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Texas Gov. Rick Perry called state lawmakers into a special session to deal with district maps used in the 2012 elections. A federal court had ordered new maps to better represent the growing Hispanic population.

There was a U.S. drone strike Wednesday in a Taliban stronghold of northern Pakistan, killing at least four people. It was the first strike since President Obama's speech last Thursday announcing that the use of drones would be scaled back to limit civilian casualties. It's also the first strike since Pakistan held elections earlier this month.

School officials broke the news to seniors that they forgot to offer a religion course that's required for students to graduate. The school admits fault. The principal said to graduate on time, seniors had just a few days to complete all the requirements for the yearlong course.

The Communist Party's new leadership has pledged to change China's slowing economy by putting a greater emphasis on private enterprise and reining in huge but far less profitable state-owned businesses. Economists say the party has no choice but to update if it wants to stay in power, but they doubt that a genuine overhaul is in the works.

In his haunting new graphic novel, cartoonist Xie Peng, 36, captures a psychological journey into the world of young Chinese. He worked for six years on the book, which renders a landscape of competition, anxiety and stress, and where everything, including dignity, is a commodity.

Residents were outraged when The Times-Picayune cut its paper-and-ink edition to three days a week to focus on its website. Now the paper is facing a new competitor for the local media market — one based 80 miles away.

NPR's Shanghai correspondent Frank Langfitt worked in China in the 1990s when the bureaucracy was crippling. Back then, Westerners hired people to sit in line for hours to pay their bills. Now, you can waltz into convenience stores and take care of such tasks in minutes.

It first showed up in the 1950s and '60s — think low-slung sofas, egg-shaped chairs and the set of Mad Men. Today, midcentury modern furniture is "blazing hot," as one dealer puts it. One explanation is that people often like what their grandparents liked.

George Porter was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black fighter pilots, and those who supported them, in American history. A mechanic during the war, Porter found ways with his colleagues to keep their planes airborne even as they were denied the tools needed to do their jobs.