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Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who was seized 15 years ago from his relatives in Miami by U.S. government officials who returned him to his native country, says he would like to visit the United States as a tourist.

"For my family it has always been, we always have the desire to say to the American people, to say to each household our gratitude, appreciation and love that we have," he tells ABC News. "Perhaps one day we could pay a visit to the United States. I could personally thank those people who helped us, who were there by our side. Because we're so grateful for what they did."

He tells ABC he'd like to see a baseball game, visit museums in Washington and talk to Americans.

Gonzalez, now 21, was rescued in 1999 as a 6-year-old boy off the Florida coast where his mother had died trying to reach the U.S. His father in Cuba wanted him returned, but his Miami-based relatives tried to keep him. A legal battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected an appeal from the Miami family. Gonzalez was seized by government agents on April 22, 2000, and returned to his father in Cuba.

ABC adds that Gonzales, who is studying engineering, is engaged to his high school sweetheart, also a student.

He says that though he disagrees with his mother's actions in trying to come to the U.S., he is grateful for her efforts to keep him afloat even as she drowned.

"I believe that if today she is not here with me it is because she fought until the very last minute for me to survive," he tells ABC. "After giving life to me, I believe she was the one who saved me. She was the one who gave life back to me at a time of danger."

You can watch the interview here:

ABC News Videos | ABC Entertainment News

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Voters in more than half the states will soon be able to register online, rather than filling out a paper form and sending it in.

Twenty states have implemented online voter registration so far, almost all in the past few years. Seven other states and the District of Columbia are now in the process of doing so. That includes Florida, whose governor, Republican Rick Scott signed a bill last Friday requiring the state to allow online voter registration by 2017.

Online voter registration has become so popular because election officials say it's more efficient than a paper-based system, and cheaper.

Voters like it because they can register any time of day from home, said David Becker, director of election initiatives for the Pew CharitableTrusts.

"What election officials are finding, is they're saving a ton of money, because they're having to process a lot fewer pieces of paper by hand, right before an election, and get that into the system," he said.

Arizona, for example, says it costs the state only $.03 to register someone online, versus $.83 on paper.

And there's another reason state election officials like online registration. It can be very difficult to keep voter rolls up-to-date and accurate, which has raised concerns about voter fraud and caused confusion at the polls. But information submitted online is immediately compared with driver's license or other state databases, and verified.

"If someone puts in First Avenue, instead of First Street, as their address by mistake and it doesn't match the motor vehicles file, in real time, with the voter still sitting at the screen, they can ask the voter to double check if what they entered was correct," Becker explained, adding that this can avoid a lot of problems on Election Day, especially if the error involves the spelling of the voter's name.

Online voter registration also turns out to be one of the few areas in running elections where many Republicans and Democrats agree.

Louisiana's Republican Secretary of State Tom Schedler says he was skeptical at first. Louisiana was one of the first states to approve online voter registration in 2009.

"Register online? I mean it just was kind of an oxymoron to me. I just was so used to the old system. So I mean, I guess it was more just my confidence level in technology," he said.

But today, Schedler is a huge fan. He says more than 220,000 people have used the system so far, with no reported problems.

"You can go straight online and do it. It takes about two minutes, three minutes max, and it's done," he says.

Still not everyone's sold on the idea. Florida's bill had strong bipartisan support in the legislature, but Gov. Scott said he signed the measure "with some hesitation." Scott said he was worried about meeting the October 2017 deadline, especially with a presidential election on the way. And his secretary of state, Ken Detzner, told lawmakers last month that he also opposed the bill because it was a massive undertaking.

Georgia's online voter registration website. registertovote.sos.ga.gov hide caption

itoggle caption registertovote.sos.ga.gov

"You're dealing with the most sensitive part of an election. You're dealing with voter registration systems. And if we do it wrong, we are in a heap of trouble," Detzner said.

Some Republican lawmakers in Texas have also blocked an online registration bill in that state, saying they're worried the system would be vulnerable to cyber attacks.

However, computer experts say that's not a problem as long as certain safeguards are put in place. Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a technology watchdog group gave this advice: "you want to make sure that you're testing for security while the system is being built and once it's in use. And you want to have a strategy for what happens if there's a failure of the system at a critical moment, like election day," she says.

In most cases, voters need to have a driver's license to use the online system, which means states can also require them to show their licenses the first time they appear at the polls, as an extra precaution, she says.

For everyone else, registering on paper is still an option.

Becker said one other problem that people were worried about has yet to materialize. Some politicians feared that online registration would favor one political party over the other. But according to Becker the party breakdown in states using online registration is almost identical to what it had been before. Red states are just as red, blue states just as blue.

Worker-rights groups are calling labor conditions in Qatar "horrific" and urging FIFA sponsors to take responsibility ahead of the 2022 soccer World Cup. Their call comes on the same day the BBC said a reporting crew spent two nights in a Qatari jail for trying to film migrant workers who are building the infrastructure for the sporting event.

"Sponsors know that Qatar is a slave state," Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said at a news conference. "This is the richest country in the world and they don't have to work this way ... fans don't want the game to be shamed this way."

ITUC singled out Adidas, Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Gazprom, KIA, Hyundai, McDonalds and Visa, saying the companies had the power to make Qatar improve labor conditions for its approximately 1.2 million migrant workers.

