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When I was coming of age in the late 1970s, as an African-American high-schooler and college student, I had two certainties: Nelson Mandela would die in prison in apartheid South Africa and no black person would become U.S. president in my lifetime.

So much for my youthful powers of prediction.

Little could I have known then that I would become a journalist who would one day get to cover events I once thought would never happen, at least not during my time on Earth.

In 1994, I was in South Africa for the Chicago Tribune covering the campaign and election that led to Mandela's becoming that nation's first black president. Years later, I participated in that paper's coverage of hometown politician Barack Obama's journey to the White House. How much luckier could one kid from the South Bronx get?

I was fortunate because I was getting paid to witness history writ large. But also because I was observing history of particular significance to African-Americans.

The political triumphs, first of Mandela, then of Obama, were pinch-me milestones on the long march to freedom for many members of two long-oppressed groups — black South Africans and African-Americans — each of which saw something of its own story in the other's.

Even blacks who didn't belong to Mandela's or Obama's political parties, or black journalists who strove to maintain a professional skepticism, couldn't help but reflect on the extraordinary history that was taking place.

Blacks weren't alone in that, of course. But our histories as being treated at best as second-class citizens arguably made the gap between our experience, and our sense of the possible, wider than it was for many whites.

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An "enchanting harmony of fuchsia, purple and pink undertones" known as 'Radiant Orchid' is Pantone's Color of the Year for 2014, unseating the more verdantly inclined Emerald that dominated the previous 12 months.

Pantone Color Institute, which describes itself as a global authority on color, describes its latest pick as "a captivating, magical, enigmatic purple" whose "rosy undertones radiate on the skin, producing a healthy glow when worn by both men and women.

For interiors, Radiant Orchid, Pantone says, is "as adaptable as it is beautiful" and "complements olive and deeper hunter greens, and offers a gorgeous combination when paired with turquoise, teal and even light yellows."

Sounds like it might go well with its predecessor, which was "a lively, radiant, lush green" that is "most often associated with precious gemstones."

After months of worsening violence, the United Nations voted Thursday to send French and African troops to the Central African Republic in an attempt to restore stability.

Brutal sectarian violence has engulfed the mostly Christian country since March, when the first Muslim leader assumed power after a coup.

Armed gangs of Muslim extremists joined by mercenaries from neighboring countries now control most of the country. Armed Christian forces are fighting back. Slaughter, rape and torture are widely reported.

A regional force has been in the country for months, but it's untrained, outmanned and outgunned. U.N. and Western officials say they fear a possible genocide.

Widespread Horrors

At a Catholic mission in Bossangoa in the country's north, more than 35,000 people are squatting in squalid conditions. Bundles of filthy rags are piled high in the seminary, and people have to pick carefully through the scant plastic sheeting and debris in a site far too small for the number of people. They have fled from the armed Muslim gangs known as Seleka, which means "alliance" in the local Sango language.

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Like a lot of neighbors who were once close, Minnesota and Wisconsin have drifted apart over time. Their politics and policy directions are now about as disparate as can be.

That's surprising, not just because the two states share a common climate and culture, but because neither party can claim a big majority of the vote in either state.

"We have parties that are so ideologically locked in, whenever they get in power they go in the direction of activists," says Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist who has studied the two states' political differences.

Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker became famous for ending collective bargaining rights for most public employees. Lately, he's generated considerable buzz as a presidential prospect with the release of his new book.

The state is also home to Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP's vice presidential nominee in 2012 and the party's top budget negotiator in Congress, as well as national party chair Reince Priebus. Collectively, they lend a Midwestern face to a party that is dominated by the South and West.

In Minnesota, by contrast, Democrats rule the roost and they're pursuing all the things Walker and his allies would never consider: Blessing same-sex marriage, raising taxes and implementing Obamacare.

"In two states that are pretty similar, with a pretty similar culture, even a little difference can create these really divergent approaches to public policy," Jacobs says.

So Why The Difference?

In the two states, there are all kinds of explanations for the current distinctions in voting patterns, from the economic to the ethnographic.

Wisconsin historically has had more residents with German and Eastern and Central European backgrounds, while Minnesota attracted more Scandinavians, says Mordecai Lee, a former state legislator who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"During their working years, they were Democrats," he says of the state's ethnic Catholics. "Those Reagan Democrats gradually became reliably GOP voters, mobilized by social issues such as abortion, gay rights and all the other very effective wedge issues that the GOP raised over the years."

The economic success of Minnesota's Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, by contrast, has created suburban pockets that are considered moderate — socially liberal, while being fiscally conservative — and don't exist on anything like the same scale in Wisconsin.

"We have a lot of Fortune 500 companies that don't go Democratic, but they're moderate Republicans," says state Sen. Jeff Hayden, a Democrat who represents parts of Minneapolis. "I think we have a better relationship with them."

No More Moderates

A generation ago, Minnesota was known not only for producing liberal Democrats such as Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, who both served as vice president, but also moderate Republicans such as Gov. Arne Carlson and Sen. David Durenberger.

That breed of Republican could never get nominated by the GOP in the state today, says Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. The state party — which has had some financial problems in recent years — is now more attuned to the Tea Party conservatism exemplified by Rep. Michele Bachmann.

"The Minnesota Republican Party has faced all sorts of problems in the last 10 years," Schier says. "By contrast, the state DFL" — the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Democratic organization is known in Minnesota — "is pretty unified and organized and well-funded."

Some observers contend that the DFL has become insular and ossified, relying not only on the children but grandchildren of famous officeholders to seek office.

But the DFL has an advantage most state Democratic parties do not. The area around Duluth, known as the Iron Range, has a tradition of unionism and Democratic voting that has been sustained. Paired with the largely Democratic vote in the Twin Cities — home to the bulk of the state population — that's generally enough to outvote Republicans in the rest of the state.

Two large rural counties in northeastern Minnesota voted last year against a ban on same-sex marriage, joining with the Twin Cities to defeat the measure even as 75 of the state's 87 counties voted in support.

"There are big sections of rural Minnesota that vote Democratic," Schier says. "That's very unusual in any state."

Closer Than They Look

Despite the GOP's current dominance of Wisconsin state politics, no Republican presidential candidate has carried the state since Ronald Reagan in 1984. (In Minnesota's case, the GOP has come up empty every time since 1972.)

Wisconsin currently has one of the most conservative senators in Republican Ron Johnson, but also one of the most liberal, Democrat Tammy Baldwin.

"There's no doubt that our statewide offices could go Democratic as much as they could go Republican," says Lee, the UW-Milwaukee political scientist.

But for a few thousand votes in 2010, the political landscape in Minnesota might look a lot more like Wisconsin's. Republicans won control of the legislature that year — they lost it in 2012 — and Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton won by only 8,770 votes, out of more than 2 million cast.

"On one level, the difference between Wisconsin and Minnesota is 8,700 votes," says David Schultz, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul. "If Dayton had not won that race, we would have seen much of the same legislation as Wisconsin, including collective bargaining."

Spillover Effects

In other words, the political margins in both states are tight enough that if a few thousand people — the right few thousand people — moved from one state to the other, it could change the political makeup of both states.

That might be happening. Communities in western Wisconsin such as Hudson, River Falls and Baldwin are booming, filling up with people commuting across the St. Croix River to jobs in the Twin Cities. Some localities have already seen growth upwards of 50 percent since 2000, with as many as 150,000 additional residents expected to arrive over the next decade.

That's going to create a new population center in Wisconsin with the potential to affect the state's politics. And, if enough of the people coming over are Democrats, that would weaken the party's current advantage in Minnesota.

"We're in the neighborhood of 50 percent of our residents commuting into the two closest Minnesota counties for work," says Scott Simpson, city administrator for River Falls.

For the past three years, there's been a shortfall in the payroll taxes collected for Social Security. And as more baby boomers join the ranks of the 57 million people already receiving benefits, that deficit is bound to keep growing.

At the same time, the overall share of wages being taxed for Social Security is shrinking as the higher wages that are exempt have soared. The Social Security Board of Trustees predicts a nearly $3 trillion trust fund built up over decades will vanish within 20 years.

But that does not seem to faze Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts Democrat has gotten a lot of attention for a speech defending Social Security that she delivered last month on the Senate floor.

"With some modest adjustments, we can keep the system solvent for many more years, and we could even increase benefits," Warren says.

To finance that, Warren and some of her Democratic allies want to lift the cap on wages taxed for Social Security.

Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin sponsored legislation that would gradually remove the cap that currently makes only the first $113,700 in wages subject to Social Security taxes. He says it's the only fair thing to do.

"If I make $50,000 a year, I pay Social Security taxes on every dime I make. If I make $500,000 a year, I only pay taxes on about the first 20 cents. After that, I don't pay any more Social Security taxes. That's regressive," Harkin says. "You want to make it more progressive, raise the cap so everybody pays their share on every dollar they make."

And as President Obama noted this week, an ever greater share of dollars is being earned precisely by those at the top.

"Since 1979, our economy has more than doubled in size, but most of that growth has flowed to a fortunate few," Obama says. "The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income; it now takes half."

That concentration of wealth has taken place beyond the earnings subject to Social Security taxes. Melissa Favreault, a Social Security expert at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, says that has meant an ever greater share of the national income is contributing nothing to Social Security.

"We do have this declining share of overall earnings that are taxed, reflecting the fact that the top half of 1 percent or so has been garnering a really large proportion of total earnings," Favreault says.

