First Run News

A settlement in the lawsuit against two psychologists who helped devise the Central Intelligence Agency’s brutal interrogation program was announced on Thursday, bringing to an end an unusual effort to hold individuals accountable for the techniques the agency adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks. Lawyers for the three plaintiffs in the suit, filed in 2015 in Federal District Court in Spokane, Wash., said the former prisoners were tortured at secret C.I.A.

Venezuela’s new Constituent Assembly granted itself wide powers to write and pass legislation on Friday, a move that essentially nullifies the opposition-led legislature and puts President Nicolás Maduro’s party firmly in control of the country. In a decree, the assembly said it would “assume the ability to legislate over matters directly related to guaranteeing peace, security and sovereignty,” as well as a long list of other areas. The move enables the Constituent Assembly to supersede

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is making a fresh attempt at drafting an executive order on handling terrorism detainees, reviving a struggle to navigate legal and geopolitical obstacles to expand use of the Guantánamo Bay wartime prison, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations. Administration officials said President Trump had been expected to sign a detention policy order three weeks ago.

A police officer was shot to death and another was seriously wounded Friday night in Kissimmee, Fla., in what the police chief said may have been an ambush while the two men were responding to a call complaining of suspicious activity on the city’s north side. The two officers, both gravely injured, were found around 9:30 p.m. at the intersection of Palmway and Cypress Streets after residents reported the shooting, Chief Jeffrey O’Dell said. One of the officers, Matthew Baxter, who had been on the force for three years, later died. The other, Sgt.

Mark Bradford, the renowned Los Angeles artist, says Confederate statues should not be removed unless they are replaced by educational plaques that explain why they were taken away. For Robin Kirk, a co-director of Duke University’s Human Rights Center, the rapid expunging of the statues currently underway needs to be “slower and more deliberative.” And Lonnie G.

BOSTON — This city was bracing for a rally on Saturday that was expected to draw thousands of demonstrators, some of them advocating free speech, while many others, fearing that the rally would attract white nationalists, were promising a major counterdemonstration. The dueling demonstrations in Boston, along with rallies expected over the weekend in a handful of other cities, come at an extraordinarily tense moment, a week after violence broke out in Charlottesville, Va., and as a national debate was unfolding over questions of race, violence and the fate of Confederate symbols.

EUFAULA, Ala. — The facts of Southern history, according to Brad Griffin, are beyond dispute. “It was a slave society,” he said. “They had white supremacy. It was definitely racist. This is the truth.” It is a truth long hammered by activists who oppose the civic display of monuments honoring the Confederacy. But Mr. Griffin, 36, is no such activist. He sees the white-dominated reactionary ideology of the antebellum South not as something to condemn but as a source of inspiration. An avowed white nationalist, Mr.

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, has excoriated President Trump for his equivocating response to the violence in Charlottesville, Va., and urged him to apologize or risk subjecting the country to “an unraveling of our national fabric.” Mr. Romney’s remarks, posted on Facebook on Friday, mark some of the strongest language from a Republican against Mr.

Carl C. Icahn, the billionaire investor, is no longer advising President Trump on regulatory matters. In his first post on Twitter in three months, Mr.

BRIDGEWATER, N.J.