APNewsBreak: Google exec chairman to visit NKorea

FILE - In this Sept. 28, 2012 file photo, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt arrives for a seminar at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Schmidt is preparing to travel to one of the last frontiers of cyberspace: North Korea. He will be traveling to North Korea on a private trip led by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson that could take place as early as this month, sources told The Associated Press on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2012. The sources, two people familiar with the group's plans, asked not to be named because the visit had not been made public. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 28, 2012 file photo, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt arrives for a seminar at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Schmidt is preparing to travel to one of the last frontiers of cyberspace: North Korea. He will be traveling to North Korea on a private trip led by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson that could take place as early as this month, sources told The Associated Press on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2012. The sources, two people familiar with the group's plans, asked not to be named because the visit had not been made public. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File)

FILE - In this April 10, 2007 file photo, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, third left, and Anthony Principi, former U.S. veterans affairs secretary, third right, and top White House adviser on Korea, Victor Cha, second right, pose for a photo with Kim Yong Dae, vice-president of the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People's Assembly, center, in Pyongyang, North Korea. Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt will be traveling to North Korea on a private trip led by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson that could take place as early as this month, sources told The Associated Press on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2013. The sources, two people familiar with the group's plans, asked not to be named because the visit had not been made public. (AP Photo/Foster Klug, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 20, 2012 file photo, a North Korean woman sits in a computer room near portraits of the country's late leaders, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, at the Kim Chaek University of Technology in Pyongyang, North Korea. Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt is preparing to travel to one of the last frontiers of cyberspace: North Korea. Schmidt will be traveling to North Korea on a private trip led by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson that could take place as early as this month, sources told The Associated Press on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2012. The sources, two people familiar with the group's plans, asked not to be named because the visit had not been made public. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu, File)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? Google's executive chairman is preparing to travel to one of the last frontiers of cyberspace: North Korea.

Eric Schmidt will be traveling to North Korea on a private, humanitarian mission led by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson that could take place as early as this month, according to two people familiar with the group's plans who asked not to be named because the visit had not been made public.

The trip would be the first by a top executive from U.S.-based Google, the world's largest Internet search provider, to a country considered to have the most restrictive Internet policies on the planet.

North Korea is in the midst of what leader Kim Jong Un called a modern-day "industrial revolution" in a New Year's Day speech to the nation Monday. He is pushing science and technology as a path to economic development for the impoverished country, aiming for computers in every school and digitized machinery in every factory.

However, giving citizens open access to the Internet has not been part of the North's strategy. While some North Koreans can access a domestic Intranet service, very few have clearance to freely surf the World Wide Web.

It's highly unlikely Google will push to launch a business venture in North Korea, said Victor Cha, a Korea expert who was a senior Asia specialist in the administration of President George W. Bush.

"Perhaps the most intriguing part of this trip is simply the idea of it," said Cha, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. Kim Jong Un "clearly has a penchant for the modern accoutrements of life. If Google is the first small step in piercing the information bubble in Pyongyang, it could be a very interesting development."

It was not immediately clear who Schmidt and Richardson expect to meet in North Korea, a country that does not have diplomatic relations with the United States. North Korea has almost no business with companies in the U.S., which has banned the import of North Korean-made goods.

North Korea likely is more interested in Google products such as email, maps and other content, said Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea expert at Kyungnam University in South Korea.

"North Korea has made a lot of investment in science and technology, not just for military purpose but also for the industry and practical reasons," Lim said, predicting that Pyongyang may ask Google to let their experts learn from the U.S. company about upgrading its software and content.

Schmidt has been a vocal advocate of providing people around the world with Internet access and technology.

As Google's chief executive for a decade until 2011, Schmidt oversaw Google's ascent from a small California startup focused on helping computer users search the Internet to a global technology giant making inroads into mobile phone markets as well as mapping.

Google now has offices in more than 40 countries, including all three of North Korea's neighbors: Russia, South Korea and China, another country criticized for systematic Internet censorship.

