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GUY RAZ, HOST:

Budget cuts are showing up on the streets of another Midwestern city. In Rockford, Illinois, they're turning out the lights. The city is in the middle of removing 2,300 streetlights, all in an effort to save money. That's about 15 percent of all the lights in town.

Corina Curry has covered the story for the Rockford Register Star and joins us now. Welcome to the program, Corina.

CORINA CURRY: Thank you very much.

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister for nearly two decades, may finally be leaving office. With Italy's debt troubles mounting and the nation's — and world's confidence in him declining — Berlusconi says he will step down. First, though, Berlusconi says parliament must endorse austerity measures he worked out with the IMF.

Attorney General Eric Holder spent almost three hours on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, getting a grilling from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about a flawed gun-trafficking operation that let hundreds of guns flow across the Southwest border.

But even after the Justice Department oversight hearing, Republican lawmakers say there are lots of questions that remain unanswered.

"I can categorically say I have never acted inappropriately with anyone, period," Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain just told ABC News' Jonathan Karl on a live ABC/Yahoo webcast.

Responding to the latest accusation by a woman — Sharon Bialek of Chicago — who says he sexually harassed her in the late 1990s, Cain said the charge is "baseless, bogus and false" and that Bialek is lying.

"An appeals court judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan just wrote an opinion affirming the constitutionality of the federal law overhauling health care," our colleague Scott Hensley writes over at the Shots blog.

New Orleans has become the center of an education revolution, where more than 70 percent of students attend a charter school.

The number of students taught in traditional district-run schools is shrinking fast. That's because parents in post-Hurricane Katrina can pick and choose from a smorgasbord of schools with different approaches and cultures.

By many measures, this educational marketplace has improved student achievement. But as this experiment moves ahead, it's led to questions about whether the district is truly open to the most challenging students.

An appeals court judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan just wrote an opinion affirming the constitutionality of the federal law overhauling health care.

That makes three appeals court decisions in favor of the law and one against, if you're keeping track.

As we reported at the end of October, 2005 YU55, an asteroid bigger than an aircraft carrier, is set to have a very close rendezvous with planet Earth. It'll be closer than the moon and today at 6:28 p.m. ET, it will make its closest approach.

Don't worry. NASA is confident it will miss us. Here's a video NASA put together that explains the trajectory and shows an animation:

Karen Kraushaar, a 55-year-old federal employee and registered Republican, has been identified as one of the two women who in the late 1990s settled claims of sexual harassment against 2012 GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, our colleague Liz Halloran reports on the It's All Politics blog and the NPR Newscast.