Krishnadev Calamur

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with older federal workers on Monday, making it easier for those over 40 to sue for age discrimination.

The 8-to-1 ruling rejected a Trump administration position that sought to dramatically limit the legal recourse available to federal workers.

Updated Sunday at 11:34 a.m. ET

The White House's legal team has called the House impeachment process "highly partisan and reckless" in a forceful response to the summons issued last week by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ahead of President Trump's Senate impeachment trial, which begins Tuesday.

Updated at 5 p.m. ET

President Trump said that Iran appears "to be standing down" after Tuesday night's missile attack in Iraq and that "the American people should be extremely grateful and happy no Americans were harmed."

Trump, in a nationally televised address from the White House, also announced a new round of what he termed "punishing economic sanctions" against the Iranian government. And he called on NATO to become "much more involved in the Middle East process."

Updated at 11:49 a.m. ET

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that states cannot keep same-sex couples from marrying and must recognize their unions. Those dissenting were the court's four conservative justices: Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito.

Roberts' Rationale

Updated at 3:42 p.m.

After listening to testimony from 63 witnesses and deliberating since Wednesday, a jury of seven women and five men in Boston gave convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the death penalty.

There was no visible reaction from either Tsarnaev or his legal team.

The jury sentenced Tsarnaev to die on counts 4, 5, 9, 10, 14 and 15. Here is more detail about those counts:

Russia's space agency is trying to save an unmanned cargo ship that spun out of control on its way to the International Space Station.

Updated at 8:10 p.m. EDT

The U.S. Capitol Police have confirmed that Douglas Mark Hughes of Ruskin, Fla. was the pilot who landed a gyrocopter not far from the capitol building.

Police searched the vehicle, saying "nothing hazardous" was found. The gyrocopter was relocated to a secure location, the department said in a statement.

Shortly after landing, Hughes was quickly named by friends and news outlets as the man who flew low over the reflecting pool to land near the Congressional buildings. He was met by police with their guns drawn.

The fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is in the hands of the jury that is deciding whether to convict the 21-year-old who has admitted to being the Boston Marathon bomber.

Updated at 11:39 a.m.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his son Jeb Bush Jr. have responded to a news report that the likely Republican presidential candidate self-identified as Hispanic in a 2009 voter-registration application.

Updated at 8:53 a.m. ET

Prosecutors in Duesseldorf, Germany, say Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight FU 9525, who appears to have deliberately crashed the plane carrying 150 people into the French Alps, concealed a medical condition from his employers.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. ET

The co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 appears to have deliberately crashed the plane carrying 150 people into the French Alps after the pilot had left the cockpit, Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said at a news conference Thursday.

This post was last updated at 5:35 p.m.

An Airbus A320 aircraft operated by Germanwings, Lufthansa's low-cost subsidiary, crashed in the French Alps today, likely killing all 150 people on board, French officials said. Germanwings said Flight 4U 9525 was traveling from Barcelona, Spain, to Duesseldorf, Germany.

As night fell on the area, French authorities called off the search operations.

Updated at 2:09 p.m. ET

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a deal the U.S. and its allies are pursuing with Iran over its nuclear program is "very bad" because, according to him, it doesn't take away the Islamic republic's ability to ultimately obtain nuclear weapons.

"This is a bad deal — a very bad deal," Netanyahu told a joint meeting of Congress today. "We're better off without it."

Update at 12:20 p.m. ET

Nearly 30 million people in the Northeast are bracing for what the National Weather Service is calling a potentially historic blizzard that could bring more than 2 feet of snow today and Tuesday to parts of the region.

Blizzard warnings have been issued all the way from the New Jersey shore to coastal New England from this afternoon through late Tuesday.

Google's massive investment in SpaceX gives the tech giant another avenue for its goal of providing Internet access to remote parts of the Earth, and it gives Elon Musk's company money to continue its research on space transport, re-usability and satellite manufacturing.

There's a cold front across much of the U.S. – with temperatures in places like New Orleans at around 29 degrees and Houston about 34 degrees. This map from NASA tells us just how cold it was on Wednesday.

The image was captured at 11 a.m. EST. Here's NASA's explanation:

Alan Gross, the former USAID subcontractor who spent five years in a Cuban prison before his release last week, will get $3.2 million from the federal government, part of a settlement with the Maryland-based company for which he worked at the time of his arrest.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, in a statement, said it had finalized a settlement, agreed to in principle in November, with Development Alternatives, Inc.

1. Obama, Raul Castro Announce Normalization Of Relations

President Obama said Wednesday the U.S. and Cuba will normalize relations, which have been strained since being severed in 1961. He spoke to Cuban President Raul Castro on Tuesday to finalize details of the announcement.

American Alan Gross had spent more than five years in a Cuban prison, where he lost five teeth, 100 pounds and much of the sight in his right eye. He could barely walk because of chronic pain and was, his wife Judy Gross said in June, "despondent and very hopeless" because he had 10 years to go in his sentence for crimes against the Cuban state. Then, on Tuesday, his lawyer, Scott Gilbert, told him in a phone call that he was going home.

There was a long pause, his spokeswoman Jill Zuckman said today in Washington, and then Gross said, "I'll believe it when I see it."

Updated at 2:39 p.m. ET

President Obama announced today the most significant change in U.S. policy toward Cuba in more than 50 years, paving the way for the normalization of relations and the opening of a U.S. Embassy in Havana.

Obama said "we will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries."

Before Mickey Mouse, there was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Only 25 seconds of Empty Socks, a Walt Disney cartoon featuring Oswald, was thought to exist. But archivists at Norway's National Library conducting an inventory at the library's vault in Mo i Rana, in the Arctic Circle, found an almost complete version of the film.

Jian Ghomeshi, a former radio host in Canada, was arrested Wednesday and charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking.

The charges carry sentences ranging from 10 years to life in prison.

Updated at 5:00 p.m.

Attorneys for the family of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old who was shot and killed by Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson, said they had expected Monday's outcome in which a grand jury declined to charge the officer in the fatal shooting.

"We could see what the outcome was going to be, and that is what occurred last night," attorney Benjamin Crump said at a news conference in St. Louis Tuesday.

He said the fact that Wilson was not indicted shows the system is broken.

Florida State University police shot and killed a gunman who had opened fire in the crowded university library around midnight. Three people were wounded.

Michael DeLeo, Tallahassee, Fla.'s chief of police, said the gunman appears to have acted alone.

"It will take not only hours but days to put all the pieces together," he said at a news conference this morning. "Obviously, everyone wants to know why, and that's the hard question that we're going to continue to investigate and try to find those answers for everybody."