Business

While most American homes still have a television in the den, how we watch, and what we watch, is changing. Computers, tablets, smartphones, DVRs and video game consoles have redefined what television is.

Viewers have officially become a multiscreen culture. And that means the TV industry is changing, as well. Consider that 36 million Americans watch video on their phones, according to the Nielsen ratings company.

Most of us know someone who's had a hard time finding or keeping a job over the past few years. It's an experience that often leaves people feeling defeated and demoralized. In Weekend Edition Sunday's Working It series, hear audio portraits of people whose daily lives are filled with uncertainty.

Friday, Twitter agreed to pull racist tweets after a French organization threatened to sue. The company has resisted efforts to police its content. But hate speech is illegal in many European countries, and anti-hate groups there are grappling with how to deal with the challenge of social media.

It's not just nutritionists who have a problem with sugar these days, so does organized labor. The AFL-CIO is calling for a boycott of one the country's biggest sugar producers, the American Crystal Sugar Company, based in Moorhead, Minn.

There was a 1.7 percent drop in sales of existing homes in September from August, the National Association of Realtors says.

But the median selling price compared to one year earlier was up for the seventh month in a row, leading NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun to say "we're experiencing a genuine recovery."

According to NAR:

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Yesterday was the kind of day executives at Google would probably like to delete. Trading of the Internet giant's shares was temporarily halted after the company's earnings were released accidently and prematurely. What's worse, the numbers were not anything Google would want to show off. The earnings reports showed profits last quarter fell by more than 20 percent. Here's NPR's Steve Henn.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

It was four years ago - almost to the day - that American taxpayers bailed out America's big banks, as the nation faced its worst financial crisis in decades. In the past several days, we've been given a look at how the banks are doing - their latest quarterly profit reports.

And to talk about that, we turn, as we often do, to David Wessel. He's economics editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Morning, David.

DAVID WESSEL: Good morning.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And in Britain this week, eyebrows were raised with the revelation that Starbucks has paid almost no corporate tax on its operations in the UK. Starbucks insists it's done nothing wrong.

Vicki Barker reports from London.

(SOUNDBITE OF STARBUCKS AD)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: That's why at Starbucks we've decided to do things differently.

VICKI BARKER, BYLINE: Since that green mermaid logo first washed up on these shores in 1998, Starbucks-UK has racked up more than four and a half billion dollars in sales, here.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

A deal in the eurozone begins NPR's business news today.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GREENE: At a summit in Brussels, the European Union agreed today to create a single overseer for its 6,000-plus banks. The move is seen as an important step in preventing future financial meltdowns. The European Bank will lead these efforts and the new overseer will have the power to intervene in any bank in the 17 eurozone countries.