After being accused of complying with China's strict Internet regulations, known as "the Great Firewall of China," Google pulled its search business from the world's largest Internet market in 2010 by redirecting traffic from mainland China to Hong Kong. The company maintains other businesses in China, but a recent transparency report shows Google's services there sporadically are blocked.

Since stepping aside as CEO, Schmidt has served as Google's executive chairman, largely responsible for the company's external relationships with policymakers, business partners and governments around the world.

And in recent months, Schmidt had been working with Jared Cohen, a former U.S. State Department policy and planning adviser who heads Google's New York-based think tank, on a book about the Internet's role in shaping society. "The New Digital Age" is due to be published in April.

Schmidt's message: The Internet and mobile technology have the power to lift people out of poverty and political oppression.

"The spread of mobile phones and new forms of connectivity offer us the prospect of connecting everybody," he said in commencement speech at Boston University in May. "When that happens, connectivity can revolutionize every aspect of society: politically, socially, economically."

The Richardson-Schmidt trip comes at a delicate time politically. In December, North Korea defiantly shot a satellite into space on the back of a three-stage rocket last month, a launch Pyongyang has hailed as a major step in its quest for peaceful exploration of space.

Washington and others, however, decry it as a covert test of long-range ballistic missile technology designed to send a nuclear-tipped warhead as far as California. The U.N. Security Council quickly condemned the launch, and is deliberating whether to further punish Pyongyang for violating bans on developing its nuclear and missile programs.

The visit also follows North Korea's announcement that an American citizen of Korean descent has been jailed in Pyongyang on suspicion of committing "hostile" acts against the state. Conviction could draw a sentence of 10 years of hard labor under North Korea's penal code.

Kenneth Bae, identified in North Korean state media by his Korean name, Pae Jun Ho, is the fifth American detained in North Korea in the past four years. The exact circumstances of his arrest were not clear. The Korean Central News Agency said he was taken into custody in Rason, a special economic zone in the far north near China and Russia, while touring the area.

Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who often serves as an envoy to countries that do not have diplomatic relations with the United States, will try to meet with North Korean officials, and possibly Bae, to discuss the case, the sources said.

Richardson has been to North Korea at least a half-dozen times since 1994, including two trips to negotiate the release of Americans detained by North Korea. His last visit to Pyongyang was in 2010.

Also leading the trip is Kun "Tony" Namkung, an Asian affairs expert who has made numerous visits to North Korea over the past 25 years. Namkung also has been a consultant to the AP.

North Korea and the U.S. fought on opposite sides of a three-year war on the Korean Peninsula before signing a truce in 1953. The Korean Peninsula remains divided by a heavily fortified border, and the U.S. stations 28,000 troops in South Korea to protect the ally.

However, even before late leader Kim Jong Il's death a year ago, North Korea indicated interest in repairing relations with Washington.

Last year, a group of North Koreans even visited Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

And government-affiliated agencies already use at least one Google product to get state propaganda out to the world: YouTube.

___

Associated Press technology writer Youkyung Lee contributed to this report. Follow AP's Korea bureau chief at www.twitter.com/newsjean and AP Seoul's technology writer at www.twitter.com/ykleeAP.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-01-03-NKorea-Google/id-af71eeafce904867a9126c05ea584993

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Google tracks the world's New Year's resolutions on an interactive map

11 min.

Rosa Golijan , NBC News

Need help carrying out your New Year's resolution??There's a map for that: Google has created an interactive geographic resolution tracker, to remind you that you are not struggling?alone.

When the clock struck?midnight and 2013 was born, many of us quietly resolved to change something. This will be the year we will lose those extra 10 pounds, be kinder to our friends, learn a new language, change career paths, fall in love, and so on. A combination of Google's celebrated?mapping and translation technologies, wrapped in a charming design, the?new tool encourages users to write down those goals and show the world what improvements 2013 may bring.

To participate, head to Google's Zeitgeist page. Watch the resolutions pop up all over the map then, if you're feeling inspired,?click the button to add your own resolutions. Once you enter the resolution (along with your postal codes and country name), you select a category such as love, health or career.?

