Business

Video game makers are rolling out their new titles — with a wide range of creativity and style — just in time for the holiday shopping season. Jamin Warren, founder of Kill Screen magazine, shares his list of video games you should keep your eye on:

In a sterile white boardroom in ABC Family's headquarters in Los Angeles, two young women are assiduously ignoring a spread of cookies in favor of two more important things: their laptops and a live broadcast of the show Pretty Little Liars playing on a large flat-screen TV.

Dalia Ganz, 28, is the show's social-media manager. She's patiently teaching one of the beautiful young actors on the show how to live-tweet this episode.

"Include #prettylittleliars in your answers," she instructs. That is a literal transcription of her words.

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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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.

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

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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.

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And our last word in business today is: Ovonics. That's the science of using thin materials to capture the power of the sun. It's named after Stan Ovshinsky, who died on Wednesday at 89 years old.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

He held hundreds of patents that changed the way we use and gather energy. Ovshinsky never went to college, but that didn't put a damper on his passion for science. His son told the Associated Press that his dad was determined to change the world.