A federal judge approved a land-swap settlement of a lawsuit over a remote site in the Mojave National Preserve where war memorial crosses have been erected for decades.

The settlement announced Tuesday calls for the site at Sunrise Rock to be turned over to a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Barstow in exchange for five acres of donated land.

The National Park Service said it hopes to complete the swap by year's end, allowing the VFW to once more erect a cross on the site. The most recent permanent cross was stolen and a replacement was removed to comply with a court injunction...

Two months after President Obama proposed a $447 billion jobs-stimulus bill, the Senate on Thursday finally found a part on which it could agree: a $30 billion package that promotes the hiring of veterans and ends an unpopular withholding requirement for government contractors.

The 95-0 vote may be the high point of the jobs debate because it exhausts the few planks of Mr. Obama’s plan that enjoyed support of both Republicans and Democrats. And that area of agreement is slim — together, the two provisions account for less than 10 percent of what Mr. Obama wants passed.

Still, senators stopped to marvel at the small outbreak of bipartisanship, which has been all too rare in recent years.

“The American people will win, and for one day at least, partisanship will lose,” said Sen. Scott Brown, Massachusetts Republican.

It was the fourth vote the Senate has held on either a piece or the whole of the president’s plan but the first to be successful.