NPR News

"The protester" has been named Time magazine's person of the year, it was just announced on NBC-TV's The Today Show and on Time's website.

That covers, most notably of course, those who went to the streets in the Arab Spring movement that swept across much of North Africa and the Middle East.

But as Time writes, protesters have also had major impacts in Greece, Spain, the U.K. and — via the Occupy Wall Street movement — the United states.

A woman in Montana lost her Christmas money while shopping in J.C. Penney on Black Friday. The store found the envelope, and was able to return it to Carrie McNeese using its surveillance tape.

The paper wrote of horse-drawn carriages in New York's Central Park, calling them "hansom cabs." That's wrong, since the carriages have four wheels. Hansom cabs have two. A Times investigation reveals a reader noted this mistake in a letter to the editor in 1985. The paper published the letter but went on to repeat the error for decades.

A veto threat. Finger-pointing. The end of some jobless benefits.

We've been through all this before this year and we're going through it again as 2011 draws to a close.

As The Associated Press says: