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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.

There will be a Nativity scene inside the Florida State Capitol Building. The Florida Prayer Network put up the scene, with a state permit. Chaz Stevens thinks that's an annoying mixture of church and state, so he applied for a permit for a Festivus pole, honoring the fake religion made up on the TV show "Seinfeld." The Festivus pole will be made of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans. Other displays allowed in the rotunda include a Bill of Rights Nativity banner.

Women are still not making headway when it comes to getting on corporate boards or into senior leadership roles within big companies.

New research out Tuesday examined Fortune 500 Companies and found that women hold only about 17 percent of the seats on boards of directors, and they have an even smaller share — about 15 percent — of senior executive positions.

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In many ways, military veterans hold a privileged place in American society, but not all vets have access to what goes along with that privilege. In the past decade of war, more than 100,000 men and women left the military with less than honorable discharges, many due to bad conduct related to post traumatic stress disorder. Once they're kicked out of the military, they lose access to benefits like treatment for PTSD.

Oil giant BP is challenging hundreds of millions of dollars in claims that were filed by businesses after the company's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The total price tag for BP's oil spill is huge — $42.5 billion. At issue here is a fraction of that — but still a lot of money. BP says $540 million has been awarded to businesses for losses that "are either nonexistent, exaggerated or have nothing to do with the Deepwater Horizon accident."

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Good morning. I'm David Greene. Good morning. Good morning, sir. That's what should have been said to a passenger on one United flight but no one woke up Tom Wagner. The passenger was on his way from Louisiana to California to visit his sister. He was napping when his plane landed for a layover in Houston and he awoke locked inside a dark and empty plane.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.

Anybody who grew up watching football has seen video of Tom Dempsey's historic field goal. In 1970, the New Orleans Saint kicked a field goal from a record 63 yards to win a game. He did it though he was born with no toes on his right foot. The record stood for decades, sometimes equaled never exceeded, until Sunday. Denver's Matt Prater kicked one from 64 yards, though it was not decisive since his team won by 23 points.

It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

New York's health insurance marketplace has been running relatively smoothly, compared with healthcare.gov, the site the federal government is running for 36 states.

But that's a low bar, and even though about 50,000 New Yorkers had signed up in the first two months, almost every day still brings complaints and glitches. Donna Frescatore, the head of the New York State Of Health, says there are no serious patterns of trouble, just individual issues that the state and its contractors address one by one.

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Some of the Republican Party's most reliable support has come from voters over the age of 65. But a recent survey suggests this could be changing.

NPR's Ina Jaffe went to the Palm Springs to look at a congressional race where we might be seeing this change play out.

As the holiday season approaches, the TV cupboard may seem a bit bare; the industry winds down like everything else, filling cable and broadcast networks with holiday specials, reruns and also-ran reality shows.

But there are bright gifts, too: TNT offers Mob City, a three-week, lavishly produced noir-ish TV show about cops and crooks vying for control of 1947-era Los Angeles, airing Wednesdays.

On Dec. 8 and 9, A&E presents a four-hour miniseries on Bonnie and Clyde, retelling the story of the Depression-era outlaws and lovers.

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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And I'm Renee Montagne. This morning, in Soweto, South Africa, crowds continue to congregate around the family home of Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday. During the struggle against apartheid, Soweto became a symbol of the separation of the races, both physically and economically.

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(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ASIMBONANGA")

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

We're hearing a song that was popular in South Africa in the 1980s, popular even though it was banned. The song was called "Asimbonanga," which means "We Have Not Seen Him." He was Nelson Mandela, who by then had been in prison for more than two decades. This morning we reached the writer of that song, Johnny Clegg, in South Africa.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Nelson Mandela is universally admired today, but was a controversial figure for much of his life. To reconstruct what that controversy was about, we turn to Bill Keller. He's a New York Times columnist and former executive editor who once covered South Africa and wrote a youth biography of Mandela. He's on the line.

Mr. Keller, welcome back to the program.

BILL KELLER: Thank you. Nice to be here.