Israel accepts a US proposal for a temporary Gaza ceasefire and Hamas gives a cool response

Israel has accepted a new U.S. proposal for a temporary ceasefire with Hamas, the White House said Thursday.

U.S. President Donald Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, expressed optimism earlier this week about brokering an agreement to halt the Israel-Hamas war and return more of the hostages captured in the attack that ignited it.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Israel “backed and supported” the new proposal.

Hamas officials gave the Israeli-approved draft a cool response, but said they wanted to study the proposal more closely before giving a formal answer.

“The Zionist response, in essence, means perpetuating the occupation and continuing the killing and famine,” Bassem Naim, a top Hamas official, told The Associated Press. He said it “does not respond to any of our people’s demands, foremost among which is stopping the war and famine.”

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Federal judge extends order blocking Trump administration ban on foreign students at Harvard

BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday extended an order blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to bar Harvard University from enrolling foreign students.

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs extended the block she imposed last week with a temporary restraining order, which allows the Ivy League school to continue enrolling international students as a lawsuit proceeds.

Harvard sued the federal government on Friday after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revoked its ability to host foreign students at its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"Harvard will continue to take steps to protect the rights of our international students and scholars, members of our community who are vital to the University’s academic mission and community — and whose presence here benefits our country immeasurably,” a university spokesman said in a statement.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration introduced a new effort to revoke Harvard's certification to enroll foreign students. In a letter sent by the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, Todd Lyons, the government gave Harvard 30 days to respond to the alleged grounds for withdrawal, which include accusations that Harvard coordinated with foreign entities and failed to respond sufficiently to antisemitism on campus.

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What happens to Trump’s tariffs now that a court has knocked them down?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has audaciously claimed virtually unlimited power to bypass Congress and impose sweeping taxes on foreign products.

Now a federal court has thrown a roadblock in his path.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled Wednesday that Trump overstepped his authority when he invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to declare a national emergency and plaster taxes – tariffs – on imports from almost every country in the world.

The ruling was a big setback for Trump, whose erratic trade policies have rocked financial markets, paralyzed businesses with uncertainty and raised fears of higher prices and slower economic growth. On his Truth Social platform Thursday, he wrote: “The ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade is so wrong, and so political! Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY.”

Trump’s trade wars are far from over. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday allowed the president to temporarily continue collecting the tariffs under the emergency powers law while he appeals the trade court's decision.

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Trump's latest pardons benefit an array of political allies and public figures

WASHINGTON (AP) — A governor who resigned amid a corruption scandal and served two stints in federal prison. A New York Republican who resigned from Congress after a tax fraud conviction and who made headlines for threatening to throw a reporter off a Capitol balcony over a question he didn't like. Reality TV stars convicted of cheating banks and evading taxes.

All were unlikely beneficiaries this week of pardons, with President Donald Trump flexing his executive power to bestow clemency on political allies, prominent public figures and others convicted of defrauding the public. The moves not only take aim at criminal cases once touted as just by the Justice Department but also come amid a continuing Trump administration erosion of public integrity guardrails, including the firing of the department's pardon attorney and the near-dismantling of a prosecution unit established to hold public officials accountable for abusing the public trust.

"He is using pardons to essentially override the verdicts of juries, to set aside the sentences that have been imposed by judges and to accomplish political objectives,” said Liz Oyer, who was fired in March as the Justice Department's pardon attorney after she says she refused to endorse restoring the gun rights of actor Mel Gibson, a Trump supporter. “That is very damaging and destructive to our system of justice.”

To be sure, other presidents have courted controversy with their clemency decisions. President Gerald Ford famously pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive financier Marc Rich just hours before the Democratic president left office. More recently, President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, sparing the younger Biden a possible prison sentence for federal felony gun and tax convictions and reversing his past promises not to use the extraordinary powers of the presidency for the benefit of his family.

But the pardons announced Wednesday are part of a pattern of clemency grants that began in Trump's first term and has continued in the current one in which bold-faced names, prominent supporters and defendants whose causes are championed by friends time and again have an edge on ordinary citizens who lack connections to the White House.

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Trump administration increases pressure on 'sanctuary jurisdictions' with public listing

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Homeland Security is putting more than 500 “sanctuary jurisdictions” across the country on notice that the Trump administration views them as obstructing immigration enforcement as it attempts to increase pressure on communities it believes are standing in the way of the president's mass deportations agenda.

The department on Thursday published a list of the jurisdictions and said each one will receive formal notification that the government has deemed them noncompliant and if they're believed to be in violation of any federal criminal statutes. The list was published on the department's website.

“These sanctuary city politicians are endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press release.

The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted communities, states and jurisdictions that it says aren't doing enough to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it seeks to make good on President Donald Trump's campaign promises to remove millions of people in the country illegally.

The list was compiled using a number of factors, including whether the cities or localities identified themselves as sanctuary jurisdictions, how much they complied already with federal officials enforcing immigration laws, if they had restrictions on sharing information with immigration enforcement or had any legal protections for people in the country illegally, according to the department.

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Elon Musk came to Washington wielding a chain saw. He leaves behind upheaval and unmet expectations

WASHINGTON (AP) — Elon Musk arrived in the nation's capital with the chain saw-wielding swagger of a tech titan who had never met a problem he couldn’t solve with lots of money, long hours or a well-calibrated algorithm.