One of the neat things about Google's brainchild is that it allows users to enter resolutions in their native languages and then automatically?translates them for others around the world.

Thanks to this setup, a person who only speaks English can still watch in realtime as someone in Germany declares their intention to meet some pretty girls this year, someone living along the Adriatic Sea pledges to take life easier, and?a Russian resident swears this is the year he'll get in shape.

Want more tech news?or interesting?links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts,?or circling her?on?Google+.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/google-tracks-worlds-new-years-resolutions-interactive-map-1C7753066

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The Year Of The Higgs, And Other Tiny Advances In Science

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, the long-sought building block of the universe. This image shows a computer-simulation of data from the collider.

Barcroft Media/Landov

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, the long-sought building block of the universe. This image shows a computer-simulation of data from the collider.

Barcroft Media/Landov

It's a year-end tradition to cobble together a list of the most important advances in science. But, truth be told, many ideas that change the world don't tend to spring from these flashy moments of discovery. Our view of nature ? and our technology ? often evolve from a sequence of more subtle advances.

Even so, chances are good that this year's list-makers will choose the discovery of the Higgs boson as the most important discovery of 2012.

The Higgs is a long-sought building block of the universe. It finally put in an appearance at an accelerator in Europe. But though it was big news, it wasn't apparently a revolutionary discovery.

"There are certainly a number of physicists who are actually disappointed," says Sam Arbesman, a scientist and mathematician at the Kauffman Foundation. "They were hoping to find something a little different from what all the models predicted."

? It's not necessarily true that we need to find these singular big discoveries. Because the truth is, the way we make discoveries is oftentimes based on the accumulation of a lot of smaller insights and smaller ideas and discoveries.

- Sam Arbesman, scientist and mathematician, Kauffman Foundation

Instead, they got a discovery that mostly assures them the universe works pretty well the way they thought it did. So big news doesn't necessarily change the way we look at the world.

Arbesman and science historian W. Patrick McCray took a few minutes recently to talk about the nature of discoveries in science and technology. Each has just written a book about the process of science and technology. Arbesman's is The Half-Life of Facts; McCray's is The Visioneers.

McCray, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says revolutionary discoveries don't necessarily announce themselves when they happen. Consider this story: In 1988, a French scientist and a German scientist independently discovered a basic physics phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance.

The discovery seemed so arcane it didn't make a splash, like the Higgs boson. But, as it turns out, this phenomenon provided an extraordinarily powerful new way to get data on and off a magnetic disk, "and became the basis for a multibillion-dollar market for computer hard drives," McCray says.

That fueled a technology revolution and eventually led to a Nobel Prize for the scientists. But Arbesman says even this story distorts how science often progresses.

"It's not necessarily true that we need to find these singular big discoveries," he says. "Because the truth is, the way we make discoveries is oftentimes based on the accumulation of a lot of smaller insights and smaller ideas and discoveries. And oftentimes in the aggregate, those kinds of things ? the things that we expect or the things that we don't expect ? are often what drive science."

One classic example of this is the observation that the Earth's surface is always rearranging itself, as continental plates drift around the globe. This theory, now called plate tectonics, was first proposed in 1912, "but it took decades for enough evidence to be accumulated to support the theory, and also for scientists to come around to the idea that the continents were moving," McCray says.

Plate tectonics is now an indispensable way of understanding many things about our world ? not just about what drives earthquakes, but how animal species came to be distributed around the planet. This kind of slow burn happens more often than you might think.

"I think the laser, initially, in terms of a technology, was one of these great examples where it was a really cool thing, but I think no one had any idea what it could be used for," Arbesman says, "and now it's ubiquitous."

There's a lesson in that for Arbesman. It's not so easy to figure out what fields of science to fund in order to get breakthroughs in return.

"The truth is, we don't really have a good track record at predicting which ones are going to be relevant in the long term," he says. "And we want to make sure that we support the creation of knowledge. And to do that, we have to really make sure that we support everything all across the board."

That means, of course, most of the time we will be supporting research that may fill in facts around the edges but won't be revolutionary.

McCray argues that one of the most notable trends in science this year wasn't a discovery at all. It has to do with how much the public accepts what scientists tell them.

"Debates over climate change, evolution, whether vaccines cause autism, things like that ? all are part of a larger debate about the role and place of experts in American society," he says.

Americans still accept that science is a way to learn truths, but people are less likely to trust scientists as objective experts, McCray says. "And I think it's certainly something that a decade from now, we might look back upon and find quite curious, and indeed, quite serious."

That trend affects how we make use of the discoveries that flow from science ? so it also matters a lot.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/01/168208273/the-year-of-the-higgs-and-other-tiny-advances-in-science?ft=1&f=1007

daylight saving time 2012

CSN: Texans trying to rediscover their defense

When J.J. Watt and the rest of his defensive mates showed up to Reliant Stadium on Monday morning, things were a whole lot simpler.

For the month previous, they worried about winning the division, playoff scenarios, whether or not they were going to be playing a game on Wild Card Weekend. Turns out, they are. And instead of treating that as the terrible fate it appears to be from the outside, the Texans are using it as motivation to get back to what made them a great defense in the first place.

?We?re at an all-time high. We?re ready to roll,? Watt said. ?This is the NFL playoffs. Twelve teams, one goal. That?s it. You lose, you go home. You win, you go on. At the end of this one month and one week there?s going to be one team standing with a trophy in their hands. And we want that to be us.?

Win or go home.

If that?s not enough to push a team back into doing what made it great, then nothing is.

So when the defense arrived at the stadium on Monday, Watt and a few other defense leaders, whom Watt refused to name, talked about it. They talked about forgetting the past month, when the Texans lost three of four and the top seed in the AFC. They talked about getting back to playing the kind of defensive football that shot Houston out to an 11-1 start to the 2012 season.

?It?s something that when we came in on Monday, we said ?we?re flipping the mentality,?? Watt said on Tuesday, four days before the Bengals come to town. ?Nobody?s going to come in here ? nobody?s going to be down about the loss. Nobody?s going to worry about what happened in the last month. It?s playoff time and all we?re going to worry about is this game, having fun, playing like the Texans and doing what we do best.?

After starting off the season as one of the most feared defenses in the league, the Texans are now the seventh ranked defense in the NFL, giving up 323.3 yards per game. The Texans? defense has given up more than that in five of its last seven games.

?We maybe lost a little bit of our confidence,? outside linebacker Connor Barwin said. ?(There was) a lack of focus the last month of the season. I think it was just what everybody?s knows. Just get back to who we are, be who we are, have fun and stop over-thinking, worrying about scenarios or what?s going to happen and just get back to having fun like we did the first three quarters of the season.?

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the decline of the once mighty Houston Texans? defense is that it hasn?t happened across the board. At times, this defense looks like the one that catapulted the team to the hottest start in football and at other times ? well, it doesn?t.

The Texans have given up six pass plays of 60-plus yards this season, tying them with the Redskins for the most in the NFL. All six of those plays have, not surprisingly, come after Week 10.

But the problem with the Texans isn?t just a decline in play. Sure it didn?t help to lose Brian Cushing and it certainly won?t help that they?ve now lost another linebacker in Darryl Sharpton. But the Texans? defense is plenty talented. Perhaps what they were missing most was their bravado. That?s what the defensive leaders tried to stress. And so far, they say it?s working.

?It?s the playoffs so everything is stepped up,? Barwin said. ?You can tell everyone is a little more locked in. You can tell the theme is getting your groove back and being who we are.?

Watt said the entire team, especially the defense, had a great day of practice on Tuesday. Players were flying around, making plays. They looked like the Bulls on Parade again.