The issue of working conditions in Qatar has been a focus of much scrutiny ever since the Arab country was awarded the 2022 World Cup. Several news organizations and human rights groups have chronicled its often-dismal working conditions.

The BBC reported today that a reporting crew spent two nights in jail for trying to report on the conditions under which the laborers – mostly migrants from South Asia — live and work. The crew was later released. Qatari officials said the BBC's Mark Lobel and his crew were trespassing. FIFA, in a statement, said it was seeking "clarity from the Qatari authorities" about the situation.

Earlier this month, Qatar officials detained German reporters who were working on a story about the controversial process under which Qatar was awarded the World Cup. The material they compiled during their trip was erased.

FIFA World Cup

FIFA

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From the earliest beginnings of the Mad Men phenomenon, some fans have wondered if superstar '60s and '70s-era adman Don Draper was destined to write one of the iconic advertising catchphrases of the time.

So it's kind of a testament to the misdirectional skills of show creator Matt Weiner that some regular viewers were surprised by the show's series finale Sunday – in which Don is shown to have concluded a long, soul searching trip through America with a trip to a California yoga retreat, which inspired him to invent the classic 1971 Coca Cola campaign "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke."

Like much of the developments in Mad Men's finale episode, "Person to Person," that conclusion – that Draper shrugged off all the self-discovery he'd achieved to go back to being his old self in his old job – is a presumed one. Because show creator Matt Weiner isn't one to spoon feed the audience key plot points; even one that puts a button on eight years of tortured self-examination by one of the most compelling lead characters in modern TV.

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As a fan, I was a little heartened by the show's finale. Weiner resolved nearly every character's story in a mostly positive fashion that close watchers of the show will likely love. Joan Harris finally got to start her company and be her own boss after getting pushed out of McCann Erickson; frumpy, repressed copywriter Peggy Olson found love with her longtime art director Stan Rizzo; weasely striver Pete Campbell got to be a big shot as a top executive at Lear jet and Draper did what we all expected – crafting one of modern advertising's most iconic campaigns.

But as a critic, I was a bit underwhelmed by much in these this final spate of seven episodes which closed out Mad Men's seventh season (the last season was stretched over last year and this year). Whole characters and storylines seemed unnecessary, like Elizabeth Reaser's tragically damaged waitress who briefly romanced Don. And Don's cross-country sojourn felt suspiciously like a Weiner-generated head fake to keep us from guessing that he might still wind up back in the ad business – this time, with his finger firmly on the pulse of the '70s zeitgeist.

Fittingly for an episode titled after a long distance phone connection, the best elements of this finale were the phone conversations. Don gets a scolding from his daughter Sally by telephone after she tells him his ex-wife Betty has terminal cancer; turns out, he's such a bad dad, the kids wouldn't be better off with him even after their mother is dead.

When Don calls Betty to confirm the news, he is again told that she would rather go to her grave not seeing him again and he realizes how much they have lost. And when Don calls former protg Olson to say goodbye to her, he's so broken up, we actually think he's never again coming east of the Mississippi (once more, great head fake, Weiner).

Because this is Mad Men, few characters get everything they want. Joan loses another self-centered clueless boyfriend when she reveals she wants to build a business instead of spend every waking hour with him; Peggy may have to wait a decade before she gets a shot at a creative director job; and fans don't get to see Peggy and Joan team up to run their own business as partners.

Still, it was good to see Weiner actually end the series, because he worked on another show – HBO's The Sopranos – which didn't really end. In a move which sparked one of the biggest series finale controversies in recent TV history, Sopranos creator David Chase simply cut to black in the middle of the show's final scene, not so much ending the series as stopping it cold. In Mad Men's case, Weiner left viewers with a good sense of where every major character was headed in their life as the show closed out. That's important when you're ending a show that people have obsessed over for so long. And I think when a series ends, that close attention has to be rewarded with a finale that gives fans some closure and yet lets them connect the dots a little bit themselves.

Mad Men will be remembered as a show which challenged audiences with its attention to detail and subtlety; it helped spark a rush of great cable series which include sibling AMC series Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. Thanks to its stylish look and note-perfect casting, the show also moved into the pop culture conversation, touching lots of people who may know Don Draper's name but have never watched moment of the series itself.

The show's biggest blind spot, curiously, has always been centered on race. It still mystifies me that a cable channel could spend eight years exploring the lives of characters throughout the 1960s and mostly disregard events that involved the civil rights movements, the end of segregation, the establishments of voting rights for black people or the end of laws against interracial marriage.

Weiner has said that the characters he focuses on in Mad Men are the type of people who wouldn't be closely connected to black people or those issues. But several writers have pointed out there were black people involved in advertising in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, a black man, Billy Davis, is credited as co-writer on the song "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," which provided the soundtrack for the Coke campaign Don is supposed to have invented.

I concluded a long time ago that Weiner simply didn't want to write about race much on Mad Men Which is a shame, because it makes the show feel a little less real and a little less relevant than it could have been.

It's truism that period pieces are often as much about the time in which they are made. And what Mad Men really did well was communicate our modern discomfort with the future, our continuing struggles with sexism and how difficult it can be to change, even when you know you must (e.g. global warming; wearing crocs)..

That last point was exemplified by Don Draper, who couldn't help using his midlife crisis as research for his next big idea in the finale – the same way he chatted up a black waiter in the show's pilot to figure out how to sell Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Even with all the great dramas now on TV, I think Mad Men will be missed.