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Financial planners all say: The sooner you start saving, the better off you'll be in retirement.

But that advice often goes unheeded by young workers focused on paying down student debt and car loans. And even for those who can afford to set aside a little cash, investing can seem complicated and risky.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Obama said he's got a way to fix all of that. He calls it myRA — a difficult-to-say-aloud name that is supposed to get people thinking about "my retirement account."

This new way of saving would be different from a traditional tax-deferred individual retirement account, or IRA. For one thing, workers can't lose money in myRAs; the government would protect the principal and help savings grow a bit faster than inflation.

Participating employers could help workers steer portions of their paychecks into the retirement accounts through automatic deductions. But they would face few costs because they would not administer the accounts.

The White House says about half of all workers do not have access to employer-sponsored retirement plans, such as 401(k) plans. The myRAs are aimed at those left-out workers.

"I want more people to have the chance to save for retirement through their hard work. And this is just one step that we can take to help more people do that," Obama said Wednesday while visiting the U.S. Steel Irvin Plant in West Mifflin, Penn., southeast of Pittsburgh.

It took four years in a prison cell for Palestinian Abdel Hamid el-Rajoub to decide to work as an Israeli informant. Not that he ever planned it that way. Rajoub is in his 60s now. He grew up in a Palestinian village near Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He says he was 19, an emotional young man, when he got involved in fighting Israel.

"It was my right," he says, "to fight Israel and the occupation."

Rajoub looked up to an older brother, who he says was part of the military branch of the Palestinian political group Fatah and was killed by Israeli soldiers. Rajoub joined Fatah's fighting wing too, and says he took part in an attack on Israelis in the mid-1970s that landed him in Israeli prison.

Life inside was oppressive, Rajoub says, but the worst part of it came from fellow Palestinians. Fatah members, he says, wrongly accused him of passing information to Israeli intelligence.

It is a charge that is difficult to disprove, particularly inside a prison community where suspicions run deep and risks are high. Being accused of working as an informant was potentially so dangerous that Israel moved Rajoub from the general prison population into a solitary cell.

"I was in the Israeli cell alone for four years, waiting for Fatah to realize I was not an informant," Rajoub says. "But an apology never came. I thought a lot during those four years. I realized that my problem was with Fatah, not with Israel."

A Key Role That's Often Invisible

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, informants have long played a key role. Palestinians pass information to Israeli security agents for a variety of reasons, including personal gain or needing something from Israel, such as a work permit. In Rajoub's case, the motive was revenge. He wanted to hit back at Fatah, feeling it had betrayed him.

Still, it hurt.

"It was a painful decision," Rajoub says, choking up. "Whenever I remember that moment, I cry."

Rajoub stayed in prison, but in special cells full of other informants like him. Their job was to put on a show of being real prisoners, to fool other Palestinians into revealing information Israeli intelligence couldn't get.

Former Israeli intelligence officer Chaim Nativ calls it theater - and a useful part of interrogation. Nativ worked in the Arab section of Israel's Shin Bet internal security service for 30 years.

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First, he's Time magazine's "Person of the Year." Then, he's Rolling Stone's cover story: "The Times They Are A-Changin'" in the Catholic Church.

Now, he's "SuperPope," the latest incarnation of Pope Francis, who has rapidly become one of the most popular leaders on the planet.

He made his debut recently, on a street named after the Roman comic playwright Plautus. It's just an ordinary street corner like many in Rome – no notable fountain, sculpture or building to gaze at.

On Wednesday morning, however, crowds gathered, aiming their cameras at a new piece of street art.

“ He's very modern. He shows concern for the young and for the poor. The previous popes didn't really understand people but Francis does because he's humble.

Steve Beshear couldn't help but chuckle during the State of the Union speech when President Obama said, "Kentucky's not the most liberal part of the country."

Obama was singling out his fellow Democrat for being the rare Southern governor who has fully implemented the Affordable Care Act, expanding Medicaid and running a state health insurance exchange that launched far more smoothly than the federal model.