?We lost three out of four but we came out this week with a goal in mind to change our outlook,? Watt said. ?On defense, we want to get back to Bulls on Parade. Get back to swarming on defense, making plays, just having fun. We want to have fun and out at practice today, you could tell there was a little bit of fun out there.?

Now?s as good a time as any.

Source: http://www.csnhouston.com/football-houston-texans/talk/texans-d-trying-become-bulls-again

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Gold Price Rises For 12th Straight Year - Business Insider

Gold prices edged higher Monday after President Obama said that a budget deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff" was in sight, if not yet complete. The advance capped a 12th consecutive year of gains.

February gold rose $19.90, or 1.2 percent, to $1,675.80 an ounce.

Gold gained almost 7 percent in 2012 after starting the year at $1,566.80.

Investors have been buying gold as a safe haven and as protection against inflation while the value of the dollar declined. The metal has gained almost six-fold since the start of 2000.

In other metals trading, copper advanced 6.3 cents, or 1.8 percent, to $3.6525 a pound, after a report showed that Chinese manufacturing hit a 19-month high in December, indicating that the world's second-largest economy is gaining momentum following a global slowdown. Copper is used in many industries and its price fluctuates with the outlook for global economic growth.

Silver, platinum and palladium also gained.

Silver for March delivery rose 25.20 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $30.277. April platinum advanced $20.80, or 1.4 percent, to $1,542.40 an ounce and March palladium gained $3.05, or 0.4 percent, to $703.35 an ounce.

In energy trading, crude oil futures prices ended higher on the New York Mercantile Exchange, rising $1.02, or 1.1 percent, to close at $91.82 a barrel.

Gasoline for January rose 1.21 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $2.8120 a gallon. Heating oil was little changed at $3.0451 a gallon. Natural gas for February fell 11.8 cents to $3.3510 per 1,000 cubic feet, a drop of 1.1 percent.

Prices for agricultural commodities were mixed. In March contracts, wheat fell 0.75 cents, or 0.1 percent, to $7.78 a bushel. Corn rose 4.25 cents, 0.6 percent, to $6.9825 per bushel. Soybeans fell 8.5 cents to $14.095 per bushel, a drop of 0.6 percent.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/gold-price-rises-for-12th-straight-year-2012-12

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Fiscal 'cliff' deal proving elusive

WASHINGTON (AP) ? A Capitol Hill deal to avert the "fiscal cliff" was proving elusive Sunday as a deadline to avert tax hikes on virtually every American worker and block sweeping spending cuts set to strike the Pentagon and other federal agencies grew perilously near.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell remained at odds on such key issues as the income threshold for higher tax rates and how to deal with inheritance taxes, among other issues. McConnell complained that Reid had yet to respond to a GOP offer made Saturday evening and reached out to Vice President Joe Biden, a longtime friend, in hopes of breaking the impasse. Biden assumed the lead role for Democrats, and a McConnell spokesman said the Kentucky Republican and the vice president were expected to negotiate by telephone into the night.

Rank-and-file lawmakers left the Capitol Sunday night with hopes that their leaders would give them something to vote on when they returned Monday morning.

One sign of progress came as Republicans withdrew a long-discussed proposal to slow future cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients as part of a compromise to avoid the cliff. Democrats said earlier Sunday that proposal had put a damper on the talks, and Republican senators emerging from a closed-door GOP meeting said it is no longer part of the equation.

"I was really gratified to hear that Republicans have taken their demand for Social Security benefit cuts off the table. The truth is they should never have been on the table to begin with," Reid said late Sunday afternoon. "There is still significant distance between the two sides, but negotiations continue."

At stake are sweeping tax hikes and across-the-board spending cuts set to take effect at the turn of the year. Taken together, they've been dubbed the fiscal cliff, and economists warn the one-two punch ? which leaders in both parties have said they want to avoid ? could send the still-fragile economy back into recession. Tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 expire at midnight Monday, and $109 billion in across-the-board cuts in federal spending this year would also begin this week.

