AP - County clerk offices opened their doors Tuesday to hundreds of gay and lesbian couples with appointments to secure marriage licenses and exchange vows on the first full day same-sex nuptials were legal throughout California.

AP - The rising Mississippi River interrupted travel on two bridges between Iowa and Illinois and forced the helicopter rescue of more than a dozen people sandbagging a levee before it broke.

AP - A military judge dismissed charges Tuesday against a Marine officer accused of failing to investigate the killings of 24 Iraqis.

AP - European astronomers have found a trio of "super-Earths" closely circling a star that astronomers once figured had nothing orbiting it, demonstrating that planets keep popping up in unexpected places.

AP - Some health insurance companies rate doctors on their performance. Now doctors are turning the tables.

AP - Police may have ignored a warning years ago that a woman with five dead spouses was trying to hire a hit man to kill one of the men, investigators in North Carolina said Monday.

AP - His lifelong dream of becoming a soldier had, in the end, come to this for Isaac Stevens: 28, penniless, in a wheelchair, fending off the sexual advances of another man in a homeless shelter.

AP - A couple accused of killing their 13-year-old son by tying him to a tree for two nights for punishment appeared in a courtroom Monday to face charges of murder and felony child abuse.