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The United States will have at least two shiny new medals no matter what happens tomorrow at the women's beach volleyball final.

After defeating China (2-0) and Brazil (2-1), today, the two American teams advanced to the finals, setting up an all-American match. It means the U.S. will receive a gold and silver.

ABC News reports:

Peter Forcelli, an ATF agent who blew the whistle on management lapses in the gun trafficking scandal known as Fast and Furious, has reached an agreement with the bureau over his retaliation claims.

A lawyer for Forcelli declined to disclose the terms of the settlement because it was the product of a confidential mediation process.

There's a life-or-death drama unfolding in Texas tonight. It involves the death penalty, the Supreme Court and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

First the basics: Marvin Wilson, 54, is set to be executed by Texas tonight. He was convicted of the 1992 killing of a police informant. His attorneys however argue that a Supreme Court ban on the death penalty for the mentally impaired prohibits the state from going forward with tonight's execution and are asking the high court to step in.

Our world seems so broken now and so much of it seems our own fault. The whole of our infrastructure — from highways to high schools, power-grids to public universities — seem on the verge of crumbling. The resources to repair or expand these arteries of public life are gone, we are told, in part because four years ago the economy was jerked to halt through (what appear to be) selective acts of titanic greed and apocalyptic mismanagement.

Another once-promising Alzheimer's drug has just been tossed on the pharmaceutical scrap heap.

This time it's a drug called bapineuzumab. Like several previous experimental drugs, it was designed to attack the plaques that build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer's.

And like those earlier drugs, it failed.

The American women's water polo team will again chase an elusive gold medal, this time at the London Olympics. The team qualified for the gold medal match by defeating longtime Olympic rival Australia.

Tied after regular time expired, the Americans scored two goals in overtime to beat the Australian water polo women, 11-9. Now the U.S. team moves on to the gold medal match Thursday.

There's always a line at the Boulangerie Cauvet on the corner of rue St. Charles in Paris's 15^th district. In their family owned bakery, Esmeralda Cauvet and her husband Cyril sell around 800 croissants and 3,500 baguettes a day.

In the kitchen, head pastry maker Pierre Gibert still rolls his croissants from triangular strips of dough. "The key to a good croissant is good ingredients and a high quality dough. You have to knead it, let it rise and roll it a second time in butter. That's what gives a croissant its flaky quality," Gibert says.

Jared Loughner, the man accused of going on a shooting spree during a meet-and-greet held by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Ariz., pleaded guilty today. The shooting spree left six people dead and 13 others wounded.

The AP adds:

"Loughner's plea Tuesday allows him to avoid the death penalty in a mass shooting that gained worldwide attention in January 2011 because his intended target was the congresswoman. Among the dead were Arizona's chief federal judge and a Giffords aide.

Sports injuries are as much a part of the Olympic Games as gold medals and doping allegations.

Will the London 2012 Games be remembered as the last Olympics of the pre-clone era? The answer is maybe — because the group that oversees equestrian events has given its OK to allowing cloned horses to compete in the Summer Olympics.

Barry Bonds will be in the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time this November. Whether he deserves a spot in Cooperstown will no doubt be debated endlessly. One side are those who say you can't take away the 762 home runs that made Bonds the sport's most successful slugger. Others will say that he and others like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are forever tarnished because of their connection to performance enhancing drugs.

We'll leave that debate for another day.

After the July 20 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., there were calls to focus as much or more on the victims and their stories as on the gunman.

The paleolithic diet has sparked plenty of discussion in the nutrition world (and on this web site) in the last few months. Lots of people are looking for advice on how to get in on this meat and vegetable-centric way of eating that claims inspiration from the simple wild foods a hunter-gatherer might have been lucky to find.

U.S. gymnast Aly Raisman has won the gold medal in the women's floor exercise at the London 2012 Games. Her powerful routine garnered a score of 15.600 — enough to beat the 15.200 of Romania's Catalina Ponor, who turned in a technically strong performance.

Russia's Aliya Mustafina took bronze, with 14.900. American Jordyn Wieber finished seventh, with a 14.500 score.

An analysis of 85 percent of school districts in the country finds that minority and disabled students have felt the brunt of disciplinary action.

NPR's Claudio Sanchez filed this report for our Newscast unit: