GM recalls 145,628 mid-sized pickups for hood latch issue

(Reuters) – General Motors Co said on Thursday it is recalling 145,628 mid-sized pickup trucks globally as the hood could open unexpectedly due to a possible missing latch.

Of the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon pickups affected by the recall, 118,800 are in the United States, 15,264 are in Canada, 7,492 are in Mexico and the rest are exports, GM said.

GM is recalling the model year 2010 to 2012 trucks because the hood may be missing a secondary hood latch, so if the primary latch is not engaged the hood could open and block the driver’s view and increase the risk of a crash, according to documents filed with the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

There are no reports of crashes or injuries related to the issue, and there are four known cases of the secondary hood latch being missing, GM said.

GM said it will notify owners and instruct them to inspect their trucks for the presence of a secondary hood latch or take the truck to a dealer for inspection. If the secondary latch is missing, a new hood will be installed, the company said.

Dealers were notified of the issue on December 18 and GM expects to begin mailing letters to owners on January 17, according to NHTSA.

(Reporting By Ben Klayman in Detroit; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

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Apple reportedly considering Waze acquisition to help fix iOS Maps app

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A Minute With: Singer Trey Songz on new movie “Texas Chainsaw 3D”

LOS ANGELES, January2 (Reuters) – R&B and hip-hop artists have appeared in horror films before, but 28-year old singer Trey Songz tackles a brand new incarnation of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise with “Texas Chainsaw 3D.”

The film, which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, follows a young woman who inherits a lavish, isolated mansion. When she visits it for the first time with her three friends, one of whom is played by Songz, they realize there is horror awaiting them in the basement.

Songz, a Grammy-nominated artist with hits like “Say Aah,” “Can’t Be Friends” and “Bottoms Up,” took a break from his world tour to talk to Reuters about his first movie role as a lead actor.

Q: Is acting something you’ve had your eye on?

A: “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but music comes first. I wanted to make sure when I did choose a role, I had time to really get in to it. (Director) John (Luessenhop) came to the studio to meet me for the first time and I told him to give me 24 hours to figure it out. I had just come off tour, I was recording an album and the four weeks I was set to have for vacation would be the four weeks I’d be shooting the film.”

Q: What did you think about during that 24-hour period?

A: “Making sure I wouldn’t be carrying the weight of the film. My name means so much in the music world that I was worried I’d have to carry the film, but I think the franchise carries the weight of the film. Luckily, (my character) Ryan is a likeable guy. There wasn’t too much stress on me mentally and it didn’t take too much away from me as a person in order to be him … I couldn’t ask for a better stepping-stone as a first-time actor.”

Q: You’ve stated that you are the first black actor in the “Texas Chainsaw” franchise. What does that mean to you?

A: “I think it means something not only to me, but to the franchise. Ryan was originally envisioned as a white male. The fact that the studio, the producers and the director went out on a limb and put a black man in such a strong part in a classic movie first made in the 70s, when things were so different, speaks volumes too.”

Q: Your single “Heart Attack,” off your fifth and current album “Chapter V,” was nominated for a best R&B song Grammy, making it your third nomination. What would a win mean?

A: “Right now I feel like I’m in the Grammy club, but not in the V.I.P. I’m just looking at the V.I.P. going, ‘I got to drink. I want a bottle, just let me in the V.I.P. please!’ But all jokes aside, the Grammy is the most elite award you can win as a musician so it would mean so much.”

Q: You moved around a lot as child, partly because you had a stepfather who worked in the military and partly because of your mother’s work opportunities. What was that like?

A: “When you’re a young, single mother, you’re dependent on welfare. Your mother is struggling and we would move around a lot – Virginia, Florida, Kansas, New Jersey, Baltimore … I went to eight different schools before ninth grade.”

Q: How does that impact you today?

A: “I’ve never really been settled. I don’t think I’ve ever known what it was like to be a person that was used to sitting still. I think it’s given me the ability to detach from any situation. It’s so easy to remove myself from the closest of situations just because I’ve had to do it my whole life.”

