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The president and his family are due to leave Friday evening for a two-week vacation in Hawaii. Before they take off, Obama will hold a year-end news conference.

Morning Edition wishes news anchors Jean Cochran and Paul Brown well. A number of our coworkers took the chance to accept voluntary buyouts as NPR changes. Leaving the Morning Edition staff are: Anne Hawke, Jim Wildman and Steve Munro.

Credit card companies routinely flag or block suspicious charges as they happen. Yet under Medicare, a convoluted and poorly managed system for catching fraud allows costly scams for prescription drugs to slide by. The federal government has done little to stop the fraud, an investigation by ProPublica found.

Christmastime — at least its visible trappings — seems to be getting tackier. There's a bounty of outre in the accoutrements of the season.

The Chesapeake Bay once supplied most of the nation's oysters, but overharvesting and disease nearly wiped them out. Now, major public-private efforts to re-establish the oyster as a quality local food product appear to be working. And chefs say the results are sweeter than oysters from other waters.

The economy grew by 4.1 percent in the third quarter of the year, significantly higher than the earlier projection of 3.6 percent. The upward revision comes mostly thanks to stronger consumer spending, and it's the strongest showing in almost two years.

After a 2012 scandal involving some Secret Service personnel conduct in Colombia, Homeland Security's inspector general launched an investigation into the agency's culture.

Confusion has surrounded the departure of a group of Greek Orthodox nuns from a convent north of Damascus earlier this month. Syrian officials say radical Islamist rebels kidnapped the nuns at gunpoint. But a rebel leader who was there says the nuns' convent was under fire from government forces.

The film Her, written and directed by Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), follows a lonely man who falls in love with a computer operating system. Critic David Edelstein says it's the best film of the year by far. (Recommended)

A federal judge deals a big blow to the NSA's mass surveillance, a look back at our series on the San Francisco Bay Area, and the rest of the best tech headlines and conversations from the week.