The Trump administration is blocking Venezuela's government from paying for the cost of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro's defense against drug trafficking charges in New York, a move that potentially interferes with his constitutional right to counsel, his lawyer says. Attorney Barry Pollack told a Manhattan federal judge in an email last week that the U. S. Treasury Department had blocked the authorization of legal fees that the government of Venezuela is required to pay for Maduro and Lady...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A prominent Supreme Court litigator who also published a popular blog about the nation's highest court was convicted Wednesday of tax evasion and related charges stemming from his secretive lifestyle as an ultra-high-stakes poker player. A federal jury found SCOTUSblog co-founder Thomas Goldstein guilty of 12 of 16 counts after a six-week trial in Greenbelt, Maryland. Jurors deliberated for approximately two days before convicting Goldstein of one count of tax evasion, four...

Researchers say seven seal pups have tested positive for an avian flu virus at California’s Año Nuevo State Park and several more are showing signs of the illness. The outbreak has prompted park officials to cancel the park's popular seal-watching tours for the remainder of the seal breeding season. Researchers with University of California-Santa Cruz and University of California-Davis made the announcement Wednesday, calling it the first detected outbreak of the virus among marine mammals...