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GUY RAZ, HOST:

From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

And I'm Melissa Block. President Obama arrived in Indonesia today, the latest stop in a 10 day trip across the Pacific. He's used the trip to send a message that the U.S. is shifting its attention to the Asia Pacific region, both for economic and security reasons. That includes the announcement yesterday that the U.S. will deploy 2,500 Marines to Australia.

Imagine someone asking you what you had for breakfast, lunch and dinner weeks ago. Most of us would do a fair to miserable job of recalling that. But it's exactly the information that investigators need to sleuth out the source of an outbreak of Salmonella or E. coli, as German officials learned the hard way this summer.

The congressional deficit-reduction supercommittee must agree before Thanksgiving to slice more than $1 trillion from projected deficits, or that money will be cut automatically from future budgets.

The fundamental divide between the panel's six Democrats and six Republicans has been over whether tax revenues should come into play. And with less than a week to go before the deadline, some Republicans are considering new tax revenue. But even the hint of compromise on that issue is dividing Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Auditions are now underway for next May's Eurovision Song Contest — that often-ridiculed television spectacle that has drawn millions of viewers around the world every year since 1956. In 2012 the host country will be Azerbaijan, since that country fielded last year's winner.

Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez has been charged with attempting to assassinate the president for allegedly firing at least two shots at the White House last Friday evening.

The Houston Astros will be moving from Major League Baseball's National League to the American League "as soon as the 2013 season," MLB announced this afternoon.

The ancient texts can be seen up close — right in the middle of New York City. There are some theatrics, but NPR's Margot Adler reports that the exhibit is happily understated.

A special deficit-reduction supercommittee has less than a week to go before a deadline to vote on a plan cutting the nation's deficits. Melissa Block talks to one of the members of the bipartisan panel, Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland.

Republicans are attacking President Obama for calling Americans "lazy." Is that really what the president said? Ari Shapiro

The STOCK Act, a bill that would ban members of Congress from trading stock based on nonpublic information they get because they're lawmakers, has 61 co-sponsors and counting. And for the first time, after years of languishing without a single hearing, the measure is getting a hearing in the House Financial Services Committee.

What's remarkable about this is that the STOCK Act had just nine co-sponsors last week. What changed? The CBS news magazine 60 Minutes did a story about congressional insider trading.

In case you haven't noticed, we're fat, and getting fatter.

If Americans stay on this path, 83 percent of men will be overweight or obese by 2020. Women are right behind them, with 72 percent projected to be overweight or obese by then.

The implications go far beyond tight pants and groaning sofas. Obesity is a big risk factor for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Imagining an America of overweight, unhealthy people gives public health officials the willies. And it should be frightening to us civilians, too.

Californians who oppose same-sex marriage just won a procedural victory in court.

The state's Supreme Court ruled this hour that opponents of same-sex marriage who successfully pushed the Proposition 8 law that bans such unions in the state may defend the initiative in court. The court's opinion is here.

The focus is on Manhattan today as protesters mark the two-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but there are things happening in other U.S. cities as well. We'll add to this post as reports come in.

-- 4:15 p.m.: Our colleague Bill Chappell has used Storify to gather other feeds and reports about what's happening at various protests.

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

From New York to California and places in between, Occupy protesters are in the streets today. That's because it was exactly two months ago that the movement began in a New York City park. Police in riot gear were deployed in lower Manhattan this morning, as hundreds of demonstrators marched with the aim of shutting down Wall Street. NPR correspondent Margot Adler has been following the events, and she joins us now live. Good morning, Margot.

MARGOT ADLER, BYLINE: Good morning.

I took a walk up and down the main arteries into Wall Street and things seem to be settling down. As the protesters dispersed this morning, they made the decision to leave large groups of people at different intersections in New York's Financial District.

What police have done to control the crowds is block access to certain blocks and they've also barricaded protesters in sidewalks. So what you have now is a fractured protest with, for example, 30 protesters at one intersection and 15 at another.

From 720,000 in the year 1980 to more than 1.9 million in 2010, the number of Americans who are 90 years of age or older has nearly tripled, the Census Bureau reports today in its first comprehensive look at the over-90 population.

And according to the Census Bureau, "over the next four decades, this population is projected to more than quadruple."

Scientists and security specialists are in the midst of a fierce debate over recent experiments on a strain of bird flu virus that made it more contagious.

The big question: Should the results be made public?

Critics say doing so could potentially reveal how to make powerful new bioweapons.

As Eyder continues to file posts from the streets of lower Manhattan, where Occupy Wall Street protesters have been on the march today, here are some other views of what's happening there and other resources for monitoring what's happening:

Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, who is in custody for allegedly firing shots toward the White House last week, "hates the president, he hates Washington, he hates society," a law enforcement official tells The Washington Post.

"The final decisions on Solyndra were mine, and I made them with the best interest of the taxpayer in mind," Energy Secretary Steven Chu plans to tell Congress today, as a House committee digs into the controversial $528 million in federal loans made to the now-bankrupt solar energy company.

There were 388,000 first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, down 5,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration just reported.

The agency also said that the "4-week moving average" of claims — a way of gauging the trend over a slightly longer period of time — was "396,750, a decrease of 4,000 from the previous week's revised average of 400,750."