Q: Do you ever want to know what it feels like to be settled?

A: “I do. I don’t know when it will happen. I don’t even know how to. When I sit still for a couple of days, I get fidgety. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

Q: I suppose acting is another way to keep yourself from sitting still. Will there be more acting in store for you?

A: “I’ve set a goal for myself to land a couple of films a year. Recently, I shot a movie starring Paula Patton entitled ‘Baggage Claim.” It’s an urban film where I get to be comedic as well as sexy.”

Q: Comedic and sexy – it’s great that you see yourself that way. What confidence!

A: Some things just are what they are!

(Reporting by Zorianna Kit; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Jackie Frank)

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11 Ways to Avoid Answering a Question: A Year in Review

When my grandfather was alive, each of his children and grandchildren was responsible for reporting to him about the world in which they worked. He loved knowledge; he always had. As the only scientist in the family, I was in charge of “science.” This never quite seemed fair and yet I did what I could until the day he asked me to explain dark matter. I am a broadly trained scientist. I have worked on bacteria, birds, plants, insects and a great deal else. But, when pressed, late in the evening, dark matter was beyond my comfort zone. I faltered. Sometimes with my grandfather, faltering could be propped up with grandstanding, but on this particular day there was no such doing. He knew I was guessing. His shoulders slumped and he announced softly, “I don’t think I am ever going to learn everything.” My ignorance was the BS that broke the camel’s back.

In part because of my grandfather I have always felt a responsibility to answer questions people ask about science. This year, I decided I would make this responsibility more conscious. I would try to focus much of my writing on answering questions that came up in my daily life, questions that I am responsible for because I am a scientist. It was a sort of New Year’s resolution. My other resolution was to write shorter articles.1–Sitting around enjoying a glass of wine with my family and our friends Ari Lit and Michelle Trautwein, Ari asked, Hey dude, why do we drink alcohol? Do monkeys drink alcohol? This led me to think about the big story of alcohol and, in as much, to write a whole series about our complex relationship with the yeasts that, as waste, produce our favorite drinks. It ended up becoming a forty thousand word online series, about alcohol, civilization and yeast. So much for the resolution to write short articles. Also, I forgot to check on the monkeys.2–My favorite questions tend to come from kids and earnest parents. This year at my daughter’s school, every third student and then every other students and then, jeez, almost every student seemed to have lice. Parents asked me, “what should we do about lice?” This was a follow-up to an article I had written years prior in response to a similar query. I was able to tell the story of how the louse problem (or success, depending on your perspective) came to be, over the last million years. But I failed to really answer what a parent should do if their kid gets lice. It turns out parents whose kids have lice don’t want to hear about ancient hominids and their lice. Go figure.Image 1. Picture of the louse species, Pthirus pubis, descended from an interaction between a human ancestor and a gorilla ancestor and that is all I am saying. Photo courtesy of the CDC. 3-In the last chapter of my book The Wild Life of Our Bodies I argue for a more serious gardening of nature in the places we live. Reading this, someone wondered about the ways in which we garden evolution itself. She emailed asking, Could we favor the evolution of good species in our houses? I wasn’t sure and am still not, but the question prompted me to reconsider the ways in which we have gardened evolution historically. I wrote the Garden of Our Neglect about this history. I then started to consider how we might favor the presence (if not evolution) of beneficial species on our bodies and in our homes. This led me to propose the Ecological Theory of Disease and to write Letting Biodiversity Get Under Our Skin, and How Clean Living is Bad for You. I also wrote an article about what our body might be doing to favor beneficial species in Your Appendix Could Save Your Life. None of these articles really told anyone which species to plant much less engender in their invisible gardens of indoor life.4-Another night with friends, we sat around talking about paleo diets. Ari asked who we should count as our ancestors, which ancestors should we consider if we were to eat ancestral diets? This debate inspired the piece Were Our Ancient Ancestors Vegetarians and then How to Eat Like a Chimpanzee. Later when Ari tried an essentially all nut and fruit super-fiber diet I found myself writing about the Hidden Truth about Calories. With these articles, I learned about diet, but I also learned that people can get very angry when it comes to discussing food. I never really answered Ari’s question.5-At one evening talk associated with the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC, someone asked me why her armpits smell sweet when she lives in the desert. She asked me that question in Durham, not in a desert, so I felt compelled to take her word for it rather than sniff around the story, but I did begin to wonder about what we do and don’t know about the microbial smells produced on our bodies and those of, for example, dogs, so I wrote Why Sick People Smell Bad. The article was fun, but I still don’t know why the woman had sweet pits; perhaps it is just her nature.6-My daughter (who sometimes seems to channel the pure inquisitivness of my grandfather) asked me “Why are our bodies warm and not cold?” This is the kind of question she asks so as to avoid going to bed. It led me to write the article How Killer Fungus May Have Made us Hot Blooded. The article offers a partial, possible, speculative answer to her question, which is her favorite kind of answer because it means she can stay up later as she asks follow-up questions.7–My son has started asking, “papa, who took your hair?” I told him, as I told my daughter when she was smaller, that the squirrels took it for their nest. This just seemed to make him afraid of squirrels so I decided to figure out the real answer, the result was a story in New Scientist (unfortunately pay-walled) about the mystery of baldness and its evolution. Balding, it turns out, is fascinating, but why we bald is still largely unresolved. Back to the squirrels.8–I sometimes introduce talks about social insects by mentioning the similarities between insect and human societies and the idea that insect societies can allow us to learn about our own. In response (and during election season), someone recently asked “who would the ants vote for?” The closest I could get to an answer was to discuss how other animals (mostly honey bees) choose their leaders. I figured out that we know far less about leaders in other societies, including those of ants, than I had thought.9–Piotr Naskrecki visited my house and found, in my basement, a species of camel cricket apparently native to Japan. He also found, to my wife’s dismay, two species of “interesting roaches.” This spurred me to ask other people about their camel crickets, which caused me to have to answer how a Japanese camel cricket has come to take over our basements? I don’t really have an answer yet, though if you check out the website there are ways for you to help me find one.10–For a number of years now, people have been offering me story ideas. “Man, you should totally write about…” Its often difficult to follow up on such ideas, but this year I tried. When my family and I were living in Parma, Italy Donato Grosso asked me if I knew about the species of crab living under Rome. “That,” he said, “would be a good story.” It was. It became “new species of crab living in Rome.” A visit to Girona, Spain where a friend had built a niche in his house for animals to colonize got me wondering about the niches in our cities that we have built for wild species. Pera said, “you should write about it.” I did, in the form of a story about the most common bird in the world, the house sparrow. There were no questions here, but even without a question to answer I seem to have written something slightly different from what Donato or Pera might have imagined.11-Finally, I have started to try to answer the question I have heard most often throughout my career, including from my grandfather, “what do I do about the ants in my kitchen?” Answering this question has required figuring out what the heck is going on with ants in kitchens and backyards and so I wrote one article about a backyard discovery made by English majors, another about a discovery made by an eight year old and another still about how little we seem to know about the most common ant species in eastern North America. I also recruited Eleanor Spicer to write Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Ants. None of these answered the question about what to do about the ants in your kitchen, though maybe the distraction bought me some time.Image 2. Camponotus pennsylvannicus, a common backyard (and occasionally kitchen) ant. Photo by Alex (the great) Wild.In short, although I’ve written something like 200,000 words this year, very few seem to have directly answered the questions I was asked. So much for my New Year’s resolution, though maybe part of the problem is that we still know so little about so many fields that it is nearly impossible to make it to the end of a story without encountering the unknown. Perhaps I can try to write shorter answers, answers short enough that I don’t get to what we don’t know. History is not on my side. I seem incapable of writing short articles (one of my shortest articles this year was repeatedly described as “long form”). Also, I come from a long history of “long form” people. My grandfather’s stories went long and, well, his father was apparently worse. When asked to comment on the history of the Episcopal church in his town, Greenville, Mississippi, my great grandfather wrote that he could not write about the history of the Episcopal church in Greenville without commenting on the history of the Episcopal church more generally. And he could not, he said, write about the Episcopal church in general without commenting upon the history of religion. And so he began. My people. It seems we start at the very beginning and answer a question similar too but not identical too the one we were asked. In this light, if my granddad were still around, I’d tell him now that, yes, I can explain dark matter now, but before I do I need to explain the big bang which, ironically, is what I do in my first article of 2013. So stay tuned and send me your questions. But don’t be surprised if, in commenting upon the history of your question, I need to comment on a broader church, the history of life or even the universe.Go ahead and post your science questions you think should be answered in 2013 here…   

