By SUDHIN THANAWALA, Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in Illinois faces legal scrutiny Thursday at a pivotal court hearing that will occur the day after a small number of Guard troops started protecting federal property in the Chicago area.

U.S. District Judge April Perry will hear arguments over a request to block the deployment of Illinois and Texas Guard members. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and local officials strongly oppose use of the Guard.

Military personnel in uniform, with the Texas National Guard patch on, are seen at the U.S. Army Reserve Center, Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025, in Elwood, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)

An “element” of the 200 Texas Guard troops sent to Illinois started working in the Chicago area on Wednesday, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Northern Command, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity in order to discuss operational details not been made public. The spokesperson did not say where specifically the troops were sent.

The troops, along with about 300 from Illinois, arrived this week at a U.S. Army Reserve Center in Elwood, southwest of Chicago. All 500 troops are under the Northern Command and have been activated for 60 days.

The Guard members are in the city to protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement buildings and other federal facilities and law enforcement personnel, according to Northern Command. Trump earlier sent troops to Los Angeles and Washington, and a small number this week started assisting law enforcement in Memphis.

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Those troops are part of the Memphis Safe Task Force, a collection of about a dozen federal law enforcement agencies ordered by Trump to fight crime in the city. Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee supports using the Guard.

The nearly 150-year-old Posse Comitatus Act limits the military’s role in enforcing domestic laws. However, Trump has said he would be willing to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to dispatch active duty military in states that are unable to put down an insurrection or are defying federal law.

Chicago and Illinois have filed a lawsuit to stop the deployments, calling them unnecessary and illegal. Trump, meanwhile, has portrayed Chicago as a lawless “hellhole” of crime, though statistics show a significant recent drop in crime.

The Republican president said Wednesday that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Pritzker, both Democrats, should be jailed for failing to protect federal agents during immigration enforcement crackdowns.

In a court filing in the lawsuit, the city and state say protests at a temporary ICE detention facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview have “never come close to stopping federal immigration enforcement.”

“The President is using the Broadview protests as a pretext,” they wrote. “The impending federal troop deployment in Illinois is the latest episode in a broader campaign by the President’s administration to target jurisdictions the President dislikes.”

Also Thursday, a panel of judges in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was scheduled to hear arguments over whether Trump had the authority to take control of 200 Oregon National Guard troops. The president had planned to deploy them in Portland, where there have been mostly small nightly protests outside an ICE building. State and city leaders insist troops are neither wanted nor needed there.

U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut on Sunday granted Oregon and California a temporary restraining order blocking the deployment of Guard troops to Portland. Trump had mobilized California troops for Portland just hours after Immergut first blocked him from using Oregon’s Guard.

The administration has yet to appeal that order to the 9th Circuit.

Immergut, who Trump appointed during his first term, rejected the president’s assertions that troops were needed to protect Portland and immigration facilities, saying “it had been months since there was any sustained level of violent or disruptive protest activity in the city.”

Associated Press writers Gene Johnson in Seattle and Konstantin Toropin in Washington contributed to this report.

By SAMY MAGDY, MELANIE LIDMAN and WAAFA SHURAFA, Associated Press

CAIRO (AP) — Israel and Hamas have agreed to a pause in their devastating two-year war and the release of the remaining hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners — a breakthrough greeted with joy and relief Thursday but also caution.

Uncertainty remains about some of the thornier aspects of the plan advanced by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump — such as whether and how Hamas will disarm, and who will govern Gaza. But the sides appear closer than they have been in months to ending a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, reduced much of Gaza to rubble, brought famine to parts of the territory, and triggered other conflicts across the Middle East.

The war, which began with Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has also sparked worldwide protests and led to allegations of genocide that Israel denies.

Even with the agreement expected to be signed in Egypt later in the day, Israeli strikes continued, with explosions seen Thursday in northern Gaza. There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

Smoke rises to the sky following an Israeli military strike in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025, following the announcement that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first phase of a peace plan to pause the fighting. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

An Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with military guidelines said that Israel was continuing to hit targets that posed a threat to its troops as they reposition.

In the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, celebrations were relatively muted and often colored by grief.

“I am happy and unhappy. We have lost a lot of people and lost loved ones, friends and family. We lost our homes,” said Mohammad Al-Farra. “Despite our happiness, we cannot help but think of what is to come. … The areas we are going back to, or intending to return to, are uninhabitable.”

In Tel Aviv, families of the remaining hostages popped champagne and cried tears of joy after Trump announced on social media late Wednesday that “ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line.”

On Thursday, thousands of observant Jews streamed into Jerusalem’s Old City to mark the holiday of Sukkot, with extra rejoicing for the upcoming hostage release.

“We were screaming and singing last night,” said Hindel Berman, a New Jersey resident who came to Jerusalem for the holiday. “We never, never, never gave up hope.”

Under the terms, Hamas intends to release all 20 living hostages in a matter of days, while the Israeli military will begin a withdrawal from the majority of Gaza, people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss details of an agreement that has not fully been made public.

