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Obstetrical emergency departments are a new aspect of some hospitals that can inflate medical bills for even the easiest, healthiest births. Just ask baby Gus' parents about their $2,755 ER charge.

Commentator Steven Waldman says that this is a season of remarkable religious unity in the U.S. In the next few weeks Americans will celebrate: Hanukkah, Christmas, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice and Rohatsu, an important Buddhist holiday. Religious variety has flourished without it being seen as a horrible threat to any particular religion. Americans have gotten pretty good at figuring out how to be different without being divisive.

In Florida today twenty-five electoral votes were cast by twenty-five people pledged to George W. Bush. Florida's electors met at the state Senate chamber in Tallahassee... with the president-elect's brother presiding:

North Carolina's 14 electors gathered in Raleigh at noon to dutifully cast their ballots for George W. Bush. They were subject to some eleventh hour arm-twisting by Al Gore supporters, but to no avail. Bush won 56 percent of the state vote, and state law bars electors from voting for someone other than the person to whom they are pledged. That law was passed after the 1968 election, in which an elector pledged to Richard Nixon voted for George Wallace. Congress will officially count the 538 votes from around the nation on January 5.

NPR's Mike Shuster profiles Condoleezza Rice, the Stanford professor and foreign policy analyst who President-elect George W. Bush has named as his National Security Adviser. Rice was a Russian specialist in Bush's father's national security council. She also has been his foreign policy tutor throughout the campaign.

Noah talks with Dan Roth, who's a senior editor at Fortune Magazine about why the magazine voted The Container Store the best company to work for. It's the second year in a row the magazine has done so.

The Web is disproving the notion that the larger the project, the more managers, or "layers of control" are needed. Instead people are able to publish a newsletter, a book, start a company, even send mail, without having to get some sort of permission first. Commentator David Weinberger says this will ultimately change the way we think about authority.

Though the Boy Scouts' anti-gay policy was upheld by the Supreme Court, many school districts are distancing themselves from the organization. That includes two of the nation's largest systems--New York City and Broward County, Florida. But, as NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports, the scouts are fighting back ... filing a lawsuit challenging Broward County's ban.

NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr, having read a new report from the CIA, wonders if the foreign policies of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice will be applicable to the world they might face.

Robert talks with NPR's Jennifer Ludden who's in Jerusalem about election politics in Israel, and the prospects of a return to power by former right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.