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Thousands of people sentenced under the tough drug laws of the 1980s and 90s are still behind bars, serving mandatory minimum prison sentences requiring them to spend decades, if not life, in prison. Nowadays people convicted for the same crimes serve far less time.

One of them is a man named David Padilla. He lives inside a medium-security prison in Fairmont, N.J. He's lived here for eighteen years now, since his arrest in November 1996. A year later, a judge found him guilty of conspiracy and possession with intent to distribute cocaine. Padilla was arrested after he and his co-defendants moved drugs out of a Philadelphia hotel in a dark-colored suitcase. State police later found two handguns in a trap door in their borrowed van.

“ "There is no doubt in my mind that I feel I should have been punished ... But I don't agree that I should die in prison."

- David Padilla

Padilla had two previous drug charges. The prosecutor in his case asked the court to weigh those priors and the judge sent him to prison for the rest of his life.

Sitting on a tan-colored plastic chair in the visitors area, and looking back on that day he was sentenced in November 1997, he sighs. "There is no doubt in my mind that I feel I should have been punished," he says. "No doubt about it. But I don't agree that I should die in prison."

Lisette is Padilla's wife of 27 years and she says prison has made him "a better man."

They met as teenagers in Philadelphia, as neighbors. Back then, Padilla was kind of a celebrity on the block — high school prom king, a bit of a bragger. And though he was an honors student, he says college never crossed his mind.

i i

Padilla, seen with his wife Lisette, earned his associate's degree while in prison. Courtesy The Padilla Family hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy The Padilla Family

Padilla, seen with his wife Lisette, earned his associate's degree while in prison.

Courtesy The Padilla Family

The years away, Lisette says, have changed him. "David is an amazing man, amazing father," she explains. "He worked so hard and I'm proud of what he has accomplished all these years. I think prison was a good thing for him."

In 1997, the judge branded Padilla a career offender who had squandered his potential. Here's a glimpse of what he accomplished since then. Behind bars, he found an unlikely passion—dentistry. He works in the prison lab, work that puts a smile on his face and a shine in his eyes.

"I never imagined that these hands would make a denture for somebody," Padilla says. "These hands, would make a prosthesis for someone. I never thought I can do that."

He also finished an associate's degree. Ask, and he'll give the credit for his close-knit family, and his own turnaround, to his wife.

"I really owe it all to my wife Lisette. She's been mommy, she's been daddy, she's been a supportive wife. She's been my everything. She had options, I gave her options," Padilla adds.

Lisette says she never considered leaving her husband. "The day of the sentencing he turns around and tells me, 'go on with your life.' I told him 'no,' I told him 'no, I'm here for you you now. Things get hard, I got to be there for you regardless.' We're his voice, we're his voice in the outside world. I believe that when two people get married, it's forever."

All these years, every year, Lisette says she takes her vacation around their wedding anniversary in August, so she can visit him multiple times in a week.

And though their children were young when he was sentenced, he's remained a big part of their lives, nudging and even nagging them about school and doing the right thing. Padilla said he had two choices when he got sent to prison for life: continue on the road to destruction, or be a model for his three kids.

"I have to show them that I can be good, that I can do what I'm telling them to do. So every time I'd get my grades...I would send them my grades, 'this is what daddy got, these are my grades, show me your grades.'"

David and Lisette's oldest daughter, Sasha, is now 26.

"I remember this project on Italy," she says. "It was one of my biggest projects and he actually went to the library, he got the encyclopedia, printed out pages for me and while I'm looking at the photocopies, he has the book so we're conversing back and forth on what's more important, what should I write, what should my thesis be."

Sasha says she's always felt a deep attachment to her dad.

Padilla, now 47, also mentors young offenders. And just as he's been preparing himself in prison, Lisette says she and the children have been preparing themselves too, for a day they can only hope for.

During Padilla's long incarceration, she squirreled away anything that could document her husband's transformation.

"Letters and certificates and recommendations," Lisette remembers. "I started making copies, I'm going to make 20 booklets. And I told Sasha, I said 'Sash, you need to come over and help me because this is a lot of paper.' We had papers all over the table, all over the floor."

Finally, last winter, Padilla heard about about a new effort, known as Clemency Project 2014, to help people serving long sentences for non-violent drug crimes. Authorities held out the promise of pardons or early release for inmates who would have been sentenced to less time if they committed crimes today.

And pro bono lawyers were looking for prisoners who might make model cases. Attorney Jeremy Klatell describes why he took this case.

