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Also: John Hodgman on Ayn Rand; J.K. Rowling to donate proceeds of new novel to charity; Fox News defends anchor's interview with the author of Zealot.

Americans once waited in line for the chance to be photographed atop the striped donkeys on this famed tourist strip. But 9/11, the recession and the Mexican drug war have stifled tourism and nearly put the "zonkeys" and their owners out of work. A new push is on to save the historic icons.

USIS, which processes thousands of background checks a year for the U.S., is being investigated for "systemic failure" to adequately vet employees and contractors. The company would not comment on the specifics of the Alexis investigation.

In what's thought to have been a gang-related incident, someone opened fire on a group of people in a park. The 3-year-old is in critical condition after a bullet struck his head.

With the city's parking meter lease making voters leery of new privatization deals, Mayor Rahm Emanuel called for too many public interest protections in the Midway Airport lease, and too few investors saw it as worth the risk. Increasingly, though, governments turn to private investors to run public assets like roads and prisons.

Three American professors won this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their studies on asset prices.

HSBC says in a new report that GDP in the seven states most affected by the Arab Spring will be 35 percent lower at the end of 2014 than if there had been no Arab Spring. But the damage to those countries is more than to their GDPs alone.

After threatening to gut the rule that lets a single senator bring the Senate to a virtual halt, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has agreed to tweak rather than transform the practice. Under the accord, Democrats would gain the ability to skip a procedural step to begin debate on a bill.

In his new book, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, Bob Shacochis returns to Haiti, but also takes the reader across continents and generations. The 700-page book has been compared to the work of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and Norman Mailer.

Friday is Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's last day on the job. She is leaving Washington, and will become president of the University of California system at the end of the month.