By CLAIRE RUSH and GENE JOHNSON

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An appeals court on Monday put on hold a lower court ruling that kept President Donald Trump from taking command of 200 Oregon National Guard troops. However, Trump is still barred from actually deploying those troops, at least for now.

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U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut issued two temporary restraining orders early this month — one that prohibited Trump from calling up the troops so he could send them to Portland, and another that prohibited him from sending any National Guard members to Oregon at all, after the president tried to evade the first order by deploying California troops instead.

The Justice Department appealed the first order, and in a 2-1 ruling Monday, a panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the administration. The majority said the president was likely to succeed on his claim that he had the authority to federalize the troops based on a determination he was unable to enforce the laws without them.

However, Immergut’s second order remains in effect, so no troops may immediately be deployed.

The administration has said that because the legal reasoning underpinning both temporary restraining orders was the same, it will now ask Immergut to dissolve her second order and allow Trump to deploy troops to Portland. The Justice Department argued that it is not the role of the courts to second-guess the president’s determination about when to deploy troops.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, a Democrat, said he would ask for a broader panel of the appeals to reconsider the decision.

“Today’s ruling, if allowed to stand, would give the president unilateral power to put Oregon soldiers on our streets with almost no justification,” Rayfield said. “We are on a dangerous path in America.”

The Justice Department did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Law enforcement officers watch as the gates close at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as people protest outside on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

Trump’s efforts to deploy National Guard troops in Democratic-led cities have been mired in legal challenges. A judge in California ruled that his deployment of thousands of National Guard troops in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a longstanding law that generally prohibits the use of the military for civilian policing, and the administration on Friday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the deployment of National Guard troops in the Chicago area,

Mostly small nightly protests, limited to a single block, have been occurring since June outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland. Larger crowds, including counter-protesters and live-streamers, have shown up at times, and federal agents have used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators.

The administration has said the troops are needed to protect federal property from protesters, and that having to send extra Department of Homeland Security agents to help guard the property meant they were not enforcing immigration laws elsewhere.

Law enforcement officers watch from a ledge on the a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, at right, as people in costumes protest on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

Immergut previously rejected the administration’s arguments, saying the president’s claims about Portland being war-torn are “simply untethered to the facts.” But the appeals court majority — Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade, both Trump appointees — said the president’s decision was owed more deference.

Bade wrote that the facts appeared to support Trump’s decision “even if the President may exaggerate the extent of the problem on social media.”

Judge Susan Graber, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton appointee, dissented. She urged her colleagues on the 9th Circuit to “to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur.”

Law enforcement officers walk back to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as people protest on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

“In the two weeks leading up to the President’s September 27 social media post, there had not been a single incident of protesters’ disrupting the execution of the laws,” Graber wrote. “It is hard to understand how a tiny protest causing no disruptions could possibly satisfy the standard that the President is unable to execute the laws.”

Johnson reported from Seattle.

It took three episodes into the season, but St. Paul native Tommy Brennan finally got some substantial screen time on this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live.” Brennan is one of five new featured players added to the cast of the venerable sketch comedy show’s 51st season.

Brennan, 31, appeared as himself during a segment on “Weekend Update.” Co-host Colin Jost introduced Brennan and asked what he thought about New York City given that he just moved there.

“Well, it’s a little different from home,” Brennan said in the three and a half minute appearance. “I’m from the Midwest. Not sure if you can tell from my kind eyes and secret drinking problem. But I’m from a big, Minnesotan family. I’m one of eight kids.”

“Eight kids, wow, you do not see that a lot,” Jost said.

“Yeah. I think probably ’cause it’s the wrong choice,” Brennan responded, to laughs from the audience.

Brennan, who had previously just played small background parts, went on to describe how his childhood home had a cafeteria-style milk machine and a milkman who delivered.

“Tim the milkman was a big part of my life,” Brennan said. “He’d show up, he’d replace the milk, we’d play catch, he’d call me ‘son.’ I’d be, like, ‘Why do I look so much like you?’ ”

Jost joked that it sounds like Brennan grew up in the 1930s.

