WASHINGTON (AP) -- Barbara Von Aspern loves her daughter, "thinks the world" of the person her daughter intends to marry and believes the pair should have the same legal rights as anyone else. It pains her, but Von Aspern is going to skip their wedding. Her daughter, Von Aspern explains, is marrying another woman.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Sometimes, a fashion launch is just too enticing.

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Texas Gov. Rick Perry says a massive fence along the U.S.-Mexican border isn't the answer to the nation's immigration challenges and instead says Washington should send thousands of border agents and National Guard to patrol the area.

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.