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs.Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
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Car slump in France, Spain and Italy spells gloomy 2013

PARIS (Reuters) – Car sales in France, Spain and Italy in 2012 fell to the lowest levels in years, with December registration data underscoring the challenges facing the broader European economy.

Automakers are facing a sustained slump in the European car market as the euro zone debt crisis and government austerity measures sap consumer demand.

“The new car market continues to decline – a trait which we anticipate will continue through the course of 2013,” Credit Suisse analyst David Arnold said on Wednesday, adding European auto sales were unlikely to see growth in 2013.

Europe’s stagnating auto market will have knock-on effects for other economic players including steel producers, Nomura analyst Matthew Kates said in a note, citing forecasts by consulting firm AutoAnalysis.

Italy’s car sales, down 22.5 percent in December, slumped 19.9 percent for the full year to 1.4 million units, their lowest levels since 1979.

“The car market is suffering from an overdose of taxes aimed at hitting, if not criminalizing, the acquisition, ownership and use of autos,” said Filippo Pavan Bernacchi, the president of Italy’s car dealers’ trade group Federauto.

He said he expected Italian car sales in 2013 to be close to 1.33 million units.

French car registrations fell 15 percent in December, leaving the full year down 14 percent to 1.90 million vehicles – the lowest since 1997, French industry group CCFA said.

Spain’s monthly sales shrank 23 percent, after a 20 percent fall in November. Its full-year total of 699,589 cars, down 13 percent, was the lowest since industry association Anfac began keeping records in 1989.

Germany will report December data on Thursday.

Ford led December’s declines among mass-market brands with sales down 40 percent in France, 31 percent in Spain and 33 percent in Italy. Opel – the European unit of General Motors – posted declines of 16 percent, 17 percent and 47 percent, respectively.

Volkswagen , Europe’s biggest automaker, saw sales at its core brand slump 25 percent in France, 15 percent in Spain and 36 percent in Italy.

PSA Peugeot Citroen fell broadly in line with both markets, while Fiat brand sales dropped 11 percent in France, 28 percent in Spain and 20.5 percent in Italy.

Renault-brand registrations dropped 20 percent in Spain and 32 percent in France. Its home market is likely to shrink 2-5 percent this year, Renault France marketing director Nicolas Monnot said.

“This is completely coherent with the various macroeconomic forecasts available.”

In a note on Italian data, auto think-tank Promotor said Italy’s full-year fall in car sales was particularly worrying at a time when the global auto market was growing.

“The auto crisis does in fact involve only the euro area and is a direct consequence of the depressive effect of austerity policies on the real economy,” it said.

The chance of a recovery in the euro zone economy has faded further into 2013 after the recession deepened in the final months of last year, a Reuters poll found last month.

KNOCK-ON EFFECTS

Falling business investment and persistently weak consumer sentiment are challenging French President Francois Hollande’s efforts to stem rising unemployment and keep government spending within its 2013 deficit target.

Spain’s year-old recession was expected to continue well into 2013, weighed down by battered economic sentiment and 25 percent unemployment, a record high. Manufacturing activity shrank for a 20th straight month in December.

