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Workers and advocates for higher minimum wages will be staging protests at fast-food restaurants and major retailers on Thursday. They want these companies to significantly raise the wages for their lowest paid workers. So what would happen, if for example, McDonald's raised its lowest wage to $15 an hour? In some cases, that would double the pay workers get now.

Vice President Joe Biden holds a second day of talks with Chinese leaders in Beijing on Thursday amid increasing tensions over the East China Sea. While he was visiting Japan earlier in the week, Biden criticized China's actions in declaring an Air Defense Identification Zone over disputed islands in the area. The issue has cast a pall over Biden's visit to Beijing, with official Chinese media accusing the vice president of taking Japan's side in the territorial dispute.

The first in a new class of drugs that can cure the viral infection that is the leading cause of liver failure and liver cancer is poised for a marketing green light from the Food and Drug Administration. More than 3 million Americans have hepatitis C, but most don't know it.

Theoretically, open-source software development should be more accessible to people underrepresented in tech, like blacks, Latinos, and women. But there are still big, less-obvious barriers to entry.

Also: Dangerously cold temperatures swoop south across the U.S.; gale-force winds slam Scotland; civilians flee brutal violence in Central African Republic; an NBA game in Mexico City is called off after smoke fills the arena; and the Pentagon's online Santa tracker will also feature fighter jets.

The story of 2013's wild-haired teenage pop phenomenon has more than a few parallels with the 1991 emergence of grunge kingpins Nirvana, but recast for the millennial age.

Holidays and cookbooks go together like chocolate and peppermint. Like eggnog and brandy. And like bacon with almost anything, it seems. Even if you never…

Friday morning, we'll learn what happened last month in the job market. But whatever happened last month, it won't change the big picture: The job market is still very bad.

President Obama addressed the nation Thursday after news that former South African president and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela died, saying the world lost an influential, courageous and "profoundly good" man.

A big ruling on whether poor criminal defendants have the right to a lawyer came this week. A judge in Washington state finds two cities have systematically violated the rights of indigent defendants by providing them with lawyers who spent less than one hour on their cases.

Nelson Mandela was released from a South African prison in 1990. Steve Inskeep talks to Renee Montagne about her time covering South Africa in the early 1990s.

Lawmakers in Mexico are considering a major change to their elections. For more than a century, the country has had the ultimate term limits: nobody can be re-elected.

Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston, considered a Heisman Trophy front-runner, has been facing allegations that he assaulted a female FSU student in December 2012, prior to his college career. Winston's attorney has contended that his client had consensual sex with the woman.

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act encouraged people to promote health insurance at Thanksgiving family gatherings. The effort moves to a new holiday. California's insurance exchange is encouraging holiday shoppers to give "the gift of health" to young people.

Also: Ursula K. Le Guin on being called a "sci-fi writer"; new poems from John Ashbery; Richard Brody on Eichmann in Jerusalem.

South African musician Vusi Mahlasela's work was born out of the struggle against apartheid. His song "When You Come Back" was performed at Mandela's 1994 inauguration and was written to the political exiles who escaped South Africa. Mahlasela shares his memories with host Michel Martin.

On this week's round-table podcast, we talk about the charm and peril of live events, we take a quiz on the most regrettable television currently circulating, and we talk about what's making us happy this week.

In "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us," a 26,000-word investigative piece in TIME magazine, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill catalogues the myriad reasons for America's skyrocketing healthcare costs, from extravagantly paid administrators at nonprofit hospitals to bloated bills for hospital care. And Obamacare, he argues, won't do much to solve the problem.

All this week, All Things Considered and Morning Edition has aired stories about the global journey a T-shirt makes from seed to finished product. Over the months NPR's Planet Money team spent reporting the series, they tackled questions about trade, work and clothes play in the global economy.

The great anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela died late Friday night in Johannesburg. South Africans woke up to the news this morning and crowds gathered outside the former Mandela family home in Soweto township. This is the home where he lived before he was arrested, before he was imprisoned for those long years, before he became an icon. The mood among the hundreds of people outside the house and on the surrounding blocks was anything but somber.