Favreault says three decades ago, 90 percent of the nation's wage earnings were taxed for Social Security; that proportion has now shrunk to 83 percent. And that's made an already regressive tax even more so.

Favreault says raising the rates for Social Security withholding would be one way to shore up the program's finances, but that would only make the tax even more regressive. Removing the cap on income subject to the tax, she says, would make it more progressive.

"The cap, I think, is really a natural place to look, just because there has been this explosion in earnings inequality, and there's been stagnation for earners at the bottom and in the middle of the wage distribution. So it's definitely a good place to look," she says.

Removing that cap could keep Social Security solvent 30 years beyond what's currently projected. But Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, warns that doing so would undo the original intent of Social Security, which was to be an insurance program for everyone.

"If Social Security comes to be seen as a welfare program, a highly redistributive program, it takes a 'soak the rich' kind of approach," Biggs says. "Then political support among, certainly among conservatives, among Republicans, among higher-income people is going to drop. And you need everybody onboard in order to keep a system like this going."

Biggs says making all payroll income subject to the 12.4 percent Social Security tax would be a sharp tax hike for the wealthy. That's a tough sell on Capitol Hill, especially for Republicans. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who serves on the tax-writing Finance Committee, says, "I'm not interested in tax increases."

So at least for now, the wealthiest 6 percent of taxpayers will continue to be protected by the Social Security wage cap.

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell is more than a little aggravated with the Senate Conservatives Fund, and who can blame him.

The youngish but well-financed Tea Party organization has targeted McConnell, a five-termer from Kentucky and highest-ranking Senate Republican, by helping to bankroll a primary challenger and using the race as an intraparty, us vs. them proxy.

McConnell in recent days has publicly accused the fund, which supported the government shutdown as an anti-Obamacare tactic, of "giving conservatism a bad name" and "participating in ruining the [Republican] brand." He reportedly scolded a Senate candidate from Nebraska in private for linking arms with the fund.

And last month McConnell's influence was apparent when the national committee that works to get Republicans elected to the Senate said it wouldn't do business with an advertising firm affiliated with the fund.

This is what former McConnell staffer Josh Holmes, now with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told The Hill newspaper about that decision: "SCF has been wandering around the country destroying the Republican Party like a drunk who tears up every bar they walk into. The difference this cycle is that they strolled into Mitch McConnell's bar and he doesn't throw you out, he locks the door."

The fund's response went something like this: McConnell is a bully, full of threats and bluster.

Fighting words, indeed.

For those who don't slavishly follow party machinations and political money, we thought we'd take a quick look at the Senate Conservatives Fund, its money, and why it is causing McConnell and other establishment Republicans so much grief. The Kentucky conservative is just one of seven GOP Senate incumbents facing primary challenges of varying seriousness from the party's Tea Party wing.

Brainchild Of Tea Party 'Godfather'

The fund, a political action committee, was founded in 2008 by then-South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, a small-government conservative viewed by many as the godfather of the Tea Party movement.

When DeMint left the Senate earlier this year to become the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, the fund, led by a cadre of his former staffers, including Matt Hoskins, got a national boost.

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China says banks in the country are no longer allowed to trade in Bitcoin, the digital currency whose value has sharply risen this year. Chinese citizens, however, are not forbidden from using the currency.

The Bitcoin exchange rate took a hit following Thursday's news from China's central bank.

From Shanghai, NPR's Frank Langfitt filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"China is the world's biggest market for Bitcoin and has helped drive its explosive appreciation this year. Today, though, the People's Bank of China appeared to prick the Bitcoin bubble here.

"China's central bank said Bitcoin is unsafe because it has few controls and makes it easier to launder money and finance terrorism.

"The bank said: 'It does not have the legal status of a currency, and it cannot and moreover should not be allowed to circulate in the market as a currency.' "

A payday loan is a costly form of credit operating on the fringes of the economy. That's why the target of a new crackdown by federal regulators may surprise you: Instead of a forlorn-looking storefront with a garish neon sign, it's your familiar neighborhood bank.

A small but growing number of banks, including some major players, have been offering the equivalent of payday loans, calling them "deposit advances."

That is, at least, until bank regulators stepped in Nov. 21 and put new restrictions on the loans.

"Many of these loans are taken on a nearly continuous basis," Consumer Financial Protection Bureau representative David Silberman told a Senate panel in July.

He and other regulators worry that deposit advances can lead consumers into a cycle of debt.

"For far too many consumers, payday and deposit advance loans are traps," Silberman said. "Returning every two weeks to re-borrow the same dollar amounts at a high cost becomes a drag on the financial well-being of consumers already facing income shortfalls."

Terms vary by bank, but basically, here's how it works: You borrow the money, and in return you give the bank the right to go into your account and pay itself back, plus a fee, as soon as your next direct deposit comes in.

Some states have fought and banned storefront versions of payday lenders, only to find banks filling the gap.

In Arkansas, nearly 300 payday lenders were operating in 2008, according to Hank Klein, a retired credit union president who became an activist against payday loans.

But, Klein says, a court ruling allowed the state attorney general to drive them out.

"They've been run out of the state by the attorney general," Klein says. "Well, now the banks come in and [they're] doing the same thing. They operate under federal laws, so the attorney general can't do anything."

Fees Quickly Add Up

About five years ago, Annette Smith, a grandmother from California, needed money to fix her truck, so she went to her local Wells Fargo for a loan.

"I asked one of the loan officers if I could make a small loan," she says. "And he said, 'We don't loan money any less than $5,000. But we do have a service that's called a direct deposit advance. And you can go home and access that on your computer and you can borrow up to $500.' "

So Smith did, and $500 appeared in her account.

Smith qualified for the loan not because she had good credit — she didn't — but because she had recurring direct deposits. In her case, those deposits were Social Security benefits of about $1,100 a month.

Related Documents

From The Bankers:

Wells Fargo Bank Letter To Federal Regulators

Letter To Bank Regulators From Industry Groups

From The Regulators:

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Report

Office Of The Comptroller Of The Currency Final Guidance

From Consumer Advocates:

Consumer Coalition Comments On Proposed Federal Regulations

Consumer Federation Of America Comments To Regulators

"There's our ship!" says Officer Lisa Sacco.

We're standing at the Port of Miami, where Sacco works for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Our ship, the Hansa Kirkenes, left Cartagena, Colombia, about a week earlier carrying all 6,078 of the Planet Money women's T-shirts.

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Ford unveiled its new Mustang on Thursday, in a splashy event that was undermined a bit by leaked photos that showed the new model's design. And the Mustang will be sold around the globe for the first time since the car was introduced nearly 50 years ago.

From Michigan Radio, Tracy Samilton filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"Ford designers say they took design cues from Mustang's heritage, especially the 1967 Fastback. Mark Fields is Ford's Chief Operating Officer. He says Ford didn't need to take global tastes into account because the Mustang already has universal appeal.

" 'We have over 5.5 million Facebook fans for the Mustang,' Fields says. 'I think that's more than Lady Gaga. And over half of those fans are overseas.'

"Ford will offer a four-cylinder Eco-boost engine in the Mustang along with the traditional V-6 and a V-8. The car will go on sale next fall."

The White House has acknowledged that as a student at Harvard Law School in the 1980s, the president briefly lived with his Kenyan-born uncle, after it first denied the two had ever met.

Earlier this week, Onyango Obama, 69, faced a deportation that resulted from a 2011 drunken-driving arrest. At the hearing, which he won, the judge asked about his family, and Onyango replied that he had a nephew named Barack Obama, adding, "He's the president of the United States."

According to The Boston Globe, Onyango also testified that while the future president was attending Harvard Law School, he briefly stayed with him.

On Thursday, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that President Obama "did stay with him [Onyango] for a brief period of time until his apartment was ready."

"After that, they saw each other once every few months, but after law school they fell out of touch. The president has not seen him in 20 years, has not spoken with him in 10," Schultz said.

That statement contradicts a January 2012 article in The Globe about Onyango Obama, in which the White House is reported to have said the two never met.

The Associated Press writes:

"Onyango Obama, the half-brother of the president's late father, testified he has lived in the U.S. since 1963, when he entered on a student visa. He had a series of immigration hearings in the 1980s and was ordered to leave the country in 1992 but remained."

"His immigration status didn't become public until his 2011 drunken-driving arrest in Framingham, Mass. Police said after the arrest he told them, 'I think I will call the White House.'

"In the president's memoir, Dreams from My Father, he writes about his 1988 trip to Kenya and refers to an Uncle Omar, who matches Onyango Obama's background and has the same date of birth."

When you're making eight bucks an hour, which is pretty typical in the fast-food industry, it's tough to make ends meet.

And increasingly, the working poor are asking this question: Why am I living in poverty, even when I'm working full time?

That's the message that thousands of fast-food workers rallying Thursday in about 100 U.S. cities — from Oakland to Memphis to Washington, D.C. — want heard. A living wage in big cities is closer to $14 an hour, and it jumps to about $20 an hour for an adult supporting a child.

The protests are part of a growing campaign backed by a coalition of advocacy groups, religious organizations and union organizers aimed at raising fast-food wages to $15 an hour.

At at time when the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. economy are also the lowest-paid, the issue of income inequality is on the lips of leaders worldwide.

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The White House has acknowledged that as a student at Harvard Law School in the 1980s, the president briefly lived with his Kenyan-born uncle, after it first denied the two had ever met.

Earlier this week, Onyango Obama, 69, faced a deportation that resulted from a 2011 drunken-driving arrest. At the hearing, which he won, the judge asked about his family, and Onyango replied that he had a nephew named Barack Obama, adding, "He's the president of the United States."