President Donald Trump was delighted to have the world’s richest person — and a top campaign donor — working in his administration, talking about how he was “a smart guy” who “really cares for our country.”

Musk was suddenly everywhere — holding forth in Cabinet meetings while wearing a “tech support” shirt and black MAGA hat, hoisting his young son on his shoulders in the Oval Office, flying aboard Air Force One, sleeping in the White House. Democrats described the billionaire entrepreneur as Trump’s “co-president,” and senior officials bristled at his imperial approach to overhauling the federal government.

After establishing Tesla as a premier electric automaker, building rockets at SpaceX and reshaping the social media landscape by buying Twitter, Musk was confident that he could bend Washington to his vision.

Now that’s over. Musk said this week that he’s leaving his job as a senior adviser, an announcement that came after he revealed his plan to curtail political donations and he criticized the centerpiece of Trump's legislative agenda.

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A global rally for stocks loses steam amid questions about what will happen to Trump's tariffs

NEW YORK (AP) — A big rally for stocks that began in Asia on Thursday lost steam after sweeping into Europe and the United States amid uncertainty about what will happen next after a U.S. court blocked many of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

The S&P 500 rose 0.4% after giving up more than half of an early gain. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 117 points, or 0.3%, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.4%.

It’s a downshift after stocks initially leaped nearly 2% in Tokyo and Seoul, where markets had the first chance to react to the ruling late Wednesday by the U.S. Court of International Trade. The court said that the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act that Trump cited for ordering massive increases in taxes on imports from around the world does not authorize the use of tariffs.

The ruling at first raised hopes in financial markets that a hamstrung Trump would not be able to drive the economy into a recession with his tariffs, which had threatened to grind down on global trade and raise prices for consumers already sick of high inflation. Trump has said he wants to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, and he warned the process could cause some pain for U.S. households.

But the tariffs remain in place for now while the White House appeals the ruling, and the ultimate outcome is still uncertain. The court’s ruling also affects only some of Trump’s tariffs, not those on foreign steel, aluminum and autos, which were invoked under a different law.

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Ex-assistant testifies Sean 'Diddy' Combs sexually assaulted her and used violence to get his way

NEW YORK (AP) — Sean “Diddy” Combs ’ former personal assistant testified Thursday that the hip-hop mogul sexually assaulted her, threw her into a swimming pool, dumped a bucket of ice on her and slammed a door against her arm during a torturous eight-year tenure.

The woman, testifying at Combs' sex trafficking trial under the pseudonym “Mia," said Combs put his hand up her dress and forcibly kissed her at his 40th birthday party in 2009, forced her to perform oral sex while she helped him pack for a trip and raped her in guest quarters at his Los Angeles home in 2010 after climbing into her bed.

“I couldn’t tell him ‘no’ about anything,” Mia said, telling jurors she felt “terrified and confused and ashamed and scared” when Combs raped her. The assaults, she said, were unpredictable: “always random, sporadic, so oddly spaced out where I would think they would never happen again.”

If she hadn’t been called to testify, Mia said, “I was going to die with this. I didn’t want anyone to know ever.”

Speaking slowly and haltingly, Mia portrayed Combs as a controlling taskmaster who put his desires above the wellbeing of staff and loved ones. She said Combs berated her for mistakes, even ones other employees made, and piled on so many tasks she didn't sleep for days.

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Authorities eyeing whether a kitchen job had a role in the 'Devil in the Ozarks' prison escape

CALICO ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas authorities are looking at whether a job in the prison kitchen played a role in the weekend escape of a convicted former police chief known as the “Devil in the Ozarks.”

Grant Hardin, 56, was housed in a maximum-security wing of the medium-security Calico Rock prison, where he also held a job in the kitchen, Arkansas Department of Corrections spokesperson Rand Champion said Thursday. Authorities have said Hardin escaped Sunday by donning an outfit designed to look like a law enforcement uniform.

“His job assignment was in the kitchen, so just looking to see if that played a part in it as well,” Champion told The Associated Press.

The kitchen is divided into two shifts of about 25 workers each, according to a 2021 accreditation report that involved an extensive review of the prison. In the kitchen, “tools and utensils were stored on shadow boards with proper controls for sign out/in of all tools,” the report states. “A check of the inventory control sheets found them to be accurate and up to date.”

The kitchen is in one of 16 buildings on over 700 acres (280 hectares) of prison land. The sprawling grounds include a garden, two greenhouses, and extensive pasture lands where a herd of more than 100 horses is raised and trained by staff and inmates.

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Patriots say they will handle video of receiver Stefon Diggs internally

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) — New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel said Wednesday that he is aware of a video that showed receiver Stefon Diggs passing a bag of pink crystals to women on a boat. Vrabel declined to comment on whether he has spoken to Diggs about it.

“Any conversations that I’ve had with Stefon will remain between him, I and the club,” Vrabel said before an optional practice that Diggs did not attend.

“It’s something that we’re aware of,” Vrabel said. “Obviously, we want to make great decisions on and off the field. … The message will be the same for all our players, that we’re trying to make great decisions.”

An NFL spokesman said the league would not comment. Diggs' agents did not immediately respond to a text from The Associated Press requesting comment.

Diggs, who has been linked to hip-hop star Cardi B this offseason, is shown in a video on social media talking to three women on a boat before he produces a bag of pink crystals. It's not clear what the pink substance was.

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