Kentucky, the home of prominent Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell, is not a blue state. It's not a place, like Connecticut or California, that has shown interest in restricting gun rights or recognizing same-sex marriages.

"I understand that the national persona of Kentucky in most people's minds reflects the face of our congressional delegation, but that's not what Kentucky's all about," Beshear says. "No, it's not a liberal beacon in the country, but it's not a radical right-wing place, either."

Beshear has gotten a lot of attention for embracing Obamacare, but that's not the only victory progressives have enjoyed in his state. Kentucky was the first state to adopt the Common Core educational standards, which have become anathema among many conservatives.

Jack Conway, the state's Democratic attorney general, is leading dozens of his peers in investigating lending practices among for-profit universities, which disproportionately support Republicans in terms of campaign donations.

And earlier this month, the Kentucky House approved a bill that would restore voting rights for felons.

Not Obama Country

A Gallup poll out this week showed Kentucky among the 10 states that gave Obama his worst approval ratings.

That's not a surprise. In 2012, Obama lost 116 of the state's 120 counties.

In fact, that year, even his performance in the state's Democratic primary was unconvincing. The president lost to "Uncommitted" in 67 counties.

"You'd be missing the boat to be suggesting that there's some shift to the left here," says Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky.

In addition to McConnell and Paul — respectively, the Senate Republican leader and one of its best-known Tea Party-aligned stars — Republicans hold five out of six U.S. House seats in Kentucky. The GOP also controls the state Senate.

But Democrats enjoy a majority in the state House and hold all but one statewide office.

"We have a fairly strong Democratic Party, compared to most of the South," Voss says. "A lot of the voters here oppose the national Democratic Party, but they are not loyal Republicans. They're not even especially ideological."

Targeting McConnell

National Democrats are hopeful about their chances of unseating McConnell this fall. Assuming he survives a primary challenge from his right, he will face Allison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky's secretary of state and daughter of a longtime Democratic operative.

But Democrats shouldn't be overly optimistic. "Grimes has an uphill battle for obvious reasons," says Dewey Clayton, a University of Louisville political scientist.

"All in all, the state is generally conservative," he says. "Even the Democrats for the most part tend to be more conservative than Democrats nationally."

While Democrats may tilt fairly conservative, not all the state's Republicans are as ideologically-driven as their counterparts in other places. Parts of the state have been Republican since the Civil War, but that's for "reasons that have nothing to do with what the party stands for today," Voss says.

Health And Education Expansions

When the state House moved to restore voting rights for non-violent felons, the chamber was cheered on by none other than Rand Paul.

"The right to vote is a sacred one in our country and it is the very foundation of our republic," Paul said in a statement.

Beshear speaks in less grandiose terms about the progressive victories he's pulled off. An additional 175,000 Kentuckians are on Medicaid, he says, representing more than a quarter of the state's previously uninsured population.

He's especially tickled that the state has just "jumped" to 10th in the country in Education Week's survey of student achievement. That's up from 34th.

Not only has Kentucky embraced the new national education standards (which is the term of art for information and skills students are expected to master at each grade level), but the state last year became the first to answer Obama's call to raise the age at which students can drop out of school — to 18 from 16.

"Whereas decades ago, education was a cause for embarrassment in Kentucky, today Kentucky's really on the cutting edge of education reform," Beshear says.

Meet Me In The Middle

Some political observers in Kentucky believe that Beshear has been pushing more progressive policies in his second term because he can't run again for governor. (His son, Andy, is running for state attorney general next year.)

Others think Beshear has his eye on a spot on the next national ticket or perhaps a cabinet post.

Whatever the governor's personal ambitions, his comfortably high personal approval ratings have shown that his largely conservative state can be governed in a fairly progressive fashion.

"We have to make a decision whether we're going to be a progressive, modern, forward-looking state," says Greg Fischer, Louisville's Democratic mayor. "My hope is that we come to this commonsense middle of moderation. That's what most people want."