Italy was seen recording a 0.2 percent economic contraction this year, according to government figures. The International Monetary Fund predicted a 0.7 percent decline.

With fast-growing markets such as China and Russia increasingly meeting their own demand for steel, European producers are more than ever at the mercy of domestic industry.

“It is difficult to get bullish on the outlook for European auto demand in the near term, with obvious implications for European steel demand,” Kates at Nomura said.

German auto demand, which had long resisted the slump spreading north, turned negative in the second half to post a 1.7 percent drop for January through November.

In another sign of contagion, French delivery van sales contracted sharply in December, plunging 22 percent for their biggest monthly decline since the crisis of 2008, CCFA spokesman Francois Roudier said.

“We have already been seeing individual consumers holding back (on car purchases), particularly in the mass market,” Roudier said. “Now company fleet sales are slowing down as well.”

(Additional reporting by Paul Day, Gilles Guillaume, Gus Trompiz and Stephen Jewkes; Editing by Dan Lalor, James Regan and Hans-Juergen Peters)

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France counts 1,193 cars torched on New Year’s Eve

PARIS (AP) — A New Year’s Eve tradition for some in France of torching empty, parked cars has continued.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday that 1,193 vehicles were burned overnight around the country, where the stunt began in the 1990s.

There was no way to compare this figure to recent ones because the conservative government of former President Nicolas Sarkozy stopped making the numbers public while he was in office. But the rate of burned cars was apparently steady. On Dec. 31, 2009, 1,147 vehicles were burned.

For some, the decision of France’s current Socialist government to resume making public figures of New Year’s Eve’s torched cars is unwise.

Bruno Beschizza, a security chief for Sarkozy’s UMP party, said on iTele TV that publishing the numbers motivates youths to commit such crimes.

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Four Android productivity apps you should use in 2013

Happy New Year! Like most folks, I am working on some resolutions for 2013. One resolution I have is to be more productive. One way I am going to do this is by using my Android phone better. Now there are apps that I have, but really have not used to their fullest. As I work on this resolution, I might discover even better apps. For now I will focus on these impressive apps that can make anyone more productive.

I use Hootsuite on the computer, but rarely find myself engaging with it on my smartphone. With Hootsuite, you can manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare accounts. The free version allows for up to five accounts and one member of your team to access the account. There is a pro version with a monthly fee, in which you can have more accounts and team members and helpful analytics tools.

The design of the app is very good. If you sync the web version to mobile, you will have everything automatically downloaded to the phone. When viewing content, you swipe left or right to change columns or streams. If you are in the middle of a stream, simply tap the top menu bar to automatically return to the top. The app allows for multiple profiles and scheduled tweets. My goal is to keep up with my feeds and tweets in real-time rather than waiting until I get to a computer.

Another web service that I started to use, but find myself not using it to the fullest. Producteev is a web-based task management service. With Producteev you can work as an individual or in a team by setting up workspaces and then organize tasks by labels. For each task you can assign a priority, due date, and share with team members, if you have any. Overall, this is a great service, since I like making lists, even though I rarely remember having made them.

The Producteev app is available for all platforms. The app has a very clean interface and is easy to find tasks. Probably the best way to keep up with tasks is to use the different widget for the home screen. Seeing the widgets will help keep those key tasks in the forefront of your mind. The app will work offline and syncs in the background.

I read blogs every single day, especially those related to new apps, Android, or mobile news. The only way I can do that is via my Google Reader. I find myself trying to catch up each day on the computer (just like with Twitter activity) when I would be better off reading a little bit over time during the day. NewsRob is a Google Reader that I have had for years. The interface is very clean and easy to use. The developer created a bunch of customizations options, which really make this reader stand out.

With NewsRob you can set up a notification of new articles, how you synchronize with Google and when, how many articles to keep in your cache, and more. If you set up folders within Google Reader, NewsRob will download the folders, too. This enables you to read the posts by blog or folder. The app provides a very clean blogpost display optimized for smaller screens. With each post you can zoom in or out, mark a post read or unread, view in the browser, and share the link to email or services such as Evernote. There is a free version of the app.

