As some last-minute developments and a late-evening deal came together to bring another shutdown showdown to a close last night, Democratic and Republican leaders were both declaring their positions in the latest budget battle had been vindicated.

Twenty-five years after its initial publication, Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy remains one of the signal narratives about life in the Mafia. Adapted by Pileggi and director Martin Scorsese into the 1990 film GoodFellas, it follows the rise and fall of true-life Brooklyn gangster Henry Hill — "a little cog" in the Lucchese crime family who turned FBI informant after a drug arrest.

In November 1941, two ships crossed paths off the coast of Australia. One was the German raider HSK Kormoran. The other: an Australian warship called the HMAS Sydney. Guns were fired, the ships were damaged, and both sank to the bottom of the ocean.

Big banks are beginning to make good on their threat to charge fees for everyday checking accounts. But most banks aren't big banks, and community institutions are hanging on to free checking as long as they can in the hopes of luring away some of the big banks' disgruntled customers.

The larger banks are now enacting what customers like James Miller of Nashville have heard was on the horizon for a year or more: Your free checking account is about to cost you.

The high price of gold and other precious metals is encouraging a new breed of gold diggers — traveling estate buyers who temporarily set up shop in hotels. They offer to pay cash on the spot for gold, diamonds, old Rolexes and collectibles.

Walking into one such event at a hotel, it all seems very professional: A fancy conference room with a 20-foot conference table, with soothing bossa nova music playing overhead.

The Greek government hopes to pass a new tax law in Parliament on Tuesday, despite wide opposition to the move by a Greek public already suffering under a policy of strict austerity. Ministers say the new property tax, which would be added to people's electricity bills, is needed to persuade the IMF and EU to release more bailout funds to prop up the Greek economy.

For a long time, much of the world saw the eurozone sovereign debt crisis as Europe's problem. Now world leaders, including the United States, realize a eurozone meltdown could have dire consequences for everyone. They are working up a massive rescue plan whose contours are beginning to emerge. Although Britain does not use the euro, that nation's politicians are using their party conventions to issue dire warnings about the euro's fate. And one eminent economist is proposing a novel solution to limit the impact of the European debt crisis.

There may not be a government shutdown later this week after all — at least that's what a deal agreed on Monday night by the Senate aims to prevent. Lawmakers had been tied up in partisan knots for days over a temporary spending measure keeping the government open once the new fiscal year begins this weekend. Most of the trouble was over House Republicans' insistence that disaster relief funding in that measure be offset by cuts in other government programs. It's now up to the House to seal that Senate deal.

The British newspaper arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is in negotiations to pay several million dollars to settle the claims of the family of a slain girl whose mobile voice mail messages were hacked by a private investigator for one of its tabloids. Murdoch would personally pay more than $1.5 million to charity as part of the deal.

But that's only the latest fallout for News Corp. in the phone hacking and bribery scandal there.

Americans pride themselves on being optimistic. But Robert Blendon, of the Harvard School of Public Health, says that may not be such a good thing when it comes to planning for retirement. For many Americans, it is proving harder than they imagined, according to a a new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.