The "Don't ask, don't tell" policy was still in effect when Air Force 1^st Lt. Josh Seefried helped start secret Facebook groups to connect active-duty gay and lesbian soldiers with each other online. Lieutenant Seefried also wrote for many publications — under the pseudonym J.D. Smith — about what it was like to be gay and an active-duty member of the military.

It's not often you see an image of a brain scan on the wall of an art exhibit. But among works by Monet and Sisley at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore hangs just that — a cross-section of a human brain. It belongs to artist Lonni Sue Johnson.

The room is really two exhibits — the art Johnson created before she contracted viral encephalitis in 2007, which destroyed her hippocampus and parts of her left temporal lobe — and her work after.

Saying "it's time we know the whole truth" about the so-called Fast and Furious gun trafficking operation, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today followed through on his promise to issue subpoenas to Attorney General Eric Holder and other high-ranking Justice Department officials.

Better medical care and equipment means fewer troops are dying on the battlefield. But more troops are coming home severely wounded, with injuries that require lifelong care and cost millions of dollars in medical costs.

When it comes to meeting the goal of getting more local food into school lunch, a major challenge has always been finding the money. Thanks to the new school lunch law, more federal grants than ever are available.

But the problem is bigger than money. It takes a serious supply chain and dedicated labor to make it work, too.

In an interview for Wednesday's Morning Edition, Bill Adair, editor of PolitiFact.com and Washington bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times, talked with NPR's Steve Inskeep about how candidates at Tuesday night's GOP debate rated on PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is this hour pleading guilty to attempting to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger jet on Christmas Day 2009.

The Detroit Free Press, which is live-blogging the court action, reports that attorney Anthony Chambers surprised the courtroom earlier by announcing that "his client plans to plead guilty." And it adds that:

Mitt Romney continued his dogged, incremental pursuit of the White House, dominating the GOP presidential debate on the economy Tuesday night. The man once touted as his most formidable opponent was barely a factor.

It as a very bad night for that opponent, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose plan to revive the distressed American economy essentially boiled down to "drill, baby, drill."

What does the deal reached by Israel and Hamas to exchange long-held Sgt. Gilad Schalit for about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners mean for the seemingly never-ending Mideast peace process and politics in the region?

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Groups on both sides of the push to repeal Ohio's collective bargaining law are taking shots at each other over a great-grandmother and a firefighter appearing in separate ads.

Union-backed We Are Ohio on Tuesday noted their ad featuring Marlene Quinn of Cincinnati thanking firefighters for saving her great-granddaughter. In the ad, Quinn asks voters to repeal the law. An ad by Republican- and business-backed Building a Better Ohio used the same footage cutting out Quinn's repeal request.