Charlie Savage

Since Republicans took control of the Senate in January 2015, the process that would enable Obama to fill vacancies on the 12 regional federal courts of appeal has essentially been halted.

U.S. officials said Thursday that 10 lower-level Yemeni detainees had been transferred from the Guantánamo Bay prison to Oman. The transfer, which took place Wednesday, was the largest single resettlement of detainees in the yearslong effort to close the prison in Cuba.

Weeks before President Barack Obama ordered the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in May 2011, four administration lawyers hammered out rationales intended to overcome any legal obstacles — and made it all but inevitable that Navy SEALs would kill the fugitive Qaida leader, not capture him.

Since last weekend's prisoner exchange in which Afghan insurgents turned over Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl after five years of captivity, a number of the men who served with him have called him a deserter. Some have gone further, blaming him for the deaths of six to eight soldiers.

The National Security Agency in 2010 and 2011 conducted a secret pilot project to test the collection of bulk data about the location of Americans' cellphones, but the agency ultimately decided against putting such a program into play for now, according to intelligence officials.

The federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.

From 1993 to early 2011, FBI agents fatally shot about 70 "subjects" and wounded about 80 others -- and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal FBI records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The Obama administration's announcement that it plans to question the Boston Marathon bombing suspect for a period without first reading him the Miranda warning of his right to remain silent and have a lawyer present has revived a constitutionally charged debate over the handling of terrorism cases in the criminal justice system.

An administrative judge has overturned the suspensions of two federal prosecutors whom the Justice Department had tried to discipline for failing to turn over evidence that might have helped the defense in the botched corruption trial against Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.