"The consistency over the 18 years of David's incarceration with which he has dedicated to rehabilitating himself as a person can't really be faked," Klatell says. "He's never had a single disciplinary infraction and we are utterly convinced that David is a different person than he was 18 years ago."

Padilla's petition is now under review. And though he's excited, prison has taught him to temper his emotions.

"Everything is hurry up and wait," he says. "Wait for the phone lines, wait for the computers, wait to get to commissary, patience is so important here."

He says he's in no rush. He's been waiting for 18 years. And he doesn't want to set expectations too high.

"My hope is to be with my family once again, to reestablish my household, to be the so-called captain of the ship one more time, that's my hope," Padilla says.

Lisette has simple dreams, she says.

"Hopefully we rebuild a new beginning," she says. "Be able to go hold hands, or take a walk in the park, walk down the beach, you know, things that we miss."

Lisette wants to show him the colors she painted the living room and the hard wood floors she sanded.

She wants a new kitchen, but she says she's saving that job for him.

Jeff Williams, Apple's senior vice president for operations, has responded to a BBC report that workers at Asian suppliers for the iPhone 6 are mistreated and overworked, saying he's "deeply offended" by the accusations.

In an email to some 5,000 Apple staff in the United Kingdom, Williams hit back at the British broadcaster's Panorama program, which sent in undercover reporters to observe conditions at the Pegatron factory, near Shanghai, where iPhones are assembled.

The BBC's report "implied that Apple isn't improving working conditions," said Williams in the email published by The Telegraph, the authenticity of which NPR confirmed with Apple.

"Let me tell you, nothing could be further from the truth," he wrote.

"We know of no other company doing as much as Apple does to ensure fair and safe working conditions, to discover and investigate problems, to fix and follow through when issues arise, and to provide transparency into the operations of our suppliers," Williams wrote to employees.

But, he added, "We can still do better. And we will."

Panorama has stood by its reporting that rules on workers' hours, ID cards, dormitories and work meetings were routinely breached, according to the BBC. the documentary alleged that workers fell asleep during 12-hour shifts on the iPhone production line and that some of them were required to work 18 days at a stretch.

Williams responded that Apple had tracked the weekly hours of more than 1 million workers in its supply chain and that 93 percent were in compliance with a limit of 60 hours per week.

Panorama also reported that child labor was being used in Indonesia tin mines, where some of the raw materials for iPhones are procured.

In response, Williams said in the email: "Apple has publicly stated that tin from Indonesia ends up in our products, and some of that tin likely comes from illegal mines.

"Tens of thousands of artisanal miners are selling tin through many middlemen to the smelters who supply to component suppliers who sell to the world," Williams wrote. "[There] is widespread corruption in the undeveloped supply chain. Our team visited the same parts of Indonesia visited by the BBC, and of course we are appalled by what's going on there."

Williams said Apple had two options: either buy tin only from outside Indonesia, which he called "the lazy and cowardly path," or else "stay engaged and try to drive a collective solution."

iPhone 6

Indonesia

China

Apple

The sun'll come out tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun

There is a thing that happens with songs where when you've heard them enough times, you stop hearing them at all. They are less pieces of music than cultural baubles that pop up to stand for styles or sentiments or eras. Long ago, "Tomorrow" became not just the song that stood for Annie, but for many people – both those who like musicals and those who don't – a song that stood for precocious children belting earnestly to the patient exhaustion of nearby adults. Consider the scene in Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail where the wealthy family of Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) listens to its charming preteen sing the song with nervous, imperfect happiness. It's not just a song; it's an anthem of young girls with big voices, and young girls with small voices who dream of having big voices.

I was six years old when Annie opened on Broadway in 1977. I was in the sweet spot: a generation in which a lot of girls took that music to heart – "Tomorrow" and "Maybe" and "Hard-Knock Life." We had the cast album, and I knew all the words, and I still do, because that's how it works. I can't remember TV shows that aired in 2012, but if I play "You're Never Fully Dressed Without A Smile" in the car, my mind and my voice retrieve it intact, like a warm blanket from a cedar trunk. I didn't even know what a lot of these words meant then – "Who cares what they're wearing on Main Street or Saville Row?" – but they're in there anyway.

It would never have occurred to me at that age that I might have more easily seen myself in that record, that show, that iconic image of the little girl with the big voice, because like practically every little girl I saw in popular culture, she was white. The original musical Annie is a period piece set during the Great Depression, but aside from the one scene where she put on the fluffy red hair, the Annie in the photos I saw looked a lot like me. Don't get me wrong – plenty of little girls loved Annie who weren't white, and plenty of boys loved Annie, and so forth. But when you're a little kid, it doesn't hurt to have commonality with the people being presented to you as cultural icons. Or maybe it's better to say it can hurt, I think, to almost never have it.

