National News from NPR

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down. That means more troops will be coming home. Jobs are tough to find these days for anyone, but especially for veterans. Yesterday President Obama signed into law a plan meant to get more vets hired. NPR's Rachel Martin has more.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: The unemployment rate for veterans is around 12 percent - that's close to four points higher than for everyone else. President Obama says it's time to do something about it.

The jobs website Careerbuilder.com reports nearly one in five workers said they plan to celebrate the holiday with coworkers. The survey asked workers who they would rather spend Thanksgiving with, and only 1 percent answered coworkers. Ninety percent said family. The remaining 9 percent answered neither.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

The latest protests began when Egypt's military tried to strengthen its own power in any future government. Egypt's military is hardly the only army to assume an outsized role in a supposedly democratic country.

And we're going to talk about that with Vali Nasr of Tufts University, author of "The Rise of Islamic Capitalism" and a former advisor to the Obama administration. He's in our studios. Good morning, Vali.

VALI NASR: Good morning.

Hugo is the latest film directed by Martin Scorsese. It's based on a children's book, and is decidedly less dark and violent than the films he's most known for.

Director Michel Hazanavicius met me at the Bradbury building in downtown L.A. It's the location of a key scene in his audacious new movie The Artist, which takes place just at the moment when talking pictures supersede silent films.

"It's mythic," said Hazanavicius of the era during which Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were stars.

In the scene shot here, a dashing film star reminiscent of Fairbanks bumps into his lovely young protégé on the building's remarkable staircase. He's on his way down; she's on her way up.

The congressional supercommittee's failure to act is supposed to trigger hundreds of billions of dollars of spending cuts for the Pentagon starting in 2013. But even cuts that large don't come close to cutbacks in military spending in years past.

The Pentagon already plans to cut about $500 billion from its budget over 10 years. Now, it faces another $500 billion in cuts. For the military, that's the worst case: Ten years, cut $1 trillion.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has directed much of its anger at giant banks, which are no strangers to customer complaints. Some of those who have been burned by high fees in recent years are now satisfying their banking needs with a giant retailer instead, as Wal-Mart surges into the financial sector with a pre-paid, reloadable debit card called the MoneyCard.

Second in a three-part series

Hybrid cars will take a lot of floor space at the Los Angeles Auto Show beginning this weekend, but they still represent a tiny portion of the U.S. car market.