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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Bigger fights loom after tax deadline deal

(Note language, paragraph 12)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans face even bigger budget battles in the next two months after a hard-fought "fiscal cliff" deal narrowly averted devastating tax hikes and spending cuts.

The agreement, approved late on Tuesday by the Republican-led House of Representatives, was a victory for Obama, who had won re-election on a promise to address budget woes in part by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

But it set up potentially bruising showdowns over the next two months on spending cuts and an increase in the nation's limit on borrowing. Republicans, angry that the "fiscal cliff" deal did little to curb the federal deficit, promised to use the debt-ceiling debate to win deep spending cuts next time.

Republicans believe they will have greater leverage over Democrat Obama when they must consider raising the borrowing limit, likely in February.

The stakes are perhaps even higher in the debt issue than in the fiscal cliff because failure to close a deal could mean a default on U.S. debt or another downgrade in the U.S. credit rating. A similar showdown in 2011 ultimately led to a credit downgrade.

In fact, bond rating agency Moody's Investors Service warned Washington on Wednesday it must do more to cut the deficit than it did in the "fiscal cliff" measure if the country is to turn around its negative sovereign debt rating.

Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said his party had to be ready to do whatever it takes to get spending cuts.

"Our opportunity here is on the debt ceiling," Toomey said on MSNBC. "We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary, partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean."

Yet Obama may be emboldened by winning the first round of fiscal fights when dozens of House Republicans buckled and voted for major tax hikes for the first time in two decades.

Deteriorating relations between leaders in the two parties during the fiscal cliff episode do not bode well for the more difficult fights ahead.

Vice President Joe Biden and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell had to step in to work out the final deal amid frayed relations between House Speaker John Boehner and Obama.

Obama Praises Deal, Says There's More to Be DonePresident Obama is praising the bill that staves off the fiscal cliff tax hikes and spending cuts. The House of Representatives followed the Senate's lead, and passed the bill late Tuesday. (Jan. 2)

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid also drew the ire of Boehner, who told Reid in the White House to "Go fuck yourself" after a tense meeting last week, aides said. His retort came after the Democrat accused Boehner of running "dictatorship" in the House.

Bemoaning the intensity of the fiscal cliff fight, Obama urged "a little less drama" when the Congress and White House next address budget issues like the government's rapidly mounting $16 trillion debt load. He vowed to avoid another divisive debt-ceiling fight ahead of the late-February deadline for raising the limit.

"While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress about whether or not they should pay the bills they have already racked up," Obama said before he headed to Hawaii to resume an interrupted vacation.

NOT TIME TO CELEBRATE

Analysts warned that might not be so easy. "While the markets and most taxpayers may breathe a sigh of relief for a few days, excuse us for not celebrating," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Potomac Research Group.

"We have consistently warned that the next brawl represents a far greater threat to the markets - talk of default will grow by February, accompanied by concerns over a credit rating downgrade," he said.

Financial markets that had been worried about the fiscal cliff showdown welcomed the deal, with U.S. stocks rising on the first day of trading in 2013.

All 10 S&P 500 industry sector indexes rose at least 1 percent, led by the information technology index, up 2.2 percent. Among the strongest names in the sector was Hewlett-Packard, which rose 5.3 percent to $15 after a miserable 2012 when the stock fell nearly 45 percent.

Debate over entitlement programs is also bound to be fraught. Republicans will be pushing for significant cuts in healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid for retirees and the poor, which are the biggest drivers of federal debt. Democrats have opposed cuts in those popular programs.

"This is going to be much uglier to me than the tax issue ... this is going to be about entitlement reform," Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee said on CNBC.

"This is the debate that's going to be far more serious. Now that we have this other piece behind us - hopefully - we'll deal in a real way with the kinds of things our nation needs to face," he said.

The fiscal cliff crisis ended when dozens of Republicans in the House of Representatives relented and backed a bill passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate that hiked taxes on households earning more than $450,000 annually. Spending cuts of $109 billion in military and domestic programs were delayed only for two months.

Economists had warned that the fiscal cliff of across-the-board tax hikes and spending cuts would have punched a $600 billion hole in the economy this year and threatened to send the country back into recession.

Dozens of House Republicans reluctantly approved the Senate bill which passed by a bipartisan vote of 257 to 167 and sent it on to Obama to sign into law.

Peter Huntsman, chief executive of chemical producer Huntsman Corp, said the vote does little to reduce the U.S. budget deficit and will hinder growth.