According to The Boston Globe, Onyango also testified that while the future president was attending Harvard Law School, he briefly stayed with him.

On Thursday, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that President Obama "did stay with him [Onyango] for a brief period of time until his apartment was ready."

"After that, they saw each other once every few months, but after law school they fell out of touch. The president has not seen him in 20 years, has not spoken with him in 10," Schultz said.

That statement contradicts a January 2012 article in The Globe about Onyango Obama, in which the White House is reported to have said the two never met.

The Associated Press writes:

"Onyango Obama, the half-brother of the president's late father, testified he has lived in the U.S. since 1963, when he entered on a student visa. He had a series of immigration hearings in the 1980s and was ordered to leave the country in 1992 but remained."

"His immigration status didn't become public until his 2011 drunken-driving arrest in Framingham, Mass. Police said after the arrest he told them, 'I think I will call the White House.'

"In the president's memoir, Dreams from My Father, he writes about his 1988 trip to Kenya and refers to an Uncle Omar, who matches Onyango Obama's background and has the same date of birth."

Shell has just floated the hull of the world's largest vessel out of its dry dock in South Korea. It's so massive, that if you stood it up, it would be 1,601 feet tall, reaching higher into the sky than the Empire State Building.

The vessel, called the Prelude, will actually be used more as a floating island than a ship. It won't be able to travel under its own power. Shell plans to tow it and anchor it about 300 miles off the coast of western Australia for 25 years.

There, the 600,000-ton Prelude will serve as a liquefied natural gas, or LNG, facility, which lets the company tap into the natural gas deep at sea. The gas will then be chilled into a liquid, which makes the gas easier to store and ship.

The Planet Money men's T-shirt was made in Bangladesh, by workers who make about $3 a day, with overtime. The Planet Money women's T-shirt was made in Colombia, by workers who make roughly $13 a day, without overtime.

The wages in both places are remarkably low by U.S. standards. But the gap between them is huge. Workers in Colombia make more than four times what their counterparts make in Bangladesh. In our reporting, we saw that the workers in Colombia have a much higher standard of living than the workers in Bangladesh.

Noreli Morales, a Colombian worker who helped make our women's T-shirt, lives with her mom and her daughter in an apartment that has a kitchen and a bathroom. Shumi and Minu, Bangladeshi sisters who worked on our men's T-shirt, share a single room with Minu's husband. There's no running water, no kitchen. Noreli sends her daughter to day care; Minu can't afford day care, so her daughter lives back in the village, with her parents.

Interactive Documentary

Updated at 11:30 p.m. ET: Cobalt-60 Found

Mexican officials say they've recovered the "extremely dangerous" radioactive cobalt-60 that was stolen last week, hours after finding its empty containter.

The Associated Press reports:

"A missing shipment of radioactive cobalt-60 was found Wednesday near where the stolen truck transporting the material was abandoned in central Mexico, the country's nuclear safety director said.

"The highly radioactive material had been removed from its container, officials said, and one predicted that anyone involved in opening the box could be in grave danger of dying within days.

"The cobalt-60 was left in a rural area about a kilometer (a half a mile) from Hueypoxtla, an agricultural town of about 4,000 people, but it posed no threat or a need for an evacuation, said Juan Eibenschutz, director general of the National Commission of Nuclear Safety and Safeguards.

"'Fortunately there are no people where the source of radioactivity is,' Eibenschutz said."

Bangladesh was created out of chaos in the early 1970s, at a moment when millions in the country were dying from a combination of war and famine. The future looked exceedingly bleak.

Abdul Majid Chowdhury and Noorul Quader were Bangladeshi businessmen who wanted to help their country. "We asked ourselves, 'What the hell do we want?' " Chowdhury recalls. The answer he and his friends arrived at: "We need employment. We need dollars."

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A new report says the Justice Department regularly coerces defendants in federal drug cases to plead guilty by threatening them with steep prison sentences or stacking charges to increase their time behind bars.

And for the first time, the study by Human Rights Watch finds that defendants who take their fate to a judge or jury face prison sentences on average 11 years longer than those who plead guilty.

In all, a whopping 97 percent of defendants plead guilty — no surprise, says author Jamie Fellner, given the enormous and essentially unchecked power that federal prosecutors wield.

"As long as there are mandatory minimums, prosecutors dictate the sentences by the charges they bring," Fellner told NPR in an interview.

The issue matters because about half of the people in costly and overcrowded U.S. prisons got there after being charged with and convicted of drug offenses. Even though many of those inmates worked on the ground floor of drug operations, they still serve long prison sentences because of 5- and 10-year mandatory terms that Congress breathed into life during the heart of the crack cocaine scare in the 1980s. Prosecutors have the option of adding more charges based on a person's prior offenses, including low-level drug possession cases.

Fellner's interviews with prosecutors, judges and public defenders and her review of sentencing data uncovered dozens of cases where defendants got sent to prison for nearly a half century for first-time drug offenses.

In one such case, the Human Rights Watch report said, Mary Beth Looney of refused a plea deal that would have sent her to prison for 17 years for dealing methamphetamines and having guns in her house. Prosecutors added more charges against her. Ultimately, after trial and conviction, she was sentenced to more than 45 years behind bars. As a federal appeals court noted, mandatory minimum sentences left the trial judge with little discretion but to impose "effectively a life sentence" on the 53-year-old Texas woman who had no prior convictions.

For others with a history of small-time drug possession raps, the ability of the Justice Department to stack on those old histories adds up, too. One judge wrote that he was dismayed by the life sentence that prosecutors tried to impose on a defendant for carrying such a small amount of drugs over the course of his criminal history that the substance "would rattle around in a matchbox." But too often, Fellner wrote, judges find their hands are tied by the mandatory sentencing system.

"To have a judge and a jury relegated to essentially museum pieces, it's not healthy," Fellner said. "It doesn't lead to trust in the results. When you have innocent people tempted and also maybe pleading guilty just to avoid the possibility of a really long sentence, that doesn't give you a whole lot of faith in the integrity of the system."

The Justice Department had no immediate comment on the Human Rights Watch study.

In August, Attorney General Eric Holder told federal prosecutors not to hit low-level drug offenders with charges that carry mandatory minimum sentences, part of an effort to reduce U.S. incarceration levels and to reorient the criminal justice system toward violent criminals and to become more "smart" on crime. Human Rights Watch says it's too early to say how prosecutors around the country will interpret that broad guidance. There's no apparent remedy if prosecutors refuse to follow the directive. And Fellner said she already has found some cases where the Justice Department appeared to do just that.

Fellner said Congress needs to restore discretion to federal judges, by getting rid of mandatory minimums or giving judges more power to depart from sentencing guidelines based on the facts in an individual case. The Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., will consider some of these options when the Senate returns from recess next week. Fellner said Holder, in the meantime, should bar prosecutors from threatening longer sentences because defendants in drug cases refuse to plead guilty.

Bangladesh was created out of chaos in the early 1970s, at a moment when millions in the country were dying from a combination of war and famine. The future looked exceedingly bleak.

Abdul Majid Chowdhury and Noorul Quader were Bangladeshi businessmen who wanted to help their country. "We asked ourselves, 'What the hell do we want?' " Chowdhury recalls. The answer he and his friends arrived at: "We need employment. We need dollars."

Interactive Documentary

A report from payroll company ADP finds that "the U.S. private sector added 215,000 jobs during November making it the strongest month for job growth in 2013," says the company's president and chief executive, Carlos Rodriguez.

The surge in job creation outpaced economists' estimates of 173,000 jobs for the month, according to CNBC. The last time U.S. companies added a bigger number of jobs to their payrolls was in November 2012, with 276,000 jobs, ADP says.

"The job market remained surprisingly resilient to the government shutdown and brinkmanship over the Treasury debt limit," says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, which collaborates with ADP on the report. "Employers across all industries and company sizes looked through the political battle in Washington. If anything, job growth appears to be picking up."

The ADP National Employment Report, which measures non-farm private employment, says small businesses led the way in job creation, with 102,000 jobs added.

"Goods-producing employment rose by 40,000 jobs in November, up from 29,000 in October," according to the report. "Both construction and manufacturing payrolls added 18,000 jobs apiece."

The ADP survey is seen as a bellwether for the monthly employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is expected to release its estimate of November's unemployment rate and payroll growth on Friday.

Also Wednesday, the Census Bureau reported that America's trade gap shrank in October, on the strength of record sales to China, Canada and Mexico. The gap narrowed 5.4 percent, to $40.6 billion from $43 billion in the previous month.

From Bloomberg News:

"Sales of goods to China, Canada and Mexico were the highest ever, pointing to improving global demand that will benefit American manufacturers. In addition, an expanding U.S. economy is helping boost growth abroad as purchases of products from the European Union also climbed to a record in October even as fiscal gridlock prompted a partial federal shutdown."

Just about every Mustang owner has a story about how their love affair with the car began.

Laura Slider's story began the day a red Mustang appeared in the driveway across the street.

"I've wanted one ever since I was 15," she says. "It was owned by a very cute boy that I liked. And then we rode in it and it was very fast and sporty and fun and pretty, and I thought, I want one someday."

Now, decades later, she has one. And, yes, it's red.

On Thursday, Ford Motor Co. will pull the veil off its redesigned Mustang for 2015. And for the first time in its nearly 50-year history, the iconic pony car will be sold in every region of the world.

“ For me, it started in childhood, and that Mustang Mach 1 from 1973, I think. That's a dream car. That's the dream.

The largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history took a major step forward Tuesday when a federal judge ruled that the city of Detroit is eligible for protection under Chapter 9 of the U.S. bankruptcy code.

The embattled city is trying to work its way out from under $18.5 billion in debt. In issuing his decision, Judge Steven Rhodes said "the court finds that Detroit was and is insolvent." Rhodes also said the city can seek to cut pensions for its retirees as it works to reduce its debt. He also cautioned, though, that such cuts must be fair and equitable — a signal he won't rubber-stamp the city's decisions.

Unions and pension funds had argued in court that the city did not bargain with them in good faith before filing for Chapter 9 protection. On that point, Rhodes had critical words for the city's negotiators: "Charitably stated, the [city's] proposal is very summary in nature," he said of Detroit's offer to unions and creditors. He also "scolded" the city for hurrying the negotiations, the Detroit Free Press reports.

But Rhodes concluded it would have been "impracticable" for the city to negotiate in good faith. "In other words," writes Detroit's WXYZ-TV, the city's financial situation was "so dire that negotiating in good faith would not have been realistic."

The city's bankruptcy case, Rhodes said, should not be dismissed over the "good faith" bargaining issue. "This case was filed in good faith and should not be dismissed," he ruled.

We've posted previously about what happens after a municipality gets bankruptcy protection. It's expected to be years before Detroit settles with all its creditors and finds ways to further reduce its labor costs and cut pension benefits. Federal bankruptcy courts will still be overseeing the process. Next up for the city, according to the Free Press:

"Emergency manager Kevyn Orr would proceed with plans to propose a massive restructuring plan, called a 'plan of adjustment,' by the end of the month. The plan would include offers to bondholders, retirees and unions and likely would also include the proposed sale of assets, such as [Detroit Institute of Arts] property and the city's water and sewer department. Several creditors have already signaled they plan to appeal."

All this baking chemistry provides the building blocks for refining the cookie's architecture, says molecular biologist Liz Roth-Johnson, who runs the Science and Food blog at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Say I have a cookie recipe, and it's not quite what I want," she says. "You can take these basic concepts and use them to engineer the perfect cookie."

The Salt

Making 'The Science Of Good Cooking' Look Easy

This summer, I hit one of life's great milestones: I became a person who posts baby pictures on the Internet. A lot of them.

Our son was born in August, and I have already taken 15,000 pictures of him, hundreds that I want to share with our family and close friends, and a few dozen that I might want to show colleagues and acquaintances. But how?

In theory, we're in a golden age of photo sharing. There are literally dozens of ways to share photos with friends now. But with the new capabilities of the Internet come new and distinctly contemporary problems.

For one, most parents don't want photographs of their children widely available. You want your people to see them but not anyone else. The privacy issues that lurk in our daily lives cry out to be addressed when it comes to children

And second, not everyone uses the same social network. Grandma's on Facebook, your nephew is on Instagram and your colleagues are on Twitter and LinkedIn.

So, what do my wife and I do?

More Tools For Shutterbug Parents

Snapchat: This mobile app has garnered a lot of publicity as a platform for sexting. That's because photos people send to each other using this app disappear (from all phones and the company's servers) within 10 seconds of viewing them. So how do we use it as parents? Well, for the gross stuff. You might want to send your partner a photo of a particularly impressively filled diaper, but you don't need or want that image in your phone's memory. That's the kind of thing Snapchat was made for.

Blurb: Online services are great for storing vast quantities of photographs of your child. But what if you want something curated, more like a keepsake or a photoalbum of old? Well, Blurb is a print-on-demand publisher with really simple tools that allow you to create beautiful, professional-looking photo books.

The Wirecutter: If, after taking a few snapshots with your phone, you find yourself in need of a camera upgrade, this is the site to find gear recommendations. It's not like other gadget sites, which are overwhelming. Wirecutter provides one recommendation for every product category. So, you're looking for the best point-and-shoot camera? It will say, "Buy this one."

The leaders of the House and Senate agriculture committees are meeting Wednesday as they continue to try and work out the differences between their respective farm bills. If they fail, the country faces what's being called the "dairy cliff" — with milk prices potentially shooting up to about $7 a gallon sometime after the first of the year.

Here's why: The nation's farm policy would be legally required to revert back to what's called permanent law. In the case of dairy, that would be the 1949 farm bill.

And if House and Senate negotiators fail to reconcile their farm bills, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warns, "I'm going to be put in a position where I have to invoke and implement permanent law. And I will do my job because that's what I swore an oath to do."

The problem is that back in 1949, the dairy industry was much smaller and less efficient than the one that exists today, so it received bigger price supports from the federal government. And if U.S. policy reverted to the old law, the government would be forced to go into the marketplace and buy milk, butter and cheese at about double the going rate.

Vilsack says this would distort the market: "So you, as a [milk] producer, would have a choice of selling it to your normal purchaser at $18 or $19 a hundred weight or to USDA at $38 a hundred weight. What do you think producers will do?"

Of course the producers would sell to the government. And that, says Jim Dunn, a professor of agricultural economics at Penn State University, "would be terrible."

"Every refrigerated warehouse in the United States would be full of cheese and butter," he says, "and non-refrigerated milk warehouses would be full of powdered milk."

And for the rest of us, he says, there would be sticker shock in the dairy aisle.

Vilsack says there would be supply issues, too, because the federal government would own the commodities, but there would be shortages in the grocery store. Which is how we'd quickly end up facing milk at $7 a gallon —"If you can find it," notes Vilsack. "And that is why it is ludicrous for Congress not to get a farm bill done."

Milk would only be the first commodity affected. Without a farm bill, other commodity prices would spike as well as the year went on, affecting every family in America. Farm policy, often obscure for most consumers, would get personal fast. If this all sounds like illogical and terrible policy — well, that's the point, says Vilsack.

"It's a great lever to compel action," he says of the invocation of permanent law that hovers over every farm bill. "In most cases, it's the reason why we've had fairly routine extensions of the farm bill for the past 50 years."

Rep. Mike Conaway, a Republican from Texas and a member of the farm bill conference committee, agrees with Vilsack's assessment.

"It's applying pressure to me," he notes."That's the whole advantage of having permanent law that's as bad as it is: To try to get folks to create the new law that we need for the next five years."

Now if all this talk about a dairy cliff sounds familiar, that's because it is: Last year, lawmakers narrowly avoided triggering those 1949 price supports by tucking a temporary extension of the 2008 farm bill into last-minute legislation that avoided the fiscal cliff.

This year, efforts to pass a new five-year farm bill have fallen into some of the same philosophical fights about the role of government that have gummed up the budget process on Capitol Hill — and just about everything else.

This story is part of the Planet Money T-shirt project.

Jeff Steinberg had a maroon and white lacrosse jersey that he wore for years. It said "Denver Lacrosse" on the front and had his number, 5, on the back.

Then, one day, he cleaned out his closet and took the shirt to a Goodwill store in Miami. He figured that was the end of it. But some months after that, Steinberg found himself in Sierra Leone for work. He was walking down the street, and he saw a guy selling ice cream and cold drinks, wearing a Denver Lacrosse jersey.

"I thought, 'Wow, this is pretty crazy,' " Steinberg says. Then he looked at the back of the shirt — and saw the number 5. His number. Steinberg tried to talk to the guy about the shirt, but he didn't speak much English and they couldn't really communicate.

More than 1 million people will see their extended unemployment benefits immediately cut off at the end of the month if Congress doesn't act.

An emergency federal benefit program was put in place during the recession to help those who are unemployed longer than six months. That allowed them to get as much as a year and a half of help while they searched for work, even after state benefits ran out.

But without congressional action, the program will expire at the end of December, meaning the most anyone could get would be six months of unemployment benefits. In some states, it would be even less.

Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., recently held a press conference with several other congressional Democrats to move the issue "from the back burner to the front burner."

"To say to people at Christmastime: When you look in your Christmas sock you're going to find a lump of coal from the Congress — that's wrong," says Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. "And then we're going to go home and have a great celebration and have a great time, and leave an awful lot of people in the cold. This has to be done."

But Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., says there simply isn't an appetite for renewing this program again, five years after it started as a temporary emergency measure at the height of the recession.

"I think that's going to be a pretty tough sell," Cole says. "They've been extended well beyond the normal boundaries ... so I think it is going to be very difficult to get that extension."

Advocates estimate that continuing the program for another year would cost about $25 billion. But for Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Ga., it may be less an argument about dollars and deficits as it is about policy.

"If the desire is to change the way we deal with unemployment in this country permanently, we need to have that debate," says Woodall. "But what we did was never intended to be permanent. It was intended to be a very temporary solution to a very temporary crisis."

But for about 4 million people who count themselves among the long-term unemployed, the crisis drags on, says Judy Conti, an advocate with the National Employment Law Project.

"I would be lying if I said people in Congress weren't fatigued by having to keep doing this, but at the same time the long-term are fatigued from having to search for work in a bad economy," Conti says. "So, it's not time yet to remove the federal safety net from the unemployed."

One of the long-term unemployed is Linda Sandefur, who lives in the hard-hit state of Michigan.

"I have a master's degree and bachelor's degree, 20 years of work experience," she says. "This is like my third go-around on unemployment. And for me, the American dream is dead."

Sandefur says that if her unemployment benefits are cut off, she won't be able to pay the mortgage on the house she shares with her mother. The irony is that Sandefur has spent a big part of her career helping other people find jobs.

"But even having the knowledge hasn't made it any easier," Sandefur says.

