Morning Edition

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In Latin America, the highest courts have increasingly been ruling in favor of gay rights, and that includes the right to marry. Now, some countries are moving to allow adoption by people who are gay. It is a hot-button issue that has drawn fierce opposition. One case that could set an important precedent involves a lesbian couple in Colombia. NPR's Juan Forero has the story.

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Okay. It can be a sensitive matter to mention a woman's age, but if people failed to mention it, Phyllis Diller was liable to bring it up herself. Diller died at home in Los Angeles yesterday at the age of 95, after decades of making people laugh by poking fun at herself, as she did in this stand-up performance in 2004.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PHYLLIS DILLER: You know you're old when your walker has an airbag.

(LAUGHTER)

DILLER: And your birthday cake looks like a prairie fire.

(LAUGHTER)

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NPR's business news starts with a really big apple.

It was bound to happen. Apple has surpassed Microsoft as the most valuable company ever. That happened when Apple stock hit $665 per share yesterday, boosting its market value to nearly $624 billion. Microsoft had held the record for market capitalization since 1999. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

It looks like a bright new car wash, but it's a battery swapping station for electric cars in Israel. When a vehicle pulls up, it is slowly pulled through a conveyor. The spent battery is taken out and replaced with one that is fully charged. The entire process takes less than five minutes.

High school students with heavy academic course loads often find the demands of homework colliding with the need for adequate sleep.

Fighting health care fraud in the U.S. can seem like an endless game of Whack-a-Mole. When government fraud squads crack down on one scheme, another pops up close by.

But the fraud squads that look for scams in the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs have some new weapons: tools and funding provided by the Affordable Care Act.

Medicare and Medicaid pay out some $750 billion each year to more than 1.5 million doctors, hospitals and medical suppliers. By many estimates, about $65 billion a year is lost to fraud.

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Changes in the health insurance industry are at the top of NPR's business news.

The giant insurance company Aetna plans to get a little bigger. It's buying Coventry Health Care for more than $5.5 billion. Now, if you want to know why, consider the changing landscape in which Aetna does business. Medicaid is expanding under President Obama's health care law, Medicare is expanding as Americans grow older, and those government-run plans include many opportunities for private insurance companies.

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