Jerry Markon

As details of the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia trickled in Sunday, it appeared that the hours afterward were anything but orderly. Scalia was found dead in his room at a hunting resort by a ranch owner.

In October and November, more than 10,500 children crossed the U.S.-Mexico border by themselves, the vast majority from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, according to U.S. government data. That's a 106 percent increase over the same period last year.

The gunman suspected of storming a Planned Parenthood clinic and killing a police officer and two others used the phrase "no more baby parts'' to explain his act, according to a law enforcement official, a comment sure to further inflame the heated rhetoric surrounding abortion.

The lead contractor on the dysfunctional website for the Affordable Care Act is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects, including a flawed effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers, documents and interviews show.

Growing evidence of far-reaching federal surveillance of the phone records and Internet activity of millions of Americans reignited the debate Thursday about how aggressively the federal government uses its surveillance powers to protect against terrorist attacks.