Eyder Peralta

Wal-Mart has reclaimed the lead spot on the Fortune 500 list released today. For the past few years, the giant retailer has been battling it out with Exxon for top billing.

This year, Exxon Mobil dropped to No. 2.

Fortune writes about Wal-Mart:

"For fiscal year 2012, ...

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting bit of analysis today: U.S. courts tend to hand out more lenient punishments to those who hide money offshore to cheat on their taxes than they do to more mundane tax evaders.

The Journal relies on Internal Revenue Service statistics and "data ...

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whom the government says was the mastermind behind the twin bombings at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and wounded more than 250, died of gunshot wounds and blunt trauma.

That's according to the Boston Herald, The Boston Globe and the AP, who report that ...

Every year around the time of pollster Lee Miringoff's birthday, The Marist Institute tries to pin down what "old" means by conducting a poll.

This year, Miringoff turned 62 years old.

NPR's Ina Jaffe filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"Anything over 60 was once considered old. But ...

The Solar Impulse, a solar-powered airplane with the 208-foot wing-span, has begun a slow journey across the United States.

We've told you about the Swiss plane before. A year ago, the plane took 20 hours to fly from Switzerland to Spain and then flew to Morocco completing its first ...

The stock market continues its winning streak: The Dow Jones hit another milestone today, tapping 15,000 for the first time, but closing just shy of the milestone.

This, of course, follows good news about the job market released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

All of this got ...

The department of Homeland Security is changing the way border agents process those people entering the country on student visas.

"Effective immediately," the AP reports, agents will have to "verify that every international student who arrives in the U.S. has a valid student visa."

The AP adds:

"The ...

If there's one conversation you listen to today, make it Melissa Block's talk with Carmen Blandin Tarleton and Marinda Righter.

Tarleton, who was disfigured when her estranged husband poured Lye over her body, received a face transplant in February. This week, for the first time, Tarleton met Righter, ...

Wish our boss was this generous.

The principal of a small, private school in Washington decided that it was so beautiful outside, kids should take the day off to enjoy it.

Bellingham Christian, which is right across the border from Vancouver, posted the notice on its website.

"Yeah! It's ...

Another interesting thread has developed this evening in the narrative of the Boston bombings: The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, CBS, The Boston Globe and NBC are reporting that in an initial interrogation, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said he and his brother, Tamerlan, originally planned a suicide ...

The FBI added Joanne Chesimard, who was convicted in the 1973 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper, to its "Most Wanted Terrorist List." Chesimard, who fled to Cuba in 1984 after escaping from prison, is the first woman added to the list.

The FBI said in a release ...

Update at 7:08 p.m. ET. Governor Signs The Bill:

"We are making history," Gov. Lincoln Chafee said right before he signed a bill that legalizes same-sex marriage in Rhode Island. "We are living up to the ideal of our founders."

With that, the state became the 10th to allow marriages ...

A wildfire, dubbed the Springs Fire, in Ventura County has burned more than 6,500 acres and shut down a 9-mile stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway.

NPR member station KPCC is live-blogging. They report that at around 1 p.m. ET., authorities ordered the evacuation of an area that includes ...

Saif Al-Islam Gadhafi, who before the revolution in Libya seemed poised to take his father's place as ruler, made a brief court appearance in Zintan today.

The Guardian reports that while Gadhafi is waiting to be tried for war crimes, he made an appearance on a totally separate case. ...

A new poll commissioned by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights finds that black Americans solidly support legislation to overhaul the immigration system in the country.

A reform proposal that includes a path to citizenship received the support of 66 percent of the more than 800 African-American ...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is asking the public for help in finding three individuals who were on the grounds of the U.S. mission in Benghazi, the day an attack killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

"These individuals may be able to provide information to help in the investigation," ...

PepsiCo announced today that it was pulling a Mountain Dew ad from all its online channels, after it was buffeted by criticism.

Boyce Watkins, a professor at Syracuse University and an outspoken social critic, called the commercial "arguably the most racist commercial in history."

MTV has the background ...

At midnight, civil unions became legal in Colorado. The state joined eight other states with similar laws and nine others — plus the District of Columbia — to permit gay marriage.

As has become the custom, couples lined up at courthouses across the state in the middle of night, waiting ...

(Most recent update: 4:36 p.m. ET.)

Three 19-year-old men — two of them University of Massachusetts Dartmouth college students from Kazakhstan who were friends with Boston bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — were taken into custody Wednesday by authorities in Boston. The third individual, an American citizen, was also a student ...

A few polls following the twin bombings during the Boston Marathon paint a mixed picture of where the American public stands on privacy and security.

Today, a poll released by The New York Times and CBS News finds that 78 percent of "people said surveillance cameras were a good idea."