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The Obama administration's push to put income inequality atop the domestic political agenda has another battlefront.

According to The New York Times, the president "this week will seek to force American businesses to pay more overtime to millions of workers, the latest move by his administration to confront corporations that have had soaring profits even as wages have stagnated."

The Wall Street Journal says that Obama "is expected to order a rule change this week that would require employers to pay overtime to a larger number of salaried workers, two people familiar with the matter said."

The announcement is expected to be made on Thursday. Obama would direct the Labor Department to make the rules changes.

"The directive is meant to help salaried workers, such as fast-food shift supervisors or convenience store managers, who may be expected to work more than 40 hours a week without receiving overtime pay," The Associated Press writes. "For example, the Labor Department could raise the pay threshold for workers covered by overtime rules. Currently, salaried workers who make more than $455 per week are exempt from overtime."

As the Times adds:

"Obama's decision to use his executive authority to change the nation's overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president's economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25. ...

"Obama's authority to act comes from his ability as president to revise the rules that carry out the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress originally passed in 1938. [President George W.] Bush and previous presidents used similar tactics at times to work around opponents in Congress."

Our headline from last night could very well be repeated today:

"Confusion Reigns Over Missing Jet's Final Location"

In fact, to say things are confusing might even be an understatement.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the 239 people on board disappeared Saturday while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. That much seems to be known for sure.

It's also being reported that authorities say the last message from the plane's cockpit was "all right, roger that," when air traffic controllers in Malaysia handed the flight off to controllers in Vietnam. After that, authorities have said, there was no communication of any type.

But as today's other reports underscore, little else can be said with any certainty:

— Was It Or Wasn't It Off Course? "A senior Malaysian air force official on Tuesday told CNN that after the plane lost all communications around 1:30 a.m. Saturday, it still showed up on radar for more than an hour longer. Before it vanished altogether, the plane apparently turned away from its intended destination and traveled hundreds of miles off course, the official said. It was last detected, according to the official, near Pulau Perak, a very small island in the Straits of Malacca, the body of water between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra."

That account matches comments attributed by the Malaysian newspaper Berita Harian to Gen. Tan Sri Rodzali Daud, chief of Malaysia's air force. But — and here's a prime example of the confusion surrounding this story — he later denied saying that radar had tracked the plane to the Straits of Malacca.

According to Reuters, "Indonesia and Thailand, which lie on either side of the northern part of the Malacca Strait, have said their militaries detected no sign of any unusual aircraft in their airspace."

— But, The Search Continues To Widen. Though Rodzali is now denying he said that military radar had tracked the plane to a point about 200 miles west of its intended route, the search for the jet "expanded on Wednesday to cover a swathe of Southeast Asia, from the South China Sea to India's territorial waters, with authorities no closer to explaining what happened to the plane or the 239 people on board," Reuters writes.

So, even though Rodzali says he didn't tell the newspaper that there's radar evidence showing the jet flew over the Straits of Malacca, the search includes that area.

Meanwhile, there's this news from Bloomberg BusinessWeek: "Vietnam sent a crew today to search the Vung Tau area in the nation's southeast after a person said he [had] spotted what appeared to be a plane on fire and sent an e-mail to government officials. Earlier this week, an aircraft had alerted Hong Kong air traffic controllers about sighting metal debris in the sea near Vung Tau, Vietnam's Civil Aviation Authority had said."

This morning's bottom line: We don't know much more than we did last night, and we may not know much more for some time.

As The Guardian says:

"Finding missing aircraft can take days or months; unraveling what went wrong can take years."

On a cold, blustery day at Port Elizabeth in New Jersey, one of several massive cranes whirs along a rail high above the pier, picks up a heavy container from a ship's deck and loads it on a waiting truck back on land. The truck drives away, another arrives and the whole process starts again.

It's a scene played out every day along America's coasts as massive container ships from across the globe pull into deep-water seaports, waiting to be unloaded. The ships are enormous — some 10 stories high and several football fields long.

Mark Hanafee, director for safety at the terminal, says no one on the pier knows for sure what's inside them.

"We know the contents of anything that's hazardous, but general cargo we don't know. It could be chicken, clothes, auto parts, anything, computers, televisions," Hanafee says. "We're an import society. We import everything."

Chris Koch, president of the World Shipping Council, says demand for cheaper goods over the past couple of decades has driven the shipping industry. He points to Walmart, which he says brings in more than 360,000 of the 40-foot cargo containers each year.

"If you add all that up, that's probably a line of trucks that is somewhere close to 4,000 miles long. That's a lot of cargo," he says.

“ We're an import society. We import everything.

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Libya's prime minister lost a vote of confidence and has been dismissed after his government was unable to stop a North Korean-flagged tanker from loading oil at a rebel-held port and reportedly breaking through a naval blockade.

Ali Zeidan was replaced temporarily by the country's defense minister, Abdallah al-Thinni, parliamentary spokesman Omar Hmeidan said.

Reuters reports that Libya's navy opened fire on the tanker as it tried to leave Sidra, one of three ports that has been in the hands of separatist forces since August.

NPR's Leila Fadel reports that:

"The militia bypassed the central government and made its first oil sale last weekend.

"Meanwhile militias that support the [central government] are reportedly mobilizing to take back control of the ports."

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