Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proving that a crime occurred.

Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

BP will face a maximum fine of $13.7bn under the Clean Water Act for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, several billion less than feared.

Federal magistrate Carl Barbier ruled on Thursday that the size of the spill from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the worst offshore spill in US history, was smaller than the government had claimed.

A simple negligence ruling, which BP sought, caps the maximum fine at $1,100 per barrel.

A Brooklyn man who claimed the police manufactured gun-possession charges against him had his case dismissed on Thursday, amid two investigations into the practices of a group of police officers in the 67th Precinct in East Flatbush.

The man, Jeffrey Herring, had maintained his innocence ever since his arrest on June 4, 2013, asserting that officers had planted the gun on him and fabricated the circumstances of his arrest.

The officers claimed that they got a tip from a confidential informer that Mr. Herring had a gun

(Reuters) - While most Americans approve of the work being done by their local police, nearly a third feel that some officers "routinely lie to serve their own interests," a survey released on Thursday by Reuters and the IPSOS polling organization showed.

The number rises to 45 percent among African-Americans.

Nearly 70 percent of African-American respondents believe that police target minorities.

Most New Yorkers didn't approve of police officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at the funerals of two officers shot to death in their patrol car

The Quinnipiac University poll found that 69 percent disapproved of the silent protest

Among the poll results, 77 percent said relations between de Blasio and the police are "generally bad."

A 20-year veteran of the Trumbull police force Tuesday began serving a 30-month prison term Tuesday for repeatedly sexually assaulting a teenaged girl he met through the department’s explorer program.

William Ruscoe told Superior Court Judge Robert Devlin Friday he was sorry for his actions.

“I was completely betrayed by someone I looked up to as a role model,” the girl told the judge. “I still wake up in a pool of sweat after having a nightmare where I yell stop and no, the two words I yelled that night at him.”

"He was a healthy 19-year-old when he went in there," said Tanyatta Woods

Deundrez Woods, an all-city wrestler at Huntsville High School, had been enrolled in summer school in 2013 when he was arrested for using a phony $100 bill at Wal-Mart. He was sentenced to jail for 60 days. His mother says the jail time was the result of an unpaid speeding ticket.

He'd been locked up for about three weeks when he appeared in court. But by then, she says, her son looked all wrong.

Nearly five years after it hit best-seller lists, a book that purported to be a 6-year-old boy's story of visiting angels and heaven after being injured in a bad car crash is being pulled from shelves. The young man at the center of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Alex Malarkey, said this week that the story was all made up.

The book's publisher, Tyndale House, had promoted it as "a supernatural encounter that will give you new insights on Heaven, angels, and hearing the voice of God."

"I did not die. I did not go to Heaven," Alex wrote. He continued, "I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible."

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The shift to a majority-poor student population means that in public schools, a growing number of children start kindergarten already trailing their more privileged peers and rarely, if ever, catch up. They are less likely to have support at home, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school, and are more likely to drop out and never attend college.

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

"I see this as a call for action to close the gap between conservation on land and in the sea," said Loren McClenachan of Colby College, who was not involved in the study.

"It is imperative that these two be located and apprehended as their behavior is becoming increasingly brazen and dangerous," the Grayson County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

They're accused of stealing a neighbor's red Toyota pickup truck, which was spotted on security video nine days later outside a Walmart store in Manning

“There was no assault, the man gave himself up”, the source said, adding that the hostages were “shocked but not injured”.

Police said the post office incident did not appear to be linked to extremist attacks.

Last year was the hottest in earth’s recorded history, scientists reported on Friday, underscoring scientific warnings about the risks of runaway emissions and undermining claims by climate-change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.

Of the large inhabited land areas, only the eastern half of the United States recorded below-average temperatures in 2014

Several scientists said the most remarkable thing about the 2014 record was that it occurred in a year that did not feature El Niño, a large-scale weather pattern in which the ocean dumps an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere.

Nationally, nearly 4-in-10 private sector workers -- 39 percent -- do not have access to any sick leave at all.

that amounts to 43.5 million workers who may be compelled by financial reasons to come into the office when they're sniffling, sneezing, barfing, and generally feeling under the weather, making the rest of us ill in the process.

Republicans in Congress are trying to drum up support for a bill that would counter the FCC's upcoming new rules. The Obama administration's comments, while not entirely rebuffing the legislative effort, could make some Democrats wary of joining it.

Obama has urged the FCC to regulate ISPs more strictly under a section of communications law known as Title II, which would treat them more like public utilities.

Republican chairmen of the Senate and House commerce committees, John Thune and Fred Upton, have been working to strike a legislative deal with Democrats that would adopt some of the same net neutrality principles but without resorting to Title II.

The five officers involved in the CIA monitoring of computers Senate staffers used while probing the intelligence agency's torture program acted in good faith and committed no wrongdoing. That's according to a Wednesday report from an "accountability board" in which three of its five members are CIA officials.

The review board concluded there was simply a misunderstanding, that the CIA believed it could search the computers being used by staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. National security was at stake, too.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) chaired the intelligence committee last year when the breaches occurred, and the politician said she was "disappointed that no one at the CIA will be held accountable."

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether all 50 states must allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. The court’s announcement made it likely that it would resolve one of the great civil rights questions of the age before its current term ends in June.

The justices ducked the issue in October, refusing to hear appeals from rulings allowing same-sex marriage in five states.

The groundbreaking memoir of a current Guantánamo inmate that lays bare the harrowing details of the US rendition and torture programme from the perspective of one of its victims is to be published next week after a six-year battle for the manuscript to be declassified.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes a world tour of torture and humiliation that began in his native Mauritania more than 13 years ago and progressed through Jordan and Afghanistan before he was consigned to US detention in Guantánamo, Cuba, in August 2002 as prisoner number 760.

The journal, which Slahi handwrote in English, details how he was subjected to sleep deprivation, death threats, sexual humiliation and intimations that his torturers would go after his mother.

The Justice Department secretly kept a database of Americans’ calls to foreign countries for more than a decade, according to a new court filing and officials familiar with the program.