Workers could see more taxes withheld from their paychecks and federal agencies are likely to soon receive warning of possible furloughs if lawmakers fail to reach a deal to avert the cliff. The new Congress will be sworn in on Thursday and would inherit the problem if the current crop of lame-duck lawmakers can't find an answer before then.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said the two sides remained at odds over the income threshold for higher tax rates and tax levels on large estates. Republicans said that Democratic demands for new money to prevent a cut in Medicare payments to doctors and renew jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed should be financed with cuts elsewhere in the budget. Republicans also balked at a Democratic proposal to use new tax revenues to shut off the across-the-board spending cuts, known as a sequester in Washington-speak.

President Barack Obama, in a televised interview, blamed Republicans for putting the nation's shaky economy at risk.

"We have been talking to the Republicans ever since the election was over," Obama said in the interview that was taped Saturday and aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." ''They have had trouble saying yes to a number of repeated offers."

"The mood is discouraged," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who caucuses with Democrats. "The parties are much further apart than I hoped they'd be by now."

The pessimistic turn came as the House and Senate returned to the Capitol for a rare Sunday session. Reid and McConnell had hoped to have a blueprint to present to their rank and file by mid-afternoon.

McConnell and Reid were hoping for a deal that would prevent higher taxes for most Americans while letting rates rise at higher income levels, although the precise point at which that would occur was a sticking point.

Obama had wanted to raise the top tax rate on individuals making more than $200,000 a year and families making more than $250,000 from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. In talks with Republican House Speaker John Boehner, he offered to raise that threshold to $400,000.

The estate tax issue was particularly tricky since several Democrats, including veterans like Max Baucus of Montana, disagree with Obama's proposal to increase the top estate tax rate from 35 percent to 45 percent.

Republicans said Democrats pressed to turn off more than $200 billion in the across-the-board spending cuts over the coming two years. This so-called sequester is the punishment for last year's deficit "supercommittee" failure to strike a deal.

Hopes for blocking across-the-board spending cuts were fading and Obama's proposal to renew the 2-percentage-point payroll tax cut wasn't even part of the discussion.

Obama pressed lawmakers to start where both sides say they agree ? sparing middle-class families from looming tax hikes.

"If we can get that done, that takes a big bite out of the fiscal cliff. It avoids the worst outcomes. And we're then going to have some tough negotiations in terms of how we continue to reduce the deficit, grow the economy, create jobs," Obama said in the NBC interview.

Gone is the talk of a grand deal that would tackle broad spending and revenue demands and set the nation on a course to lower deficits. Obama and Boehner were once a couple hundred billion dollars apart on a deal that would have reduced the deficit by more than $2 trillion over 10 years.

Republicans have complained that Obama has demanded too much in tax revenue and hasn't proposed sufficient cuts or savings in the nation's massive health care programs.

Obama upped the pressure on Republicans to negotiate a fiscal deal, arguing that GOP leaders have rejected his past attempts to strike a bigger and more comprehensive bargain.

"The offers that I've made to them have been so fair that a lot of Democrats get mad at me," Obama said.

Boehner disagreed, saying Sunday that the president had been unwilling to agree to anything "that would require him to stand up to his own party."

The trimmed ambitions of today are a far cry from the upbeat bipartisan rhetoric of just six weeks ago, when the leadership of Congress went to the White House to set the stage for negotiations to come.

But the deal under discussion Sunday appeared unlikely to settle other outstanding issues, including the sequester, which would total more than $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years, divided equally between the Pentagon and other government agencies. And off the table completely is an extension of the nation's borrowing limit, which the government is on track to reach any day but which the Treasury can put off through accounting measures for about two months.

That means Obama and the Congress are already on a new collision path. Republicans say they intend to use the debt ceiling as leverage to extract more spending cuts from the president. Obama has been adamant that unlike 2011, when the country came close to defaulting on its debts, he will not yield to those Republican demands.

Meanwhile, a senior defense official said if the sequester were triggered, the Pentagon would soon begin notifying its 800,000 civilian employees that they should expect some furloughs ? mandatory unpaid leave, not layoffs. It would then take some time for the furloughs to begin being implemented, said the official, who requested anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the internal preparations.