“I didn’t, but I do look like I did. I look like a locket photo during World War I. You know, I look like a guy who was really good at football pre-integration,” Brennan said to more chuckles from the crowd.

Brennan went on to say he loves the subway and that he finally worked up the nerve to jump his first turn style: “It was cool. It was exhilarating. It was thrilling. It was, uh, it was on the way out. But, like, it felt good. It still counts, you know?”

During the segment’s final minute, Brennan joked about how his Catholic upbringing always made him feel guilty and how he couldn’t confess to “the one sin that me and every other 12-year-old boy was committing constantly.”

Brennan will have to fight for future screentime, given the size of the “SNL” cast, which boasts 10 repertory players and seven featured players.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Internet disruptions tied to Amazon’s cloud computing service affected people around the world Monday trying to connect to online services used for work, social media and video games.

About three hours after the outage began, Amazon Web Services said it was starting to recover from the problem. But the company later said it was continuing to respond to “significant” errors and connectivity issues across multiple services.

What is Amazon Web Services

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

Seattle-based Amazon said the problems were centered in its Virginia-based US-EAST-1 data center region, one of its most important cloud hubs around the world. The region is a backbone “for so many services that when things go screwy, domino effects around the internet-as-we-know-it are enormous,” wrote John Scott-Railton, a cybersecurity researcher at Citizen Lab, in a social media post.

What happened?

AWS traced the source of the problem to something called the “DynamoDB endpoint in the US-East-1 Region,” in a pair of jargon-laden updates.

“DynamoDB isn’t a term that most consumers know, but it underpins the apps and services that all of us use every single day,” said cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple.

DynamoDB is a centralized database service that many internet-based services use to track user information, store key data and manage their operations, Chapple said by email.

It’s “one of the record-keepers of the modern internet,” said Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “It’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s reliable. But today it stopped working and we saw the effects of that outage ripple across the internet.”

Amazon’s updates suggest the problem isn’t with the database itself, but rather that something went wrong with the records that tell other systems where to find their data, he said.

“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data. It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia,” Chapple said.

Amazon has attributed the outage to a domain name system issue. DNS is the service that translates internet addresses into machine-readable IP addresses that connects browsers and apps with websites and underlying web services. DNS errors disrupt the translation process, interrupting the connection.

Because so many sites and services use AWS, a DNS error can have widespread results.

Who was affected?

Internet users around the world faced widespread disruption because Amazon’s problem took down dozens of major online services, including social media site Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games and chat app Signal.

On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services.

Starbucks experienced “a very limited impact for a very short amount of time” to its app, but all stores were serving customers normally, Starbucks Global Communications Director Jaci Anderson said in an email to The Associated Press.

“Our mobile order ahead and pay app is working normally to serve our customers this morning,” Anderson said midmorning.

DoorDash said its systems were not directly affected but some of its partners “experienced brief disruptions” affecting deliveries.

The risks of centralized cloud services

Some cybersecurity experts have warned for years about the potentially ugly consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to dominate key internet operations.

“So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) compute companies who provide the underlying infrastructure that when there’s an issue like this, it can be really impactful across a broad range, a broad spectrum” of online services, said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

“The world now runs on the cloud,” and the internet is seen as a utility like water or electricity, as we spend so much of our lives on our smartphones, Burgess said.

And because so much of the online world’s plumbing is underpinned by a handful of companies, when something goes wrong, “it’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox,” Burgess said.

“The good news is that this kind of issue is usually relatively fast (to resolve)” and there’s no indication that it was caused by a cyber incident like a cyberattack, Burgess said.

Has this happened in the past?

This is not the first time a problem with Amazon’s key services has caused widespread disruptions.

Many popular internet services and publishers were down after a brief outage in 2023. AWS’s longest outage in recent history occurred in late 2021, when companies — everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services — were affected for more than five hours. Other major outages happened in 2020 and 2017.

Unrelated to Amazon, a faulty software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike affecting devices running Microsoft’s Windows also rippled across the world to cause massive disruptions in 2024.

By ERIC TUCKER and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for former FBI Director James Comey urged a judge Monday to dismiss the case against him, calling it a vindictive prosecution motivated by “personal animus” and orchestrated by a White House determined to seek retribution against a perceived foe of President Donald Trump.