The last task I need to work on to be more productive is to keep up with the calendar. I find myself checking on the computer, after the fact, finding out that I am either late or forgot about a meeting or appointment. Using Google calendar is a good place to start, but I have not found the standard calendar app on my Droid was all that helpful.

Business Calendar is a very capable calendar app that has a ton of features. The app lets you view your calendar in a number of different views, and has search and favorite-calendar features, to name a few. The option of viewing different calendars, color coding and being able to easily add, delete, and edit events is helpful. The ability to use widgets for reminders is important. The pro version has over 10 different sizes and allows for the import or export of calendar files in the iCalendar format. Business Calendar also has a free version.

So my top goal or resolution for 2013 is to be more productive. I think using these apps more will help me accomplish that goal. Are there any apps you have but not using to their fullest? What resolutions do you have for 2013?

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Playboy Hugh Hefner marries his ‘runaway bride’

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hugh Hefner is celebrating the new year as a married man once again.

The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his “runaway bride,” Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year’s Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old “Playmate of the Month” in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.

Playboy said on Tuesday that the couple celebrated at a New Year’s Eve party at the mansion with guests that included comic Jon Lovitz, Gene Simmons of KISS and baseball star Evan Longoria.

The bride wore a strapless gown in soft pink, Hefner a black tux. Hefner’s been married twice before but lived the single life between 1959 and 1989.

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Mood drug no help for smoking cessation in prison study

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The addition of the antidepressant nortriptyline to conventional smoking cessation therapy didn’t improve the chances of longterm success among male prisoners, Australian researchers have found.

Depression and other mental illnesses raise the likelihood of smoking, and quitting can depress a person’s mood – which in turn can make it harder to quit. Studies have shown that antidepressants, including nortriptyline, can improve the success of smoking cessation efforts.

And prison inmates are notoriously heavy smokers, with higher rates of depression and other mental illness than the general population.

But the new study found that nortriptyline (marketed as Aventyl) – which is not FDA-approved for smoking cessation but often is used for that purpose – did not seem to help inmate smokers stay tobacco-free over time.

Compliance with the therapy appeared to a significant issue, however, said Robyn Richmond, a public health researcher at the University of New South Wales, in Kensington, who led the study.

Prisoners who were faithful to the treatment as ordered at least three-quarters of the time were much more likely to break their smoking habit than those who could not stick to the regimen, Richmond told Reuters Health.

Another factor, Richmond added, was that the prison population in the study tended to migrate, making follow-up of the participants difficult.

“One thinks that you have a captive audience” in prison studies, she said. “However, half of the prisoners were either transferred to another prison within the study or released into the community.”

The study, which appears in the journal Addiction, included 425 male inmates from prisons across Australia. All were smokers, with a habit lasting on average 20 years and more than 23 cigarettes a day.

Nearly three-quarters of the inmates in the study had tried to quit in the previous year, according to the researchers.

All of the prisoners in the study received 10 weeks of smoking cessation therapy consisting of nicotine patches and two sessions of behavioral counseling. To that was added either a dummy pill or nortriptyline.

The researchers recorded the inmates’ tobacco use at three, six and 12 months after the end of treatment, relying on self-reporting and direct measurements of exhaled carbon monoxide, a byproduct of smoking.

At the three-month mark, about one-quarter of prisoners who had received the antidepressant had managed to stay off smoking continuously, compared with 16 percent of those who had not taken the drug. But by the one year mark, the abstinence rate had fallen to about 11 percent for both groups.

Psychologist Karen Cropsey, a smoking researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said most jails and prisons in the United States have significantly restricted tobacco use by inmates. Roughly half of prisons, and many jails, now ban smoking completely, she said, while facilities that permit it typically require inmates to go outside to smoke.

Cropsey, who has studied tobacco use by female inmates, said the latest work is the first to look at smoking by male inmates.