“With God’s help we will bring them all home,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed on social media.

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Netanyahu plans to convene his Security Cabinet late Thursday to approve the ceasefire, and the entire parliament will then meet to approve the release of Palestinian prisoners.

The deal will include a list of prisoners to be released and maps for the first phase of an Israeli withdrawal to new positions in Gaza, according to two Egyptian officials briefed on the talks, a Hamas official and another official.

Israel will publish the list of the prisoners — and victims of their attacks have 24 hours to lodge objections.

The withdrawal could start as soon as Thursday evening, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to be publicly named speaking about the negotiations.

The hostage and prisoner releases are expected to begin Monday, the officials from Egypt and Hamas said, though the other official said they could occur as early as Sunday night.

Five border crossings would reopen, including the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, allowing 400 trucks in the initial days and increasing to 600 trucks after that, the Egyptian and Hamas officials said.

Trump is expected in the region in the coming days.

Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has opposed previous ceasefire deals, said he had “mixed emotions.”

While he welcomed the return of the hostages, he said he had “immense fear about the consequences of emptying the jails and releasing the next generation of terrorist leaders” and said that as soon as the hostages are returned, Israel must continue trying to eradicate Hamas and ensure Gaza is demilitarized.

Hamas, meanwhile, called on Trump and the mediators to ensure that Israel implements “without disavowal or delay” the troop withdrawal, the entry of aid into Gaza and the exchange of prisoners.

Trump’s peace plan

The Trump plan calls for an immediate ceasefire and release of the 48 hostages that Hamas still hold from their attack on Israel two years ago. Some 1,200 people were killed by Hamas in that assault, and 251 were taken hostage. Israel believes around 20 of the hostages are still alive.

People react as they celebrate following the announcement that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first phase of a peace plan to pause the fighting, at a plaza known as hostages square in Tel Aviv, Israel, Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Under the plan, Israel would maintain an open-ended military presence inside Gaza, along its border with Israel. An international force, comprised largely of troops from Arab and Muslim countries, would be responsible for security inside Gaza. The U.S. would lead a massive internationally funded reconstruction effort in Gaza.

The plan also envisions an eventual role for the Palestinian Authority — something Netanyahu has long opposed. But it requires the authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, to undergo a sweeping reform program that could take years to implement.

The Trump plan is even more vague about a future Palestinian state, which Netanyahu firmly rejects.

More than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and nearly 170,000 wounded during the war, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants but says around half of the deaths were women and children. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government, and the United Nations and many independent experts consider its figures to be the most reliable estimate of wartime casualties.

Relief at a deal

Even with many details yet to be agreed, many expressed relief at the progress.

In Tel Aviv, joyful relatives of hostages and their supporters spilled into the central square that has become the main gathering point in the effort to free the captives.

Palestinians celebrate following the announcement that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first phase of a peace plan to pause the fighting, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

Einav Zangauker, the mother of Israeli captive Matan Zangauker and a prominent advocate for the hostages’ release, told reporters that she wants to tell her son she loves him.

“If I have one dream, it is seeing Matan sleep in his own bed,” she said.

From the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, Alaa Abd Rabbo called the announcement “a godsend.”

“This is the day we have been waiting for,” said Abd Rabbo, who was originally from northern Gaza but was forced to move multiple times during the war. “We want to go home.”

This would be the third ceasefire since the start of the war. The previous two also saw hostages and prisoners exchanged. Israel ended the most recent ceasefire, which started in January, with a surprise bombardment in March.

Ayman Saber, a Palestinian from Khan Younis, said he plans to return to his home city and try to rebuild his house, which was destroyed last year by an Israeli strike.

“I will rebuild the house, we will rebuild Gaza,” he said.

Lidman reported from Tel Aviv, Israel, and Shurafa from Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip. Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Aamer Madhani in Washington, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut, David Rising in Bangkok, Sam Mednick in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Giovanna Dell’Orto in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

By KOSTYA MANENKOV and MIKE CORDER, Associated Press

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, whose philosophical, bleakly funny novels often unfold in single sentences, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for his for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

Several works including his debut, “Satantango” and “The Melancholy of Resistance,” were turned into films by Hungarian director Béla Tarr.

FILE – Hungary’s Laszlo Krasznahorkai poses for photographers in London, Tuesday, May 19, 2015. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

The Nobel judges praised his “artistic gaze which is entirely free of illusion, and which sees through the fragility of the social order combined with his unwavering belief in the power of art.”

Krasznahorkai, 71, has received many awards including the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. The Booker judges praised his “extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way.”

He also won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the U.S. in 2019 for “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.”

He is the first winner from Hungary since Imre Kertesz in 2002. He joins an illustrious list of laureates that includes Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro.

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The literature prize has been awarded by the Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy 117 times to a total of 121 winners. Last year’s prize was won by South Korean author Han Kang for her body of work that the committee said “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

The literature prize is the fourth to be announced this week, following the 2025 Nobels in medicine, physics and chemistry.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday.