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The lawyers separately called for the indictment’s dismissal because of what they said was the illegitimate appointment of the U.S. attorney who filed the case days after being hastily named to the job by Trump.

The two-prong attack on the indictment, which accuses Comey of lying to Congress five years ago, represents the opening salvo in what is expected to be a protracted court fight ahead of a trial currently set for Jan. 5. The motions take aim not at the substance of the allegations but rather on the unusual circumstances of the prosecution, which included Trump exhorting his attorney general to bring charges against Comey as well as his administration’s abrupt installation of a White House aide to serve as top prosecutor of the elite office overseeing the case.

“Bedrock principles of due process and equal protection have long ensured that government officials may not use courts to punish and imprison their perceived personal and political enemies,” wrote Comey’s defense team, which includes Patrick Fitzgerald, the former U.S. Attorney in Chicago and a longtime Comey friend. “But that is exactly what happened here.”

They said the Justice Department had brought the case because of Trump’s hatred of Comey, who as FBI director in the first months of Trump’s first term infuriated the president through his oversight of an investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump fired Comey in May 2017. The two have been open adversaries in the years since, with Comey labeling Trump “unethical” and comparing him to a mafia boss and Trump branding Comey an “untruthful slimeball” and calling for him to be punished because of the Russia investigation.

“The government has singled out Mr. Comey for prosecution because of his protected speech and because of President Trump’s personal animus toward Mr. Comey,” defense lawyers wrote, adding that such a “vindictive and selection prosecution” violates multiple provisions of the Constitution and must be dismissed.

Comey’s defense team had foreshadowed the arguments during his first and only court appearance in the case, where he pleaded not guilty.

Though motions alleging vindictive prosecutions do not often succeed, this one lays out a timeline of events intended to link Trump’s demands for a prosecution with the Justice Department’s scramble to secure an indictment last month just before the statute of limitations was set to lapse.

Last month, for instance, he complained in a Truth Social post directed to Attorney General Pam Bondi that “nothing is being done” on investigations into some of his foes and called for action, specifically referencing inquiries into Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California.

“JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” part of the message said.

He installed Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who had been one of Trump’s personal lawyers but had no experience as a federal prosecutor, to run the Eastern District of Virginia and replace Erik Siebert, who had resigned as U.S. attorney one day earlier amid administration pressure to charge Comey and James. Comey was indicted days later.

Comey’s lawyers argued that that social media post represented an admission that the government was prosecuting Comey for “an impermissible discriminatory purpose.”

“For many years, President Trump has sought to prosecute or otherwise punish Mr. Comey because of overt hostility to Mr. Comey’s protected speech and because of his personal bias against Mr. Comey,” the attorneys said. “But despite President Trump’s yearslong campaign to prosecute Mr. Comey, no career or appointed prosecutor had ever agreed to do so. Thus, Mr. Trump made clear to his Attorney General that the only way to achieve ‘JUSTICE’ against Mr. Comey was by ousting Mr. Siebert and installing Ms. Halligan.”

Defense lawyers in a separate motion argued that the case was “fatally flawed” because Halligan was unlawfully appointed before she signed the indictment late last month.

“The President and Attorney General appointed the President’s personal lawyer as interim U.S. Attorney in violation of a clear statutory command so that the interim U.S. Attorney could indict an outspoken critic of the President just days before the relevant statute of limitations was set to expire,” defense lawyers said.

That motion is expected to be heard by a different judge than the trial judge, U.S. District Court Michael Nachmanoff.

Halligan is not the only U.S. attorney facing a court challenge.

A federal appeals court in Philadelphia heard arguments Monday in a case challenging the tenure of Alina Habba as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor. A panel of judges did not immediately rule but questioned the propriety of maneuvers meant to keep Habba in her job.

Separately Monday, defense lawyers and prosecutors argued in court papers over a suggestion by the Justice Department that Fitzgerald, might have to step aside. Prosecutors late Sunday asserted in a court filing that Comey’s “lead defense counsel” had earlier been used by Comey to disclose classified information, a claim the defense team called “provably false” and defamatory.

Associated Press writer Mike Catalini in Philadelphia contributed.