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.

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 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.

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.

It looks like the government will be funded until Nov. 18. According to multiple news reports, Senate leaders announced they have come to an agreement that will likely avoid a partial shutdown of the government.

Randall Lee Church was 18 when he was convicted and sentenced to life for fatally stabbing a man. That was 1983 with just glimmers of the Internet and ideas of mobile phones.

So when he was released after 26 years in prison, he was overwhelmed and lost.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are 2,000 years old and very sensitive to direct light. At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where they are housed, the scrolls are rotated every few months to minimize the damage. As Bloomberg explains it, the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is the most ancient biblical manuscript on Earth, is so sensitive that only a copy of it is on display.