Her last temporary gig ended in June. And she's been applying for just about anything, no matter how low the pay or the experience required. Still, the search continues.

"Earlier today I did find a couple of things that did sound a little closer to me," Sandefur says. "So I've got to do a little follow-up with them and convince them that I'm the person they're looking for."

But every time she follows up on a job, she says they tell her they've gotten more than 100 other applications.

Democrats say they hope a benefits extension can be added to must-pass legislation before the end of the year.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner says Republicans will take a look at any plan Democrats come up with, but adds: "We think it would be better for them to focus on helping get our economy moving again so more of the unemployed can find jobs."

Part of the Planet Money T-shirt Project

This is the story of how the garment industry is transforming life in Bangladesh, and the story of two sisters who made the Planet Money T-shirt.

Shumi and Minu work six days a week operating sewing machines at Deluxe Fashions Ltd. in Chittagong, Bangladesh. They each make about $80 a month.

Interactive Documentary

Any day now, the New Mexico Supreme Court may grant same-sex couples the right to get married.

At this point, such a ruling may not seem like such a big deal. Prior to last year's elections, gays and lesbians had a civil right to marry in only six states. Now, they have it in 16.

"This year represented the true tipping point," says Eric Marcus, author of Making Gay History. "We've reached a moment in history where it's very difficult, if not impossible, to go back."

This has been "the gayest year in gay history," in the words of Fred Sainz, vice president of the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, and not only because individual states and the U.S. Supreme Court have extended greater protections to gay couples.

There have been substantive changes in policy and personnel, with President Obama essentially doubling the number of openly gay individuals who have served as federal judges and ambassadors.

This year has also seen symbolic milestones, including Obama enshrining the cause of gays in the civil rights pantheon in his second inaugural address, and the first professional athletes in major sports coming out.

None of which is to suggest that anti-gay discrimination has gone away entirely, or that all Americans are on board with these trends. When the Cheney sisters feuded recently, the Pew Research Center showed that nearly two-thirds of Republicans are opposed to same-sex marriage.

But an earlier Pew survey found that a majority of gay marriage opponents viewed its legal recognition as "inevitable." And gay rights advocates almost can't believe the progress they've already made.

"To describe the events of the year as breathtaking is woefully inadequate," says Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

A Long Time Coming

As with any great societal change, this year's victories for the gay rights movement took a long time to gestate.

Gays and lesbians had once complained about feeling invisible, but as millions of individuals have come out, they not only have made their political desires more tangible but also have won sympathetic allies among many straights.

"It took the shape of a million different conversations that a newly out gay family member had with her parents or his siblings," Kendell says.

Just as the presence of gays in American life came to seem more commonplace, so did same-sex marriage.

"With every state that has passed marriage equality, it becomes a little less of a headline and a little more an advance of a norm," says Mark Harris, a film critic and cultural historian. "Everybody feels like it's only going in one direction."

A decade ago, Harris and his husband, playwright Tony Kushner, became the first same-sex couple to be featured in The New York Times "Vows" section.

"It took a long time for those gay marriage announcements to be routine," Harris says. "It seemed like a long time to us, but it was really a short time. The speed of our progress in the last several years has been almost unparalleled in American history in terms of a specific minority group's push for civil rights."

By the time Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin was sworn in this year as the first openly gay senator in U.S. history, the occasion received barely any coverage. Similarly, Maine Democratic Rep. Mike Michaud coming out ahead of his gubernatorial bid seemed to cause barely a ripple.

"When I travel around the state, people want to talk about the future," says state Rep. Heather Mizeur, an openly gay Maryland Democrat running for governor next year. "It's insignificant to them that my wife will become the first lady of the state."

Crediting Obama

Given that gays make up a small fraction of the population, they have needed to win over allies. Their most important champion has been the president.

During his first term, Obama sometimes came across as a reluctant warrior on gay issues, taking his time to "evolve" his position on marriage, his timing perhaps prodded by remarks from Vice President Joe Biden. But Kendell and other advocates give him points for announcing his new position in the midst of his re-election bid.

"We saw an 18-point swing in African-American communities when the president came out in favor of it," says Mizeur of Maryland, where voters approved a same-sex marriage law last year.

Obama had already been the rare national politician to use the word "we" when speaking of the gay rights cause before announcing his support for same-sex marriage last year. In his inaugural address in January, he referred in the same breath to Stonewall, Selma and Seneca Falls (respectively, landmarks in the struggles for rights for gays, African-Americans and women).

Obama has been the "gays' LBJ," says Jonathan Rauch, a resident scholar at the Brookings Institution, comparing the current president to Lyndon Johnson, who signed into law the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s.

"He's a guy who took an issue that had been something of a hot potato and put both his hands on it and said, 'I am mainstreaming this issue,' " Rauch says.

Obama's efforts have been more than rhetorical. Crucially, he ended "don't ask, don't tell," the policy that kept gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.

This year's Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage might well have turned out differently if the government still had an active interest in arguing for discrimination, says Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center at San Francisco State University, which studies transgender military service.

"People who opposed gays in the military were exactly right to do so," he says. "They realized the military is so widely revered in American society that if they could draw the line in the sand there, they could prevent gays from locking in rights in other parts of society."

Aspirational Achievement

Obama spoke about gay rights in aspirational terms in his second inaugural.

"Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law," he said, "for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well."

Marriage helped gays "change the subject from being primarily about rights and nondiscrimination to being about love, family and community," says Rauch, who has written books about same-sex marriage and growing up gay.

"That's more compelling to people," he says. "They don't like having fingers shaken at them and being called a bigot."

Gays have not won every battle. The Senate passed an anti-discrimination law known as ENDA last month, but it appears to have little traction in the House. It remains legal for employers to fire people for being gay or transgender in more than half the states.

Although a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage rights, according to polls, it's a small majority. Public opinion polls may overstate such support, according to one study.

There's still considerable resistance among many voters and politicians to the gay rights cause. But the fact that support for gays and gay marriage has been rising — particularly among young people — may leave opposition to their movement less heated, activists say.

"Before Obama, it was possible to say that gay rights was a controversial but fringy concern," Rauch says. "After Obama, it is agree or disagree, but gay rights is 100 percent mainstream."

Anyone who has hankered for a list of 10 of the most life-affirming dog rescue stories ever can rely on the social media site BuzzFeed.

That list of 11 classic horror films that should never have been remade? That's from BuzzFeed too.

BuzzFeed's digital traffic is stratospheric: It cites Google Analytics figures that show it drew more than 130 million unique visitors to its site last month. But the social media outfit is in the process of building up a team of journalists to offer original news reporting, raising questions of just what it intends to be.

"When we look at with whom we're really competing — look at The New York Times, look at The Guardian — these are stories that people are sharing," says Ben Smith, the charismatic BuzzFeed editor-in-chief hired away from Politico two years ago. "These are meaningful stories that are advancing the news."

Under Smith, BuzzFeed has hired reporters to cover politics and culture and added reporters in Cairo, Istanbul, Russia and, most recently, Nairobi, Kenya. The promise: to offer stories with distinctive takes, not just the latest development.

Yet most visitors clearly arrive for the viral posts that made it famous. The conference rooms at BuzzFeed's new Manhattan headquarters are named for some of the most important players in its early history: "No No No Cat," "Kitten with a Tiny Hat," "Birthday Cat," "Business Cat" and "Lil Bub." They are unlikely to be household names -– unless your household includes social media junkies under the age of 35. As it turns out, many tens of millions of houses and apartments do.

Enlarge image i

Get recipes for Homemade Peppermint Extract, Roasted Squash With Mint And Feta, Cranberry Sauce With Pomegranate And Mint, Peppermint Patty Tart and Mint Julep Hot Chocolate.

Part of the Planet Money T-shirt Project

This is the story of how the garment industry is transforming life in Bangladesh, and the story of two sisters who made the Planet Money T-shirt.

Shumi and Minu work six days a week operating sewing machines at Deluxe Fashions Ltd. in Chittagong, Bangladesh. They each make about $80 a month.

Interactive Documentary

The news that Amazon is hoping to one day use semi-autonomous drones to deliver small packages to customers has many asking a familiar question:

What could go wrong?

Check this tweet:

"An Amazon drone!? What could go wrong?! 'They're autonomous' - this is how the Terminator started FYI..."

Think twice — it may not be all right.

Bob Dylan is being sued by a France-based Croatian organization for alleged racism following an interview last year in which the music legend loosely compared Croats and Nazis.

France has strict laws against hate speech, and the Council of Croats in France says it wants an apology from Dylan.

His "comments were an incitement to hatred," Vlatko Maric, the group's secretary said, according to The Guardian.

Just last month, Dylan was awarded France's Legion d'Honneur.

Dylan's comments came in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2012, when he was asked to comment on present-day America. Dylan said the U.S. was too focused on race.

"It's a distraction. People at each other's throats just because they are of a different color. It's the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighborhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.

"It's doubtful that America's ever going to get rid of that stigmatization. It's a country founded on the backs of slaves."

A former Amazon executive who helped Jeff Bezos turn shopping into a digital experience has set out to end illiteracy. David Risher is now the head of Worldreader, a nonprofit organization that brings e-books to kids in developing countries through Kindles and cellphones.

Risher was traveling around the world with his family when he got the idea for Worldreader. They were doing volunteer work at an orphanage in Ecuador when he saw a building with a big padlock on the door. He asked a woman who worked there what was inside, and she said, "It's the library."

Enlarge image i

This story is part of the Planet Money T-shirt project.

Jeff Steinberg had a maroon and white lacrosse jersey that he wore for years. It said "Denver Lacrosse" on the front and had his number, 5, on the back.

Then, one day, he cleaned out his closet and took the shirt to a Goodwill store in Miami. He figured that was the end of it. But some months after that, Steinberg found himself in Sierra Leone for work. He was walking down the street, and he saw a guy selling ice cream and cold drinks, wearing a Denver Lacrosse jersey.

"I thought, 'Wow, this is pretty crazy,' " Steinberg says. Then he looked at the back of the shirt — and saw the number 5. His number. Steinberg tried to talk to the guy about the shirt, but he didn't speak much English and they couldn't really communicate.

We've been following the story of the helicopter that crashed into a pub in Glasgow, Scotland, last week. There's more news Monday on the deadly crash: A ninth body has been pulled from the wreckage of The Clutha Bar.

Three people on board the helicopter were killed, along with at least six others in the pub. Dozens of people were injured. The Guardian reports that rescue workers were making a final search of the debris to make sure no more bodies were inside the bar.

"Of course, we hope that there's nobody else in there, but before we can confirm that we need to be double, double sure," David Goodhew, the Scottish fire and rescue service operation commander, told the newspaper.

Here's more from The Guardian:

"On Monday, a second of the six customers killed in the crash was named as Samuel McGhee, 56, of Glasgow. He is believed to have been sitting next to one of the men missing since the crash, the poet and writer John McGarrigle, 59.

"As other relatives expressed frustration at the speed of the recovery operation, McGarrigle's son, also John, visited the site on Monday to press home his demands for help from the police.

"He had been seeking confirmation that his father's remains were there since Friday night, but police had been unable to confirm that because of the difficulties of recovering bodies from the ruins."

San Francisco has long been a desirable place to live — and that's even more true today as the city is basking in the glow of another tech boom. But the influx of new money and new residents is putting a strain on the city's housing market.

The city has the highest median rent in the nation, and the evictions of longtime residents are skyrocketing.

Ground zero for San Francisco's eviction crisis is the Inner Mission District. Until recently, this edgy neighborhood was home to a mix of working-class Latinos, artists and activists.

Tom Rapp, an airport building maintenance worker, rents a modest second-story flat that he's called home for 15 years. He says a lot of his neighbors have been evicted over the past couple of years. Then bad news came knocking on his door, too.

"We received an eviction notice at the end of August," he says.

"But we've gotten like three different ones, right?" adds his roommate, Patricia Kerman.

Kerman, a senior on a fixed income, has lived in this flat for 27 years.

The two are fighting to stay in their rent-controlled apartment as their landlord tries to evict them under what's known as the Ellis Act. It's a state law that allows an eviction if the landlord wants to pull the building out of the rental market, usually with a plan to sell the units.

"They found this loophole where they're now able to get people out of their rent-controlled apartments, and it's just becoming an epidemic," Rapp says.

Rapp's landlord was not available for comment.

A recent city report finds that Ellis Act evictions have increased 170 percent over the past three years. Low- and middle-income tenants are unlikely to find another affordable apartment in San Francisco, where the median monthly rent has risen to about $3,400.

Fighting Back

At the steps of San Francisco City Hall, a small group of tenants and community organizers recently demanded that the city do something to prevent more evictions.

Inside City Hall, at a packed hearing of the Board of Supervisors, landlord Andrew Long blamed the evictions on the city's rent-control policies.

"This has caused rents for long-term tenants to be quite low, which is great for them, but it doesn't keep a building up," Long said.

Long said rent control drives small property landlords into the hands of big-money speculators who profit from converting rentals to condos.

But the hearing was dominated by scores of long-time residents who talked about their fears of getting pushed out of San Francisco.

Beverly Upton, director of the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium, is facing eviction from a building where she's lived for 25 years.

"Once the advocates and the organizers and the artists are gone, who will be left to care about our city?" she said.

That's a big concern in San Francisco, where traditionally there's always been a balance between the comfortable and the nonconformists, says former Mayor Art Agnos.

"The struggle to keep people who make between $60,000 and $150,000 a year is what we're facing in San Francisco. That's who the struggle is for today," Agnos says. "Frankly, it's all but over for the poor in this city."

More Development To Come

The evictions and the fear they engender come as the city is booming. Construction cranes crowd the downtown horizon. Pricey new restaurants serve the well-heeled tech crowd. Million-dollar condos sell for cash as soon as they come on the market.

So in a city that takes pride in its quirky diversity, there's a palpable sense that the bohemian days of live and let live are slipping away, Agnos says.

"We're not saying wealthy people shouldn't live here," he says. "What we're saying is we're losing the balance and the opportunity that has always been the promise of San Francisco."

San Francisco has endured similar periods when its housing supply was squeezed, like during the last dot-com boom.

And each time, Agnos says, the city becomes that much less affordable.

More than 1 million people will see their extended unemployment benefits immediately cut off at the end of the month if Congress doesn't act.

An emergency federal benefit program was put in place during the recession to help those who are unemployed longer than six months. That allowed them to get as much as a year and a half of help while they searched for work, even after state benefits ran out.

But without congressional action, the program will expire at the end of December, meaning the most anyone could get would be six months of unemployment benefits. In some states, it would be even less.

Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., recently held a press conference with several other congressional Democrats to move the issue "from the back burner to the front burner."

"To say to people at Christmastime: When you look in your Christmas sock you're going to find a lump of coal from the Congress — that's wrong," says Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. "And then we're going to go home and have a great celebration and have a great time, and leave an awful lot of people in the cold. This has to be done."

But Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., says there simply isn't an appetite for renewing this program again, five years after it started as a temporary emergency measure at the height of the recession.

"I think that's going to be a pretty tough sell," Cole says. "They've been extended well beyond the normal boundaries ... so I think it is going to be very difficult to get that extension."

Advocates estimate that continuing the program for another year would cost about $25 billion. But for Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Ga., it may be less an argument about dollars and deficits as it is about policy.

"If the desire is to change the way we deal with unemployment in this country permanently, we need to have that debate," says Woodall. "But what we did was never intended to be permanent. It was intended to be a very temporary solution to a very temporary crisis."

But for about 4 million people who count themselves among the long-term unemployed, the crisis drags on, says Judy Conti, an advocate with the National Employment Law Project.

"I would be lying if I said people in Congress weren't fatigued by having to keep doing this, but at the same time the long-term are fatigued from having to search for work in a bad economy," Conti says. "So, it's not time yet to remove the federal safety net from the unemployed."

One of the long-term unemployed is Linda Sandefur, who lives in the hard-hit state of Michigan.

"I have a master's degree and bachelor's degree, 20 years of work experience," she says. "This is like my third go-around on unemployment. And for me, the American dream is dead."

Sandefur says that if her unemployment benefits are cut off, she won't be able to pay the mortgage on the house she shares with her mother. The irony is that Sandefur has spent a big part of her career helping other people find jobs.

"But even having the knowledge hasn't made it any easier," Sandefur says.

Her last temporary gig ended in June. And she's been applying for just about anything, no matter how low the pay or the experience required. Still, the search continues.

"Earlier today I did find a couple of things that did sound a little closer to me," Sandefur says. "So I've got to do a little follow-up with them and convince them that I'm the person they're looking for."

But every time she follows up on a job, she says they tell her they've gotten more than 100 other applications.

Democrats say they hope a benefits extension can be added to must-pass legislation before the end of the year.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner says Republicans will take a look at any plan Democrats come up with, but adds: "We think it would be better for them to focus on helping get our economy moving again so more of the unemployed can find jobs."

The Planet Money men's T-shirt was made in Bangladesh, by workers who make about $3 a day, with overtime. The Planet Money women's T-shirt was made in Colombia, by workers who make roughly $13 a day, without overtime.

The wages in both places are remarkably low by U.S. standards. But the gap between them is huge. Workers in Colombia make more than four times what their counterparts make in Bangladesh. In our reporting, we saw that the workers in Colombia have a much higher standard of living than the workers in Bangladesh.

Noreli Morales, a Colombian worker who helped make our women's T-shirt, lives with her mom and her daughter in an apartment that has a kitchen and a bathroom. Shumi and Minu, Bangladeshi sisters who worked on our men's T-shirt, share a single room with Minu's husband. There's no running water, no kitchen. Noreli sends her daughter to daycare; Minu can't afford daycare, so her daughter lives back in the village, with her parents.

Interactive Documentary

Oregon has spent more than $40 million to build its own online health care exchange. It gave that money to a Silicon Valley titan, Oracle, but the result has been a disaster of missed deadlines, a nonworking website and a state forced to process thousands of insurance applications on paper.

Some Oregon officials were sounding alarms about the tech company's work on the state's online health care exchange as early as last spring. Oracle was behind schedule and, worse, didn't seem able to offer an estimate of what it would take to get the state's online exchange up and running.

"It is the most maddening and frustrating position to be in, absolutely," says Liz Baxter, chairwoman of the board for Cover Oregon, the state's online exchange. "We have spent a lot of money to get something done — to get it done well — to serve the people in our state, and it is maddening that we can't seem to get over this last hump."

Falling Back On Paper Applications

Oregon had an ambitious goal: to create a place where anyone, from Medicaid recipients and small-business owners to people in the individual market, could go to shop for insurance. "In hindsight — which is always wonderful — we made decisions that made our system much more complicated to build," Baxter says.