There is already a perfectly good filmed version of Annie that's charming, straightforward, well-executed, and quite faithful to the original musical, if that's what you're after. It's not the 1982 film directed by John Huston – that one is pretty bad. It's the 1999 version made for television, starring Victor Garber as Daddy Warbucks, Audra McDonald as Grace, Kathy Bates as the mean Miss Hannigan, Alan Cumming and Kristen Chenoweth as her rotten brother and his girlfriend, and Alicia Morton as Annie. (Note: It was directed by Rob Marshall, whose Into The Woods is about to open.) That is a good production, and we don't necessarily need another along those lines.

The new film is not along those lines; it is pretty radically different. Directed by Will Gluck, it stars Quvenzhane Wallis as Annie, Jamie Foxx as Warbucks replacement and tech mogul/mayoral candidate Will Stacks, Rose Byrne as Grace, Bobby Cannavale as a political consultant who functionally takes the place of Rooster, and Cameron Diaz as Miss Hannigan. It's been doubly updated: the musical was a 1977 piece about 1933; this is a 2014 piece about 2014. Here, Annie is not living in an "orphanage," per se, but in a crowded foster home where Hannigan, still an alcoholic and now a refugee from a busted music career, warehouses kids in exchange for meager assistance checks. (Diaz is a hoot, and I had to respect the way the joke about her past in a band pays off with one late joke that seems to justify the entire runner.) When Stacks and Annie have a chance encounter, Cannavale's conniving operator persuades him that taking a foster kid into his home for a while will win him votes.

If you love the original musical, know that this is not that. The music has been largely transformed into sweetened, highly produced modern radio pop, which I personally find enormously less pleasurable than the original songs. Some songs have survived largely intact, particularly the opening trio of "Maybe," "Hard-Knock Life" and "Tomorrow." But beyond that, it's mostly numbers that nod at the original music before veering off into songs that are either entirely new for the film or so different that you'll barely recognize them. "You're Never Fully Dressed Without A Smile," for instance, is here only as a Sia pop rendition used to score a fantasy scene. The score frequently includes pieces of songs that are never actually heard, as if to reassure the audience that this is not forgetting the show's roots, but specifically acknowledging them and setting them aside. Whether you find that actually reassuring probably has a lot to do with your perspective.

It seems fair to point out, though, that if the new music is vulnerable to the accusation that it sounds too produced and synthetic, the original presentation of Annie on Broadway was vulnerable to musical digs of its own. Certainly, your classical singers would have dropped their teeth at young Andrea McArdle's high belting chest voice, which really does sound at times like it would hurt to sing that way for very long. Returning to the original cast album makes me warmly nostalgic, but also makes me sympathetic to adults who felt at the time that they were listening to entire songs made up of children yelling. We may be in a time of enthusiastic snark, but we did not invent the tsk-tsking of the displeased, particularly in the case of entertainment for children.

Despite any reservations about the music, it is a charming, lovely little movie. Wallis, who was nominated for an Oscar for Beasts Of The Southern Wild, remains a naturally affecting young actress, and her Annie retains the ingenuity and resilience that is more important to the character, in the end, than the Depression setting and the red hair. What has always been most poignant to me about Annie was her conviction, deep and real, that her parents were gone only temporarily and would return for her. And the film's way of conveying that, which takes Annie back over and over to the only place she can think of to wait for them, is quite touching.

What they do with Jamie Foxx as a germophobic entrepreneur (he's quite funny) is necessarily different from the model of Daddy Warbucks, old-school rich dude. But there are interesting trade-offs that come out of the updating process. While I much prefer the original's "N.Y.C." to the new film's "The City Is Yours" when it comes to songs about the draw of New York, the song isn't the only thing about that scene that changes here. In the original, "N.Y.C." is a comfortable rich man's salute to the city he loves, sung as he wanders through it: "The city's bright as a penny arcade; it blinks, it tilts, it rings." Warbucks represents established royalty; in order to capture New York's appeal to strivers, they throw in a verse from an aspiring actress: "N.Y.C., tomorrow a penthouse that's way up high; tonight, the Y."

