WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s White House fought and lost a battle to avoid making public what it claimed were confidential records of internal deliberations over the attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya last September.

Obama administration officials portray their unsuccessful effort to avoid disclosing the records as the end result of a process of “accommodation” which the government’s executive branch routinely uses to respond to frequent requests and subpoenas by Congress for sensitive materials.

By Mark Hosenball

(Reuters) – Fifteen men of Palestinian origin have been arrested on charges of running a multi-million-dollar cigarette smuggling ring in New York, and New York authorities who announced the arrests on Thursday said several of the suspects have ties to Hamas and other Islamist militant groups.

The men are accused of smuggling more than a million cartons of untaxed cigarettes from Virginia to be sold in grocery stores across New York, with $55 million in sales uncovered so far, Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, and Ray Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, said at a press conference.

WASHINGTON May 15 (Reuters) – The Justice Department’s
controversial decision to seize phone records of Associated
Press journalists was just one element in a sweeping U.S.
government investigation into media leaks about a Yemen-based
plot to bomb a U.S. airliner, government officials said on
Wednesday.

The search for who leaked the information is being led by
the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington and has involved
extensive FBI interviews of personnel at the Justice Department,
U.S. intelligence agencies, the White House’s National Security
staff and the FBI itself.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s administration fought back on Friday against Republican accusations that it covered up details of last year’s deadly assault on a U.S. mission in Libya, after a news report that memos on the incident were edited to omit a CIA warning of a threat posed by al Qaeda.

The report by ABC News gave new momentum to the highly partisan flap over whether the administration tried to avoid casting the September 11, 2012, attack as terrorism at a time when the presidential election was less than two months away.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration denied Republican accusations of a cover-up in last year’s deadly attack in Libya, moving on Friday to defuse a renewed political controversy after a news report said memos on the incident were edited to omit references to a CIA warning of an al Qaeda threat.

ABC News reported emails between the White House, State Department and intelligence agencies about the Benghazi attack went through 12 extensive revisions and were scrubbed clean of warnings about a militant threat.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration denied Republican accusations of a cover-up in last year’s deadly attack in Libya, moving on Friday to defuse a renewed political controversy after a news report said memos on the incident were edited to omit references to a CIA warning of an al Qaeda threat.

ABC News reported emails between the White House, State Department and intelligence agencies about the Benghazi attack went through 12 extensive revisions and were scrubbed clean of warnings about a militant threat.

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, May 9 (Reuters) – U.S. authorities on
Thursday announced visa fraud charges against a Tunisian man who
prosecutors said had met with a key figure in an alleged plot to
blow up a railroad line in Canada that carries Amtrak trains
between Toronto and New York.

In a letter filed in federal court in New York, prosecutors
said the man, Ahmed Abassi, 26, who had lived in Canada, was
recorded by a U.S. undercover agent discussing various “proposed
terrorist plots” with Chiheb Esseghaier, another Tunisian
suspect. Esseghaier is now being held by Canadian authorities.

SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration may seek to end a long-running debate over Internet wiretaps with proposed legislation that would enable law-enforcement agencies to tap into many types of Internet communications, U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter said.

The proposal is aimed at getting past the technical and legal obstacles that make it difficult for the FBI and other agencies with court orders to check so-called voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) services such as those offered by Microsoft Corp’s Skype.

WASHINGTON, May 7 (Reuters) – The regulator of the Vatican
bank on Tuesday signed an information-sharing pact with the U.S.
agency that tracks suspicious financial transactions, part of an
effort by the scandal-ridden bank to improve its international
image.

The bank, which manages money mostly for dioceses and
religious institutions and is known as the Institute for Works
of Religion (IOR), has traditionally been isolated from the
international regulatory system.

BOSTON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Investigators believe Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, likely made the bombs they are suspected of setting off at last month’s Boston Marathon in Tamerlan’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, law enforcement officials said on Friday.

FBI agents have been questioning Tamerlan’s wife, Katherine Russell, and other witnesses for days to try to piece together exactly how and where the devices were made and what people knew about the brothers’ beliefs and plans.