Initially, Oracle promised it could get the job done. But by mid-May, the head of Cover Oregon, Rocky King, had written the company, pleading for "a simple calendar schedule ... to ascertain whether or not we will be able to deliver" a working exchange by Oct. 1.

Five months later, when Oregon's exchange was supposed to go live, the site still didn't work. And as recently as two weeks ago, the state had not yet managed to sign up a single person for private health insurance under the federal Affordable Care Act.

In desperation, Baxter says, Cover Oregon hired hundreds of temporary workers and cobbled together an application based on paper — currently the only way to apply.

All Tech Considered

The Key Test For HealthCare.gov Is The Part You Can't See

Outside the glittering new Perez Art Museum Miami, finishing touches were still being applied late last month to the spacious plazas and gardens surrounding the $220-million building. Next door to the art museum, a new science museum is also going up. When it's all complete, the 29-acre Museum Park will provide a focus and a gathering spot on Biscayne Bay for those who live in, work in and visit downtown Miami.

The Perez building, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, has been described, and often, as stunning. It's notable for its spare, rectangular lines and expanse of glass windows — the largest hurricane-impact-resistant glass windows in the world — and for the 70 hydroponic gardens hanging from every side. They were designed by French landscape artist Patrick Blanc, and they're self-watering.

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San Francisco has long been a desirable place to live — and that's even more true today as the city is basking in the glow of another tech boom. But the influx of new money and new residents is putting a strain on the city's housing market.

The city has the highest median rent in the nation, and the evictions of longtime residents are skyrocketing.

Ground zero for San Francisco's eviction crisis is the Inner Mission District. Until recently, this edgy neighborhood was home to a mix of working-class Latinos, artists and activists.

Tom Rapp, an airport building maintenance worker, rents a modest second-story flat that he's called home for 15 years. He says a lot of his neighbors have been evicted over the past couple of years. Then bad news came knocking on his door, too.

"We received an eviction notice at the end of August," he says.

"But we've gotten like three different ones, right?" adds his roommate, Patricia Kerman.

Kerman, a senior on a fixed income, has lived in this flat for 27 years.

The two are fighting to stay in their rent-controlled apartment as their landlord tries to evict them under what's known as the Ellis Act. It's a state law that allows an eviction if the landlord wants to pull the building out of the rental market, usually with a plan to sell the units.

"They found this loophole where they're now able to get people out of their rent-controlled apartments, and it's just becoming an epidemic," Rapp says.

Rapp's landlord was not available for comment.

A recent city report finds that Ellis Act evictions have increased 170 percent over the past three years. Low- and middle-income tenants are unlikely to find another affordable apartment in San Francisco, where the median monthly rent has risen to about $3,400.

Fighting Back

At the steps of San Francisco City Hall, a small group of tenants and community organizers recently demanded that the city do something to prevent more evictions.

Inside City Hall, at a packed hearing of the Board of Supervisors, landlord Andrew Long blamed the evictions on the city's rent-control policies.

"This has caused rents for long-term tenants to be quite low, which is great for them, but it doesn't keep a building up," Long said.

Long said rent control drives small property landlords into the hands of big-money speculators who profit from converting rentals to condos.

But the hearing was dominated by scores of long-time residents who talked about their fears of getting pushed out of San Francisco.

Beverly Upton, director of the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium, is facing eviction from a building where she's lived for 25 years.

"Once the advocates and the organizers and the artists are gone, who will be left to care about our city?" she said.

That's a big concern in San Francisco, where traditionally there's always been a balance between the comfortable and the nonconformists, says former Mayor Art Agnos.

"The struggle to keep people who make between $60,000 and $150,000 a year is what we're facing in San Francisco. That's who the struggle is for today," Agnos says. "Frankly, it's all but over for the poor in this city."

More Development To Come

The evictions and the fear they engender come as the city is booming. Construction cranes crowd the downtown horizon. Pricey new restaurants serve the well-heeled tech crowd. Million-dollar condos sell for cash as soon as they come on the market.

So in a city that takes pride in its quirky diversity, there's a palpable sense that the bohemian days of live and let live are slipping away, Agnos says.

"We're not saying wealthy people shouldn't live here," he says. "What we're saying is we're losing the balance and the opportunity that has always been the promise of San Francisco."

San Francisco has endured similar periods when its housing supply was squeezed, like during the last dot-com boom.

And each time, Agnos says, the city becomes that much less affordable.

While lawyers dismantle many restrictions on political money, the ones affecting Morning Edition and Downton Abbey still stand tall. A federal court in San Francisco says public radio and TV stations cannot carry paid political ads.

The 8-3 decision Monday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling last April by a smaller panel of the court. NPR and PBS both joined the case as friends of the court.

The court upheld the decades-old bar against political ads on public broadcasting stations, even as other restrictions have vanished over the years. One long-gone rule held that funders could only be listed by name.

The case just decided – Minority Television Project v. FCC – began as a bid to take any commercial advertising. Among the arguments rejected by the appeals court, the TV station invoked the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling of 2010, which allowed corporations to spend freely advocating for or against candidates.

Two dissenting judges argued that the station didn't get a fair shake because "judges like public radio and television, while pretty much nobody likes commercials."

The price of lords-a-leaping and ladies dancing has spiked this holiday season, but other items mentioned in the carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" still cost the same as they did last year.

Buying one set of the gifts mentioned in each verse costs $27,393 in stores, or 7.7 percent more than last year, according to the so-called Christmas Price Index that PNC Wealth Management updates annually. And if you buy all 364 items repeated throughout the carol, you'll pay $114,651 — 6.9 percent more than last year.

Last-minute shoppers who turn to the Internet will pay even more for all the gifts — about $173,000.

"We were surprised to see such a large increase from a year ago, given the overall benign inflation rate in the U.S.," said Jim Dunigan, managing executive of investments for PNC.

The federal government's core Consumer Price Index rose only 1.7 percent this year.

In the three decades since the list was started in 1984, year-over-year increases have averaged 2.9 percent, which is exactly the same number as broader U.S. inflation. But it's a fickle list because the price of some items has barely budged, while others have soared.

Seven swans cost $7,000 this year, the same as in 1984, while the cost of a single partridge went from $12.57 to $15 during the same period. One pear tree to put that partridge in? Thirty years ago it cost $19.95, but will now set you back $184.

The cost of nine ladies dancing is now $7,553, or 20 percent more than last year's $6,294, while 10 lords-a-leaping jumped 10 percent, to $5,243.

Seven items on the list cost the same as they did last year, including gold rings and turtle doves, while pipers piping, drummers drumming, and the pear tree showed only modest changes up or down.

The swans are the most expensive item at $1,000 each. The eight maids-a-milking still cost a total of just $58 because the federal minimum wage hasn't risen. At $7.25 each, they're the least expensive gifts in the song.

PNC Financial Services Group Inc. checks jewelry stores, dance companies, pet stores and other sources to compile the list. Among its sources this year were the National Aviary in Pittsburgh and the Philadelphia-based Pennsylvania Ballet Company.

The price of lords-a-leaping and ladies dancing has spiked this holiday season, but other items mentioned in the carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" still cost the same as they did last year.

Buying one set of the gifts mentioned in each verse costs $27,393 in stores, or 7.7 percent more than last year, according to the so-called Christmas Price Index that PNC Wealth Management updates annually. And if you buy all 364 items repeated throughout the carol, you'll pay $114,651 — 6.9 percent more than last year.

Last-minute shoppers who turn to the Internet will pay even more for all the gifts — about $173,000.

"We were surprised to see such a large increase from a year ago, given the overall benign inflation rate in the U.S.," said Jim Dunigan, managing executive of investments for PNC.

The federal government's core Consumer Price Index rose only 1.7 percent this year.

In the three decades since the list was started in 1984, year-over-year increases have averaged 2.9 percent, which is exactly the same number as broader U.S. inflation. But it's a fickle list because the price of some items has barely budged, while others have soared.

Seven swans cost $7,000 this year, the same as in 1984, while the cost of a single partridge went from $12.57 to $15 during the same period. One pear tree to put that partridge in? Thirty years ago it cost $19.95, but will now set you back $184.

The cost of nine ladies dancing is now $7,553, or 20 percent more than last year's $6,294, while 10 lords-a-leaping jumped 10 percent, to $5,243.

Seven items on the list cost the same as they did last year, including gold rings and turtle doves, while pipers piping, drummers drumming, and the pear tree showed only modest changes up or down.

The swans are the most expensive item at $1,000 each. The eight maids-a-milking still cost a total of just $58 because the federal minimum wage hasn't risen. At $7.25 each, they're the least expensive gifts in the song.

PNC Financial Services Group Inc. checks jewelry stores, dance companies, pet stores and other sources to compile the list. Among its sources this year were the National Aviary in Pittsburgh and the Philadelphia-based Pennsylvania Ballet Company.

The leader of Thailand's anti-government protests said unexpectedly that he met the prime minister Sunday after daylong clashes between his supporters and police but defiantly told her he would accept nothing less than her resignation and a new government of an appointed council.

In a defiant tone that drew cheers from his supporters, Suthep Thaugsuban said the meeting with was held under the auspices of the military, which says it is neutral in the conflict.

Police throughout the day fought off mobs of rock-throwing protesters who tried to battle their way into the government's heavily-fortified headquarters and other offices. Mobs also besieged several television stations, demanding they broadcast the protesters' views and not the government's. Several of the capital's biggest shopping malls closed in the heart of the city due to the unrest.

With skirmishes around Yingluck's office at Government House continuing as darkness fell, the government advised Bangkok residents to stay indoors overnight for their safety.

