Iran rejected.

Given this frustration, Ozcelik suggested there is unlikely to be the “sharp, violent sectarianism that we saw after 2003,” when Iraq descended into a bloody, prolonged period of violence between the formerly dominant Sunni minority and Shiite majority in the wake of the U.S. invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim. The violence spilled across other countries in the region, most notably into the Syrian civil war.

Since then, “the Middle East in many ways has moved on. I think there is a strong urge and desire for de-escalation at this point, particularly in the Gulf,” Ozcelik said.

Previous prominent targets

Over the past years, the U.S. and Israel have assassinated some of the most prominent figures in the Iran-led regional alliance, including Shiite clerics. It began with the 2020 killing of Iran’s Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, along with veteran Iraqi militant Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad.

In September 2024, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, the de-facto head of an Iranian alliance spread across Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon, was killed in a massive Israeli airstrike south of Beirut.

But Khamenei was by far the biggest blow.

“After the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran says it has no red lines left,” said Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of American foreign policy think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

An injured Shiite Muslim woman is taken to medical help during a protest against the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Monday, March 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

A region in turmoil

Tehran’s backlash has brought turmoil across the region.

Hundreds of missiles and drones have flown across the Middle East and as far afield as Cyprus. Usually prosperous and peaceful countries like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar scrambled to shoot down Iranian weaponry as they shut their airspace, grounding commercial flights and stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Many Shiites perceive the strikes against Iran and Khamenei’s killing as aimed against their entire community.

“There is targeting of Muslims in general, but the targeting is specifically directed at Shiites,” said Nasser Khazal, whose building was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike Tuesday in a suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Lebanese political analyst Qassim Qassir said Iran’s vehement retaliation is seen as a fight for Shiite survival against the U.S. and Israeli vision for the region.

“There is targeting of the Shiite community and its political and religious leaders, and today it is an existential war, whether in Iran, Lebanon, or Iraq,” said Qassir, author of a book about Hezbollah. “The United States and Israel want to impose their project on the region.”

Becatoros reported from Athens, Greece. Munir Ahmed in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed