SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (AP) -- Four people have been ordered to stand trial on charges they torched an 11-foot cross outside the California central coast home of a black teenager.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As her mother's Alzheimer's worsened over eight long years, so did Doreen Alfaro's bills: The walker, then the wheelchair, then the hospital bed, then the diapers - and the caregivers hired for more and more hours a day so Alfaro could go to work and her elderly father could get some rest.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The plot of land known for a decade as "the pile," "the pit" and "ground zero" opened to the public Monday for the first time since that terrible morning in 2001, transformed into a memorial consisting of two serene reflecting pools ringed by the chiseled-in-bronze names of the nearly 3,000 souls lost.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- A lawyer has asked the Virginia Supreme Court to throw out the incest conviction of a former top adviser to Martin Luther King Jr.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) -- Enough with the fun and games. Watson is going to work. IBM's supercomputer system, best known for trouncing the world's best "Jeopardy!" players on TV, is being tapped by one of the nation's largest health insurers to help diagnose medical problems and authorize treatments.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. intelligence in the struggle against terrorism comes in many forms, maddeningly general, improbably precise, a game of sorts with vast consequences for winner and loser.

Nearly 10 years after the September 2001 terror attacks, the U.S. government has significantly improved homeland security but still lacks a system to know who is leaving the country and exactly what is inside luggage checked at airports, according to a congressional audit.

FREEPORT, Maine (AP) -- Three days after 9/11, Elaine Greene held an American flag above her on a busy street corner in this small Maine town. Since then, she and two other women have waved the flag on the same corner for an hour every Tuesday in honor of America's service personnel and to show that the American spirit is alive and kicking.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- His sleeves rolled up and his finger stabbing the air, President Barack Obama pitched his newly unveiled jobs plan with campaign-style fervor Friday, urging Americans to pressure their lawmakers to pass his $447 billion initiative. "We're tougher than these times," he declared. "We are bigger than the smallness of our politics."

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) -- Union activists aren't backing off demands to work at a new Washington state grain terminal after hundreds of Longshore workers stormed the facility, overwhelmed guards and dumped grain.