Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, lawmakers voted to approve a $1.1 trillion, 10-year plan that Democrats said could be their defining social policy achievement.

Jason Rodriguez, who is accused of shooting six people, one fatally, in Orlando, Fla., on Friday, “has been declining in mental health,” his lawyer said.

Gen. Casimir Pulaski finally became an American citizen, 230 years after he died fighting in the Revolutionary War.

As a high-priority bill for Congressional leaders and President Obama, the legislation has become a vehicle for many other initiatives large and small.

Years after the frontier town of Unalaska picked itself up off the barroom floor, residents fear a shelter would once again invite the wrong kinds of neighbors.

Heavier Americans are lobbying legislators and trying to move public opinion to recognize their point of view: that thin does not necessarily equal fit, and that people can be healthy at any size.

Construction of a permanent memorial is under way at the crash site in Pennsylvania of United Airlines Flight 93.

The results of that fight were evident as many liberal Democrats denounced the plan because of abortion restrictions, even though most held their noses in the end and voted for the bill itself.

There are just over 100 people in the world serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles in which no one was killed; 77 of them are in Florida.

Investigators believe that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the suspect in the mass shooting at Ford Hood, acted under a welter of emotional, ideological and religious pressures.

Those who treat soldiers’ psychological wounds say last week’s rampage highlights the strains of their profession.

Mental trauma and war have a long history. How to treat it remains a mystery.

Barack Obama’s speechifying once gripped the nation. Not so much now. He may need his salesman’s tools more than ever.

Professor Rossi was a noted sociologist and feminist scholar who was a founder of the National Organization for Women.

Mr. Rines will be mainly remembered not for holding more than 800 patents, starting a law school or writing music for the stage, but for his pursuit of the Loch Ness monster.

President Obama, extending condolences to Fort Hood, Tx., reminded Americans that people of “every race, faith and station” serve in the military — an oblique attempt to prevent a backlash against Muslims.

The bodies of the 13 victims were taken to Dover, Del., as federal investigators continued to figure out how and why this deadly act could have occurred on an Army base in the United States.

A piece of the stimulus program Congress passed earlier this year is helping the mayor burnish his credentials with the business community.

Some of the virulent culture that gave rise to the attack itself is defiantly asserting itself, despite efforts to contain it.

In Hebrew the word for Julie Seltzer’s arcane profession is soferet; she’s a scribe, a Hebrew calligrapher who writes sacred texts on parchment.