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A lot happens between clicking "place order" on an online purchase and finding it on your doorstep. With more and more holiday shopping taking place over the Internet, fulfillment centers large and small are busy processing orders this season.

While all eyes are on the GOP presidential contenders, there's another candidate busy building an organization in Iowa: Barack Obama. Volunteers have opened eight offices across the Hawkeye State, hosted dozens of house parties and logged tens of thousands of telephone calls.

Presidential candidates have been sounding off about millionaires on food stamps, but the reality is harsher. Even in high-income zip codes, the formerly well off are having to turn to food stamps to put food on the table. That's according to two new surveys of food insecurity and income.

Nearly nine years after U.S. forces stormed into Iraq, American involvement in the war ends with a flag-lowering ceremony attended by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Only a few thousand U.S. troops remain, and they are to leave within days.

Congress has voted in favor of sanctions on Iran's Central Bank — which is intended to make it harder for Iran to sell its oil. But the move could have the unintended result of reducing the oil supply, thus driving up the price Iran would receive for oil it does sell.

Iowa's popular Gov. Terry Branstad hasn't endorsed any of the Republican presidential candidates crisscrossing his state yet. Still, Branstad will eventually be endorsing someone after the Jan. 3 caucuses. As he told All Things Considered co-host Melissa Block Thursday: "I want to work to help unite the party behind the winner of the nomination process."

The influential writer and cultural critic died Thursday at the age of 62 from complications of cancer of the esophagus. Hitchens confronted his disease in part by writing, bringing the same unsparing insight to his mortality that he had directed at so many other subjects.

Mitt Romney returned to form in the final Republican presidential debate before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. Romney, who had perhaps his shakiest debate performance in Des Moines over the weekend, appeared to regain his composure in Thursday night's debate in Sioux City, Iowa.

Queen Jackson has been homeless for about a year. As she recently told her case manager, Debra MacKillop, it all started in 2009, when she was laid off. Since then, there have been hard moments — and some precious ones, as well.

Commentator John Ridley talks to Renee Montagne about the controversy following the publication of an online column on the Forbes website titled "If I Were a Poor Black Kid." The columnist, Gene Marks, is a middle-aged white man.