Lawmakers have until the new Congress convenes to pass any compromise, and even the calendar matters. Democrats said they had been told House Republicans might reject a deal until after Jan. 1, to avoid a vote to raise taxes before they had technically gone up, and then vote to cut taxes after they had risen.

___

Associated Press writers David Espo, Robert Burns, Julie Pace, Jim Kuhnhenn and Michele Salcedo contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fiscal-cliff-deal-proving-elusive-013025420--finance.html

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Family of 7 displaced after Summerville house fire - Live5News.com ...

• Berkeley County man killed in tractor accident

  Berkeley County man killed in tractor accident

  Updated: Monday, December 31 2012 8:46 AM EST2012-12-31 13:46:00 GMT

  CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) - A Berkeley County man was killed Saturday night in a freak tractor accident. According to Coroner Bill Salisbury, Richard Watson Murray, 41, of Moncks Corner was lost control ofMore >>A Moncks Corner man was killed Saturday night when he was thrown from his tractor before it crashed into a farm pond.More >>

• North Charleston man shot to death in Goose Creek home

  North Charleston man shot to death in Goose Creek home

  Updated: Monday, December 31 2012 8:47 AM EST2012-12-31 13:47:01 GMT

  CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) - Berkeley County Sheriff's deputies raced to a home on Jean Well Drive in Goose Creek around 3:00 AM Saturday in response to a shooting. Inside they found D'Andrae White, 27, ofMore >>Berkeley County Sheriff's deputies raced to a home on Jean Well Drive in Goose Creek around 3 a.m. Saturday in response to a shooting.More >>

• Assault suspect handcuffed after tripping over cinder blocks

  Assault suspect handcuffed after tripping over cinder blocks

  MYRTLE BEACH, SC (WMBF) - A man is behind bars after police saw him allegedly beating an ex-flame in the home he now shares with a new love. It was just after 2:30 a.m. Friday when a woman on the 1300More >>A man is behind bars after police saw him allegedly beating an ex-flame in the home he now shares with a new love.More >>

• Report: Man tells officers he deals drugs to take care of step kids

  Report: Man tells officers he deals drugs to take care of step kids

  Updated: Saturday, December 29 2012 4:06 PM EST2012-12-29 21:06:55 GMT

  A suspected drug dealer told police that he was selling marijuana to pay for electricity bills and take care of his step kids, according to a police report. The Charleston Police Department charged HubertMore >>A suspected drug dealer told police that he was selling marijuana to pay for electricity bills and take care of his step kids, according to a police report. The Charleston Police Department charged Hubert Lee Edmond with possession with intent to distribute marijuana.More >>

• Coroner: Man found dead in car was shot in the head

  Coroner: Man found dead in car was shot in the head

  Updated: Friday, December 28 2012 1:28 PM EST2012-12-28 18:28:48 GMT

  The Berkeley County Coroner's Office says a 21-year-old St. Stephen man was found dead in a car Thursday morning in Pineville. Authorities say Bradley Blake was found dead in his car at 11 a.m. on WillowoodMore >>The Berkeley County Coroner's Office says a 20-year-old man who was found dead in a car in Pineville was shot in the head.More >>

SUMMERVILLE, SC (WCSC) -

A Summerville home was overtaken by fire Sunday. Fire officials say the blaze was accidentally started in the kitchen.

The house, located at 106 Poppy Road, suffered extensive damage from the afternoon fire. Summerville fire and rescue officials say that 12 people were at home at the time, but luckily all of them made it out safely. According to the Red Cross, a?family of seven, including six children, live in the home.

Officials are investigating the incident as an accidental kitchen fire.

The American Red Cross provided the family with temporary housing, funds to help replace the food lost in the fire as well as comfort kits.

Copyright 2012 WCSC. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.live5news.com/story/20472753/summerville-home-damaged-in-fire

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