Here, "The City Is Yours," on the other hand, finds a black billionaire in his helicopter arguing the city's promise to a young black foster kid: "Now's the time you've gotta stand tough; cause if you work hard, you can rise up." Life is, of course, not that simple. But while I don't love the new song, that new dynamic between the characters is perhaps more interesting and relevant than revisiting the New Deal would have been. (The original show actually features FDR making the cabinet sing "Tomorrow" and has a song called "A New Deal For Christmas," which is literally about ... the New Deal.) Stacks is sort of both Warbucks and the actress in that sequence – speaking to both the dream and the hustle it takes to get it. He is having a more substantive conversation with Annie than comes out of just showering a kid with stuff. "Rise up." "Stand tough." There's a consciousness in that scene of the odds Annie is actually facing that's largely missing from the fully fantasy-bound original.

Gluck is a director with a history of making films that are better than they could have been in other hands: 2011's Friends With Benefits, starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, is a solid contemporary romantic comedy, and 2010's Easy A, with Emma Stone as a high school student dealing with rumors about her sex life, is terrific. I don't think Annie is quite as interesting as either of those, but it's fun, and it's funny.

The endearing thing about "Tomorrow," despite all that's happened to it over the years, is that when you actually listen to it, its ideas are elemental: Most things are not the end of the world. There are chances for things to go better. Hope is real. I could be possessive and sniffy and negative and I could catalog the differences between what I loved more and what I loved less. But every generation deserves its own Annie, pressing that idea that hope is real in whatever way reaches them the best. Different ways at different times, hopefully looking like different little girls. Is it a great movie? No. Am I glad they made it, and did I enjoy it? Yes.

This week's historic agreement between the U.S. and Cuba to reinstate diplomatic relations after decades of silence could launch a digital revolution in the island nation.

According to the White House, only 5 percent of Cubans have access to the open Internet, comparable to North Korea. As part of the deal, that could change overnight.

Status Check

Maribel Fonseca a teacher in Miramar, Cuba, has never seen the Internet. A few of her more privileged students have been online.

"I work in a school where members of the military and foreigners and top people in the country are," she says over a terrible (and very expensive) phone connection. "They use it. They go shopping, they see things I haven't seen."

What she wants to see most is her family. Fonseca's sister lives in the United States, and it's been more than a decade since they've seen each other. Her voice lights up at the idea video-chatting with her.

"I can guarantee if I could have Internet at home, I'd talk to my sister every single day. I wouldn't miss a minute of her life. I love her so much," she says.

Aidil Oscariz, a Cuban who lives in Miami, says students back home ask people abroad, like her, for the latest research papers, and even for news about Cuba. State-owned media doesn't report reliably on crime or corruption, but underground bloggers leak stuff out.

"Sometimes I have actually found out things that are happening in Cuba before some of my family members [there] have," Oscariz says.

Government Influence

Cuba's only telecommunications company, ETECSA, is government-controlled. This week's announcement could mark the end of that monopoly, and pave the way for free-market competition and growth.

"I don't know that the Castros are ready for an information revolution," says Alec Ross, who was a senior adviser on tech issues for the U.S. State Department. "But they're a couple old men. They're going to die sooner than later. And I think that they're trying to salvage something."

Ross, now a fellow at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, says Cuba won't just light up with bandwidth immediately. The government has to start a bidding process. Mobile operators (presumably foreign-owned) will buy leases and build networks, putting in hundreds of millions of dollars in capital. That's step one.

"Step two is determining and seeing whether, once Cubans actually go online, are they allowed free expression?" he says, "Or is the Internet more like it is in Iran?"

It's a hot question — though interestingly, it's also somewhat peripheral. In plenty of countries, Ross says, government control has a chilling effect on online speech. But as seen during the Arab Spring, if a wireless signal is there, citizens will use it.

Role of U.S. Tech Companies

U.S. tech companies like Google, Facebook and CISCO are watching how commercial policy shapes up.

Kenth Engo-Monsen with the European telecom operator Telenor says these companies can play a huge role in keeping the Internet free: If and when a government asks for a secret surveillance deal, they can say no.

"That's not part of being a mobile operator," he says, "because you have your relationship with your customers, and that is built on the trust that you have with them."

Engo-Monsen says that he's happy for Cuba, and that he views the Internet as a human right.

Nathan Eagle, a mobile technology analyst with Jana, says companies are going to compete fiercely to get the Cuba telecom contract, and that will help Cubans.

"Once third-party mobile carriers come in, they bring tariff plans — they price connectivity in a competitive way" so the average Cuban can afford service, he says.

digital divide

internet access

Raul Castro

Cuba