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Gray Thursday may become the new Black Friday. Many big retailers have moved up the beginning of their shopping season, traditionally the Friday after Thanksgiving, to Thursday evening.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are feeling pressure from online retailers, which have given consumers an earlier shopping option.

"In the past, online retailers have had Thanksgiving Day all to themselves," says Marshal Cohen, retail analyst with the NPD Group. "And what that means is by the time Black Friday comes around, a lot of consumers have already spent a bunch of money."

New Year's Day typically inspires hope and new beginnings. But this next one may be cause for trepidation. Tax cuts for all income levels expire on Jan. 1, 2013, and most federal programs will face a 10 percent haircut — because Congress failed to agree on a deficit-reduction plan.

A great many families going to the movies over this Thanksgiving weekend will probably see Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's new film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and an impressive cast.

Based on a biography by Doris Kearns Goodwin, but scripted by playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner, it's been very well-reviewed, but here's a question: How true to history is it?

Talk about your snake-bitten congressional districts.

The Thanksgiving-eve news that Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. was resigning from Congress after reports that he has bipolar disorder and is the subject of a criminal probe of his spending of campaign funds, is just the latest in a series of bad endings for those who have represented Illinois' 2nd Congressional District in Washington.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Maen Rashid Areikat is chief of the PLO delegation in Washington, D.C. That means he is the de facto ambassador of the Palestinian Authority in the United States. Welcome to the program.

MAEN RASHID AREIKAT: Thank you.

HOST: I want to ask you first about what we just heard Leila Fadel say. Is Egypt now the guarantor of this agreement in the Gaza Strip?

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: And I'm Robert Siegel.

As anti-austerity protests spread around the country, the Spanish government is drafting a law prohibiting citizens from taking photos and video of riot police on the job. Video already released on YouTube shows police firing rubber bullets into crowds and beating demonstrators. The proposed ban on citizen photography seems to have prompted even more people to join protests and take pictures, including 12 year old Paula Carrasco.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Last night, in a Division Three college basketball game, Grinnell College beat Faith Baptist 179 to 104. That is a piece of sports news we would not spend a second on, but for the individual performance of Grinnell's Jack Taylor. The 5-foot-10 inch guard scored 138 points. It's a new collegiate record and, for all we know, a new planetary record. Among the 108 shots he attempted, Taylor took 71 three-point shots and made 27 of them. And he joins us now.

Congratulations on setting this new record.

Marine Esteban Brojas is rocking back and forth in his chair in a rehabilitation center for veterans in Menlo Park, Calif. He rubs his hands together so quickly you can hear them.

"You know, you're going into a building, and you know there's a grenade being popped in there," he says, "and there's a woman and a child in there ... and you're part of that?"