"We haven't even begun to address the basic issues behind this," Huntsman told Reuters. "We haven't fixed anything. All we've done is addressed the short-term pain.

The vote underlined the precarious position of Boehner, who will ask his Republicans to re-elect him as speaker on Thursday when a new Congress is sworn in. Boehner backed the bill but most House Republicans, including his top lieutenants, voted against it.

The Ohio congressman also drew criticism on Wednesday from his fellow Republicans for failing to schedule a House vote on a bill passed by the Senate that would provide federal aid to Northeastern states hit by the storm Sandy.

(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey, Richard Cowan in Washington and Gabriel Debenedetti and Ernest Scheyder in New York, Editing by Alistair Bell)

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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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House faces test on ‘fiscal cliff’ deal

Vice President Joe Biden gives two thumbs up following a Senate Democratic caucus meeting about the fiscal cliff …The Republican-held House of Representatives faced a tough vote Tuesday on a last-minute “fiscal cliff” compromise to cut taxes on all but the richest Americans and stall some painful spending cuts.  The deal, cut in secret weekend talks and passed by the Senate by a lopsided 89-9 margin shortly after 2 a.m. New Year's Day, could face stiff opposition from conservatives who hoped it would contain more spending cuts and liberals who wanted to raise more taxes.

Financial markets were closed for the holiday, but lawmakers were keenly aware of the potential impact of failing to address the so-called cliff, which some experts warned could plunge the still-fragile economy into a new recession.

Vice President Joe Biden, who took the lead for Democrats in negotiating the deal over the weekend with Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, was scheduled to join House Democrats at a behind-closed-doors meeting at 12:15 p.m. Biden paid a similar call on Senate Democrats late Monday.

House Republicans were also slated to huddle behind the scenes to discuss what to do about the Senate-passed measure. The anti-tax Club for Growth warned lawmakers to oppose the compromise because “this bill raises taxes immediately with the promise of cutting spending later.”

Under the compromise arrangement approved by the Senate, taxes would rise on income above $400,000 for  individuals and $450,000 for households, while exemptions and deductions the wealthiest Americans use to reduce their tax bill would face new limits. The accord would also raise the taxes paid on large inheritances from 35% to 40% for estates over $5 million. And it would extend by one year unemployment benefits for some two million Americans. It would also prevent cuts in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients and spare tens of millions of Americans who otherwise would have been hit with the Alternative Minimum Tax.

The middle class will still see its taxes go up: The final deal did not include an extension of the payroll tax holiday. And the overall package will deepen the deficit by an estimated $3.9 trillion dollars by extending the overwhelming majority of the Bush tax cuts. Many Democrats had opposed those measures in 2001 and 2003. Obama agreed to extend them in 2010.

Efforts to modify the first installment of $1.2 trillion in cuts to domestic and defense programs over 10 years -- the other portion of the “fiscal cliff,” known as sequestration -- had proved a sticking point late in the game. Democrats had sought a year-long freeze but ultimately caved to Republican pressure and signed on to just a two-month delay while broader deficit-reduction talks continue.

That would put the next major battle over spending cuts right around the time that the White House and its Republican foes are battling it out over whether to raise the country's debt limit. Republicans have vowed to push for more spending cuts, equivalent to the amount of new borrowing.

Obama has vowed not to negotiate as he did in 2011, when a bruising fight threatened the first-ever default on America's obligations and resulted in the first-ever downgrade of the country's credit rating. Biden sent that message to Democrats in Congress, two senators said.

“This agreement is the right thing to do for our country and the House should pass it without delay,” President Barack Obama said in a written statement shortly after the Senate vote.

There were signs that the 2016 presidential race shaped the outcome in the Senate. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, widely thought to have his eye on his party’s nomination, voted no. Republican Senator Rand Paul, who could take up the libertarian mantle of his father Ron Paul, did as well. Observers were watching to see how Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman and his party's failed vice presidential nominee in 2012, would vote Tuesday.

In remarks just before the Senate adopted the compromise, McConnell repeatedly called the agreement “imperfect” but said it beat allowing income tax rates rise across the board.

“I know I can speak for my entire conference when I say we don’t think taxes should be going up on anyone, but we all knew that if we did nothing they’d be going up on everyone today,” he said. “We weren’t going to let that happen.”

“Our most important priority was to protect middle-class families. This legislation does that,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said. But Reid cautioned that “passing this agreement does not mean negotiations halt. Far from it.”

The House’s Republican leaders, including Speaker John Boehner, hinted in an unusual joint statement that they might amend anything that clears the Senate – a step that could kill the deal.

“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,” they said.

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