The final Nobel, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is to be announced on Monday.

Nobel Prize award ceremonies are held on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite who founded the prizes.

Each prize carries an award of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million), and the winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a diploma.

Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands.

There’s been a lot of excitement about last week’s ruling by a federal judge in Boston that the Trump administration, in its efforts to deport college students holding objectionable political views, violated the First Amendment. Commentators have described the opinion by District Judge William G. Young as “blistering” and a “landmark” — and so on in that vein. And I’m pleased to see that the court tried to find a way to extend the protections of free speech to those present in the country on temporary visas.

But even though I’m in sympathy with the outcome, I find the celebrated opinion itself oddly unpersuasive, perhaps because the judge sets out to answer the wrong question. Appalled as I am by the administration’s assault on dissent, I wonder whether constitutional rights give us the proper lens through which to study what’s gone so constitutionally wrong.

Here’s a nice, clear democratic principle: The government should not keep track of what the people subject to its jurisdiction are saying — no surveillance, no recordkeeping, and certainly, no punishment. Yes, there are rare exceptions, but they must remain rare. Otherwise, debate suffers, which means that democracy suffers. Here’s a corollary: The government should neither be granted nor presumed to possess broad powers that would enable it to violate the principle.

As any libertarian will be quick to note, that’s not really a point about the rights of individuals; it’s a point about the structure and limits of government.

To see why, let’s turn to Association of American University Professors v. Rubio, the decision handed down by Judge Young. The plaintiffs — three chapters of the AAUP, together with the Middle East Studies Association — argue jointly that their members’ speech has been chilled by the crackdown on noncitizens who, in the words of President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order, “espouse hateful ideology” — in particular, speech that is pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel.

The deportations around which the case revolves arise from the exercise of the secretary of state’s statutory authority to deport visa holders for otherwise lawful “beliefs, statements, or associations,” but only if failing to do so would, in the secretary’s judgment, “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The secretary holds the even broader authority to revoke a visa “at any time, in his discretion.”

These are breathtaking grants of authority about which, as scholars often complain, there’s remarkably little law. The issue before the court — an issue around which judges have traditionally tiptoed — was whether the First Amendment limits those and similar discretionary federal powers over visa holders. For example, the government cannot punish one of its own citizens for the most vile expression of anti-Semitic views; contrary to what left and right too often seem to think, the First Amendment admits no exception for “hate” speech. But what about a noncitizen on a student visa? Are the rules the same? That was, until recently, ground largely untrod.

Judge Young concludes that the secretary of state’s broad discretion does not extend to deporting visa holders on the basis of speech alone, no matter how odious; and he concludes further that it was speech, and only speech, which prompted the visa revocations at issue.

I’m a near-absolutist on free speech, so I like the outcome. But the opinion itself is problematic — sufficiently problematic, I suspect, to invite reversal on appeal. For one thing, it’s unnecessarily long (more than 160 pages) and, to be frank, sloppily written — with lots of repetition, meandering detours into politics, and such elementary errors as confusing “staunch” and “stanch.” The New York Times, with old-fashioned understatement, called the opinion “exhaustive and winding.” Parts of the text read like a press release — a feature that may help explain why the news media found the opinion so quotable. Moreover, the judge dismisses with just a few sentences the most relevant Supreme Court precedent. (In addition, the opinion seems to misread the Supreme Court’s most recent cases on the standing of associations to assert the rights of their members — a simple ground for reversal, should an appellate court prefer not to reach the merits of the case.)

The difficulties emerge, I suspect, not from any inability to cope with the issues, but from the challenge of trying to fit into a First Amendment framework what’s really a problem of government power in a democracy.

Another immigration-related example might help make the point. First Amendment fans are up in arms about Apple’s recent decision to yield to Department of Justice pressure and remove from its app store ICEBlock and other applications that crowdsource information enabling users to track, in real time, the location of immigration agents. The developer says the app can help people avoid the area; the Justice Department says it can endanger federal personnel; and, reportedly, the Dallas detention center shooter used this app or a similar app to locate targets.

But the issue isn’t whether true information can be misused by those with wicked agendas; the issue is the lack of debate over what amounts in practice to government pressure for a ban. The ease with which the Justice Department swept ICEBlock out of the app store is concerning. If the federal government is so large and powerful that the mightiest corporations in the world tremble at its slightest whim, what chance do ordinary individuals have when its angry gaze burns our way?

The real challenge we face is the vast power we have concentrated in the federal government in general and in the presidency in particular. As much as we might talk about courts as checks on executive authority, the sad truth is that Congress has granted the president too much authority to check. Whatever lever of power a judge might refuse to let the administration use, there’s always another to tug. (See the Harvard litigation.)

Maybe it’s too late to imagine a smaller federal establishment with fewer powers. But as current events illustrate, if that’s the case, then the only real check is the ethical compass of the occupant of the Oval Office and those who advise him. Right now, they don’t seem to be pointing true north.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

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