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You never know where you might find a volunteer with a clipboard looking for signatures trying to get a voter referendum on the local ballot – like Ed Flanagan in the town of North Pole, Ala.

"I'm out in what's called the North Pole transfer station. This facility has about 50 metal dumpsters arranged in a fenced area. Folks back up and throw their household trash in there. This is a very busy place," he says.

There's no residential trash pick-up there so people have to haul their own. So for Flanagan, it's a great place to do some politicking for the minimum-wage hike that his group hopes to get on the August primary ballot.

Democrats in Congress are pushing to increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and tie further increases to the cost of living. But there are also ongoing efforts to boost the minimum wage in more than a dozen cities and states, like Alaska.

Activists around the country say it's an issue whose moment has arrived in all states — Democratic or Republican.

Thousands of miles away at an office in Massachusetts, Lew Finfer is with a coalition looking to get a minimum wage hike on the November ballot.

"Something like 700,000 people in Massachusetts who earn between $8 and $10.50 would get a raise, and there would be a billion dollars that would go back into the economy because people would spend it locally," Finfer says.

One of those Massachusetts workers who would benefit is 41-year-old Patty Federico. She makes $9.10 per hour at a movie theater, and she says they won't put her on full-time work.

"Right now with the money that I'm making, it just is a nightmare," she says. "It's not paying the bills. So I am desperately looking for a full-time job."

More On Minimum Wage

Planet Money

Here's Who Earns The Minimum Wage, In 3 Graphs

Central African Republic's interim president resigned Friday under pressure from fellow leaders at a regional summit to end the violence in his country.

Michel Djotodia and Prime Minister Nicolas Tiangaye resigned at the regional meeting in Chad.

Djotodia, a Muslim, took power in a coup last year, almost immediately plunging his landlocked, predominantly Christian country into violence. The U.N. voted last month to send French and African Union troops in an attempt to restore stability. As Hannah McNeish reported on All Things Considered at the time:

"Brutal sectarian violence has engulfed the mostly Christian country since March, when the first Muslim leader assumed power after a coup.

"Armed gangs of Muslim extremists joined by mercenaries from neighboring countries now control most of the country. Armed Christian forces are fighting back. Slaughter, rape and torture are widely reported."

The influential and controversial poet, playwright and essayist Amiri Baraka died Thursday in his hometown of Newark, N.J. He was 79.

Baraka, who was formerly known as LeRoi Jones, was one of the key black literary voices of the 1960s. The political and social views that inspired his writing changed over the years, from his bohemian days as a young man in Greenwich Village, to black nationalism and later years as a Marxist.

Baraka's work was at the forefront of the Black Arts Movement. His play Dutchman won the prestigious Obie Award in 1964 and shocked audiences with its explicit language and rage against the oppression of blacks in America. His writing about jazz and African-American culture, most notably the book Blues People: Negro Music In White America, was highly regarded.

But his detractors accused him at various times of being racist, dangerously militant, homophobic and anti-Semitic. His infamous 2002 poem about the Sept. 11 attacks contained lines that suggested Israeli involvement in the attack on the World Trade Center. Still, as The New York Times' Margalit Fox wrote, "his champions and detractors agreed that at his finest he was a powerful voice on the printed page, a riveting orator in person and an enduring presence on the international literary scene whom — whether one loved or hated him — it was seldom possible to ignore."

Baraka spoke to Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1986.

For the first time in more than 50 years, the Cuban government began selling new and used vehicles last week to anyone with the money to buy one. And as crowds gathered at state-owned car lots in Havana to check out the inventory, a consensus quickly emerged.

The cars on sale had either been priced by callous, greedy idiots, or the Cuban government had become the most incompetent automobile retailer in the world.

How else to explain 2013 Peugeot sedans priced at more than $250,000 — seven or eight times their retail value in Europe?

Or used vehicles like a 2010 Volkswagen Passat offered at $70,000?

Even Chinese-made Geelys — some of the world's cheapest cars — are listed at more than $30,000, somehow increasing in value after absorbing years of abuse as tourist rentals on Cuba's pothole-rotted roads.

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