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WASHINGTON (AP) — A 2-year-old Supreme Court decision has added more confusion, rather than clarity, about how police may track the whereabouts of criminal suspects.

In 2012, the justices unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling that police made an error when they didn't have a valid warrant but still attached a GPS tracking device to the car of a Washington, D.C., nightclub owner. It led them to a stash house for drugs.

But in three separate opinions, the justices offered different legal rationales — and that's left a muddled legal landscape.

New technologies are developing more quickly than judges can issue opinions, and courts in different jurisdictions have reached different conclusions on similar issues, leaving law enforcement confused about what it can legally do.

BAGHDAD (AP) — The mayor and residents of a northern Iraqi town close to the Syrian border say Sunni militants have captured the town of Tal Afar.

Mayor Abdulal Abdoul told The Associated Press that his town, located 420 kilometers (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad, was taken just before dawn on Monday.

The town has a population of some 200,000 people, mostly ethnic Shiite and Sunni Turkomen.

Residents in the town reached by phone confirmed its capture by militants. They spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for their safety.

The fall of Tal Afar comes a week after militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant captured Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit in a lightening offensive.

BEIJING (AP) — A court in western China sentenced three people to death Monday for planning a deadly car ramming at Beijing's iconic Tiananmen Gate that was blamed on Muslim separatists, state media reported.

The three were accused of helping prepare for the Oct. 28 attack, in which a car plowed through tourists and ended up in a fiery crash in the heart of Beijing, killing two bystanders and the three attackers.

A court in the Xinjiang regional capital of Urumqi sentenced the three to death, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Five other people were given prison sentences, with four receiving terms of five to 20 years and one getting a life sentence. It was not clear what role those five had played in the attack.

The eight were arrested within days of the incident. A Chinese visitor and a tourist from the Philippines were killed in the attack, along with the vehicle's driver, his wife and mother-in-law, according to Chinese authorities.

The attack was the first to strike Beijing in recent years. It pointed to a new level of violence and lethal intent in the long-simmering insurgency against Chinese rule in the far northwestern region of Xinjiang waged by radicals among the native Turkic Uighur Muslim population.

The Tiananmen Gate attack was followed by similar incidents in Xinjiang, including one on May 22 in which men driving off-road vehicles and throwing explosives plowed through a crowded market in Urumqi, killing 39 people. Police said four suspects were killed at the scene and a fifth was caught that evening in an area about 250 kilometers (150 miles) south of Urumqi.

Beijing says unrest among Uighurs is caused by extremist groups with ties to Islamic terror groups abroad, but has shown little direct evidence.

Uighur activists say public resentment against Beijing is fueled by an influx of settlers from China's Han ethnic majority, economic disenfranchisement and onerous restrictions on Uighur religious and cultural practices.