The protests have renewed fears of prolonged instability in one of Southeast Asia's biggest economies. Sunday marked the first time police have used force since demonstrations began in earnest a week ago — a risky strategy that many fear could trigger more bloodshed.

At least three people have been killed and 103 injured in skirmishes so far, according to police and the state's emergency medical services. The deaths occurred at a Bangkok stadium where the body of one protester shot in the chest lay face-up on the ground. The death toll was revised from four after the emergency services office said there had been a mix-up in information from hospitals.

Suthep insisted to his supporters that the talk with Yingluck did not constitute negotiations. The protesters had dubbed Sunday "victory day" but failed to attain their main stated goal of taking over the prime minister's offices, despite engaging in pitched street battles. Yingluck's government has gone to painstaking lengths to avoid using force.

Suthep told followers it would take another two days for their goal to be reached. He earlier called for all public servants to take Monday off. Last week, protesters tried to disrupt government operations by besieging and occupying parts of several ministries and other government offices.

"If Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra listens to the people's voices, we will treat her like gentlemen because we all are good citizens," he said.

Spokesmen for both the prime minister and the army said they were too junior to comment on any meeting. Government spokesman Teerat Ratanasevi said Yingluk was not expected to make a public statement Sunday night. She did not appear in public, and her aides said she was in a safe place.

While a talk between the main protagonists would suggest a faint possibility of a peaceful settlement, it also would underline the traditional powerbroker role of the military, which could tumble the government even without a coup by refusing to let its forces help keep the peace. More than 2,500 military personnel were deployed Sunday in support of police defense efforts.

Political instability has plagued Thailand since the military ousted Yingluck's brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, in a 2006 coup. Two years later, anti-Thaksin demonstrators occupied Bangkok's two airports for a week after taking over the prime minister's office for three months, and in 2010 pro-Thaksin protesters occupied downtown Bangkok for weeks in a standoff that ended with parts of the city in flames and more than 90 dead.

Any further deterioration is likely to scare away investors as well as tourists who come to Thailand by the millions and contribute 10 percent to the $602 billion economy, Southeast Asia's second largest after Indonesia. It is also likely to undermine Thailand's democracy, which had built up in fits and starts interrupted by coups.

The latest unrest began last month after an ill-advised bid by Yingluck's ruling Pheu Thai party to push an amnesty law through Parliament that would have allowed the return of her self-exiled brother, who was overthrown after being accused of corruption and abuse of power. Thaksin lives in Dubai to avoid a two-year jail term for a corruption conviction he says was politically motivated.

The bill failed to pass the upper house of parliament, emboldening protesters, who drew 100,000 people to a mass rally in Bangkok one week ago. Then, over the past week, they seized the Finance Ministry, camped at a sprawling government office complex, cut power to the national police headquarters and briefly broken into the army headquarters compound to urge the military to support them.

The demonstrators want to replace Yingluck's popularly elected government with an unelected "people's council," but they have been vague about what that means. Because Yingluck's party has overwhelming electoral support from the country's rural majority, which benefited from Thaksin's populist programs, the protesters want to change the country's political system to a less democratic one where the educated and well-connected would have a greater say than directly elected lawmakers.

Some of Sunday's most dramatic scenes played out in front of Government House, where more than 1,000 protesters wearing bandanas and plastic bags over their heads hurled stones, bottles and sticks at police, who fought back with rubber bullets, water cannons and tear gas over barricades that separated them. Protesters clipped away at coils of barbed wire that surrounded the compound, pushed over barriers and at one point tried to drag one away with a green rope tied to a truck.

A few kilometers (miles) away, police drove back another crowd of protesters at the city's police headquarters.

Until this weekend, the demonstrations were largely peaceful. But Saturday night, rival groups clashed in northeastern Bangkok, where a large pro-government rally was being held in a stadium. Dozens were wounded, and unidentified gunmen were also responsible for the three shooting deaths.

Army commander Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha — who said last week the army would not take sides — urged the police not to use force and also called on protesters to avert violence, according to Lt. Col. Winthai Suvaree, an army spokesman.

Most of the protesters are middle-class Bangkok residents who have been part of the anti-Thaksin movement for several years and people brought in from the opposition Democrat Party strongholds in the southern provinces.

___

Associated Press writers Todd Pitman, Grant Peck, Jocelyn Gecker, Papitchaya Boonngok, Yves Dam Van, and Raul Gallego Abellan contributed to this report.

The United Nations agency that provides basic health care and education to Palestinian refugees doesn't have enough money to pay local salaries this month.

The shortfall could directly affect 30,000 teachers, doctors and social workers, as well as the people using their services in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian territories.

Filling Basic Needs

Sit for an hour in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency office in the al-Amari camp for Palestinian refugees, and you get a sense of what people expect the agency to provide.

An old woman asks where she can pick up food basics next month. An aunt wants to get her grown nephew his own refugee card. An unemployed carpenter, Mehedin Sheik Kassam, wants help finding work.

"I am 55 years old," Kassam says. "I have lived in this camp all my life. The UN is supposed to support all aspects of our life: health, economy, education."

The agency's general fund pays for health clinics and schools for some 5 million Palestinian refugees across the Mideast. The budget shortfall would affect salaries of the people who work in those places.

A Year-End Budget Gap

Agency director Filippo Grandi says a cash crunch is normal toward the end of the year.

"In past years, toward the end of the year, governments usually have some spare money, unspent money," Grandi says. "But this year, especially with Syria draining a lot of ... humanitarian resources, it has become difficult for governments to help us."

Last December, Britain let the agency use future contributions to cover a year-end gap. The year before that, the EU did the same thing. At the moment, neither is expecting to do that again.

Nor is the United States, the biggest single country donor to the UN Relief and Works agency. U.S. regional coordinator for Palestinian refugees Guy Lawson says it doesn't make sense to plug the end-of-year hole.

"We try to provide our contributions very early in year, and we try to do it in a way that allows them to plan and program effectively," Lawson says. "If we use our 2014 contributions to meet 2013 needs, then the needs will just become greater in 2014."

UN Workers Are In Need, Too

Adding pressure right now in the West Bank and Gaza is a union request for salary increases for local UN employees — all refugees themselves.

"The UN is responsible for me and my children," says Mohammad Katami, who has worked for the agency for 22 years. "We have to think about the people who provide refugee services. I need to be paid to keep the whole system healthy."

Local UN workers have gone on strike over pay disputes in the past. There have also been protests when the UN has cut or limited programs.

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Starting Monday, same-sex marriage is legal in Hawaii. The state has long been a destination for weddings and honeymoons. And now state officials, as well as hotels and restaurants, are hoping the latest marriage-equality law will spur a new market for wedding tourism.

Wedding planner Keane Akao is showing off a secluded beach wedding site, one of several on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu.

"And so you can use the beach for pictures," he tells a couple. "And this is actually called Secret Beach"

His company, Perfectly Planned Hawaii, offers wedding planning for same-sex couples. Swaying palm trees and clear blue water makes for a dream ceremony.

Akao started his company with his business partner less than six months ago, just before Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie called for a special session to debate same-sex marriage.

"People now can look at Hawaii as a destination to have their marriage done legally," says Akao. "And for it to be recognized by the federal government, no matter what state they may live in."

So far, he's received more than two dozen confirmations since the bill passed last month.

One couple planning to marry in the islands is Cira Abiseid and Cyrilla Owle. Last month, they celebrated their union in a ceremony with family and friends at home in Conway, Ark. But since their home state doesn't recognize same-sex marriage, Owle says they're now going to Hawaii to make it official.

"I think there's two things that came in effect when planning where we wanted to be married," says Owle. "First, like any couple, we wanted to see where we wanted to go for our honeymoon. So who doesn't want to go to Hawaii for their honeymoon, right? And the second reason was, where could we get a license?"

"Same sex couples will be attracted to Hawaii for the same reasons that opposite sex couples are attracted to Hawaii," says Sumner Lacroix, an economist at the University of Hawaii. "It's the great weather, it's the warm water, it's the beautiful scenery. And it's also the aloha spirit."

Lacroix estimates that over the next three years, gay marriage will boost tourism in Hawaii by $217 million. Unlike some other states with marriage equality laws, Hawaii already has a booming tourism industry. Lacroix believes that gives Hawaii an advantage.

"The machinery of marriage is already in place here. There are hotels that are in the marriage business," he says. "They're used to catering to couples who are honeymooning or want to get married or are celebrating a marriage. There are wedding photographers. There are caterers. There's large number of firms that are specialized in the marriage business."

In Hawaii, tourism is a $14 billion industry. Now, the island chain is positioning itself for a spike in visitors.

Among them, Honolulu-based hotel chain Aqua Hospitality. It already offers LGBT travel deals, including one called the "Out and Proud" package and another strangely called the Civil Unions romance special.

Bigger beachfront resorts are also getting in on the action. The Sheraton Waikiki is the only hotel on Oahu providing on-site marriage licenses. General Manager Kelly Sanders says now the hotel is running a new ad campaign in mainland LGBT publications.

"And yes, there's a revenue opportunity," says Sanders. "There's an opportunity for all of us to really have that great success, but in my mind it's something that should have happened already. And so it's just now being able to really open all of our arms as wide as they can be and say welcome."

It was Hawaii that back in 1991 touched off the national conversation about same-sex marriage. Then, three couples sued to force the state to issue them marriage licenses. Now more than two decades later, Hawaii is the latest state to recognize marriage equality.