Erik Eckholm

The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced Friday that it has imposed sweeping controls on the distribution of its products to ensure that none are used in lethal injections, a step that closes off the last remaining open-market source of drugs used in executions.

Whether and how to charge teenage sexters has become a quandary for prosecutors nationwide, forcing them to weigh when to muster the force of criminal justice and when to back off and let schools and families deal with youthful indiscretions.

From Friday to Monday, more than 6,000 federal prisoners will be released earlier than they once expected, although nearly one-third of them are foreign citizens who will be handed over for likely deportation.

A Wisconsin lawsuit brought by two police officers wounded in a 2009 shooting seeks to establish gun shop owners' liability for selling weapons to "straw buyers" -- after a similar Alaska case in which jurors sided with a shop owner.

By a 2-1 vote, a federal appeals court in Cincinnati on Thursday upheld the right of states to ban same-sex marriage, overturning lower court decisions in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee that found such restrictions to be unconstitutional.

It challenges four decades of constitutional doctrine and is based on disputed scientific theories. Yet a push to ban abortion at 20 weeks after conception, on the theory that the fetus can feel pain at that point, has emerged as a potent new tactic of the anti-abortion movement.