Source: http://bit.ly/U67ejn Addiction, online December 11, 2012.

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Obama urges House to back deal

1 January 2013 Last updated at 12:45 ET

US President Barack Obama has urged the House of Representatives to back a Senate-approved deal to prevent sweeping tax rises and spending cuts known as the “fiscal cliff”.

These came into effect at midnight when George W Bush-era tax cuts expired, although few effects will be felt immediately as Tuesday is a US holiday.

House Republicans were to meet at 13:00 (18:00 GMT) to discuss their strategy.

There is pressure for a vote before financial markets reopen on Wednesday.

However, the speaker of the Republican-led House, John Boehner, has not endorsed the Senate deal and there is expected to be some opposition from Republican representatives.

Mr Boehner has pledged either a vote or the tabling of an alternative measure. The House has now reconvened.

‘Without delay’

The Senate-backed bill, which raises taxes for the wealthy, was passed in the early hours of Tuesday by 89 votes to eight after lengthy talks between Vice-President Joe Biden and Senate Republicans.

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What is the fiscal cliff?

• On 1 January 2013, tax rises and huge spending cuts come into force – the so-called fiscal cliff


• The deadline was put in place in 2011 to force the president and Congress to reach agreement on the budget over the next 10 years


• Date coincides with expiry of Bush-era tax cuts


• There are fear that raising taxes while massively cutting spending will have a huge impact on households and businesses


• The fiscal squeeze could also push the US into recession, and have a global impact

Spending cuts have been delayed for two months to allow a wider agreement.

In hailing the Senate vote, President Obama stressed the urgency of a House approval.

He said in a statement: “While neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted, this agreement is the right thing to do for our country and the House should pass it without delay.”

He said: “Leaders from both parties in the Senate came together to reach an agreement that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support that protects 98% of Americans and 97% of small business owners from a middle class tax hike.”

Mr Boehner and other top Republican leaders said in their statement: “Decisions about whether the House will seek to accept or promptly amend the measure will not be made until House members – and the American people – have been able to review the legislation.”

On Tuesday, one senior Republican aide told Reuters news agency that the party’s House members were meeting at 13:00 local time to discuss a “path forward”. Mr Biden is also meeting House Democrats.

Voters had mixed opinions about the Senate deal

The BBC’s Zoe Conway in Washington says that, with some Republicans expressing their unhappiness with the tax increases, the passage of the Senate’s bill is far from guaranteed.

Representative Tim Huelskamp told CNN he would be voting no, saying the legislation would damage small businesses.

However, fellow Republican House member Tom Cole told MSNBC that the Senate deal should be accepted.

“We know the essential details and I think putting to bed this thing before the markets [open on Wednesday] is really a pretty important thing to do,” he said.

As the House reconvened on Tuesday, a number of representatives from both parties expressed concerns about the deal.

The Virginia Democrat, Jim Moran Jr, said it was “a bad deal for America” that simply set up further fiscal cliffs to overcome in the coming months.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

American politicians certainly know how to take it to the wire – and just a little bit beyond”

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The current House can legislate until Wednesday, when it is replaced by a new chamber chosen during last November’s election.

Analysts warn that if the full effects of the fiscal cliff were allowed to take hold, the resulting reduction in consumer spending could spark a new recession.

The 1 January deadline triggers tax increases of about $ 536bn and spending cuts of $ 109bn from domestic and military programmes.

The compromise deal reached on Monday seeks to avoid this by extending the tax cuts for Americans earning under $ 400,000 (£246,000) – up from the $ 250,000 level Democrats had originally sought.

In addition to the income tax rates and spending cuts, the package includes:

• Rises in inheritance taxes from 35% to 40% after the first $ 5m for an individual and $ 10m for a couple


• Rises in capital taxes – affecting some investment income – of up to 20%, but less than the 39.6% that would prevail without a deal


• One-year extension for unemployment benefits, affecting two million people


• Five-year extension for tax credits that help poorer and middle-class families

BBC News – Business

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