CHICAGO (AP) -- Striding quickly through the streets he learned as a boy, Mark Harris handed out fliers hoping to entice people to spend a weekend in Chicago's most violent neighborhood, where barred windows are the norm and even residents keep watchful eyes on their parked cars.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- With thousands of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators roughing it in parks for up to six weeks, garbage, human waste and hygiene are becoming a growing worry in public encampments nationwide.

WILLIAMSTON, Mich. (AP) -- An 8-foot wall collapsed in a Michigan high school locker room, killing a 14-year-old student who had jumped and grabbed for the top to do a pull-up, police said Thursday.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An Ohio zoo says despite its opposition, a woman plans to reclaim three leopards, two primates and a young grizzly bear that have been cared for by the zoo since her husband freed dozens of exotic animals at their farm and killed himself.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Muslims who change their names to sound more traditionally American, as immigrants have done for generations, or who adopt Arabic names as a sign of their faith are often investigated and catalogued in secret New York Police Department intelligence files, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

U.S. officials have given BP the go-ahead to drill a new deepwater well in the Gulf of Mexico, its first such permit since last year's catastrophic oil spill.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- The daughter of a woman accused of being the ringleader in an alleged Social Security fraud plot in which mentally disabled people were held captive in a squalid basement is "shocked" but understands the charges she faces, her lawyer said Wednesday.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Fed up with petty crime, the all-night racket of beating drums, the smell of human waste and the sight of trampled flowers and grass, police and neighbors are losing patience with some of the anti-Wall Street protests around the U.S.

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) -- Joe the Plumber is launching his bid for Congress in Ohio. A county Republican official tells The Associated Press that the man who became a household name during the 2008 presidential race will make his announcement Tuesday night.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A nurse who treated Michael Jackson has testified the singer asked her to help him get the powerful anesthetic propofol.