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Wednesday, January 2, 2013

NHL, players' union set to meet at league offices

FILE - This Aug. 14, 2012, file photo shows NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, left, and Bill Daly, deputy commissioner and chief legal officer, following collective bargaining talks in Toronto. The NHL is set to get back to the bargaining table Sunday, Dec. 30, 2012, with the locked-out players? association after a new contract offer from the league broke the ice between the fighting sides. "We delivered to the union a new, comprehensive proposal for a successor CBA," NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said in a statement Friday, Dec. 28. "We are not prepared to discuss the details of our proposal at this time." (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Chris Young, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 6, 2012, file photo, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, right, and deputy commissioner Bill Daly speak to reporters in New York. The NHL made a new proposal to the players' association, hoping to spark talks to end the long lockout and save the hockey season. Daly said Friday, Dec. 28, 2012, the league made its offer Thursday and was waiting for a response. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

NEW YORK (AP) ? The NHL and the union are back at the bargaining table and seem determined to work toward a deal to save the hockey season.

A full day of talks was planned for Tuesday, one day after negotiations resumed following nearly three weeks apart. On Monday, the players' association presented a counterproposal to an offer made by the league late last week. The NHL spent Monday night reviewing the document, then got together again with the union Tuesday.

Small groups from each side met and conferred by conference calls all afternoon about provisions of a potential collective bargaining agreement. A full meeting of the negotiating teams wasn't expected at the league office before 6:30 or 7 p.m. EST, a union spokesman said. The NHL then requested that the meeting be pushed back to 9 p.m.

What is clear is that time has become a real factor.

"We've said we need to drop the puck by Jan. 19 if we're going to play a 48-game season," Commissioner Gary Bettman said. "We don't think it makes sense to play a season any shorter than that."

That leaves a little less than two weeks to reach an agreement and hold one week of training camp before starting the season. All games through Jan. 14 have been canceled, claiming more than 50 percent of the original schedule.

The NHL is the only North American professional sports league to cancel a season because of a labor dispute, losing the 2004-05 campaign to a lockout. A 48-game season was played in 1995 after a lockout stretched into January.

The NHL was supposed to be celebrating its annual outdoor Winter Classic between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings on Tuesday ? the 108th day of the lockout ? at Michigan Stadium. But that game was canceled long ago along with the All-Star game.

Monday's talks marked the first time the NHL and union met in person since Dec. 13. Bettman says a deal must be reached by Jan. 11 so the season can begin eight days later.

When the sides met Monday, the union brought a condensed counterproposal in response to the NHL's 288-page contract offer. There were some discussions between the negotiators and some time spent apart in internal meetings.

Neither side would elaborate on what was offered in either proposal or characterize any of Monday's discussions that union executive director Donald Fehr said "weren't terribly long."

"There was an opportunity for the players to highlight the areas they thought we should focus on based on their response, and that's something we've got to look at very closely in addition to the myriad of other issues," Bettman said. "The process continues and we're anticipating getting back together."

That neither offer was quickly dismissed could be taken as a positive sign that perhaps the gap has narrowed.

"I'm out of the prediction business," Fehr said. "You get up every day and you try to figure out how to make an agreement that day, and if it fails you try and do it the next day. That's exactly where we are."

Bettman also reserved judgment when asked if progress was made.

"I think it would be premature for me to characterize it and not particularly helpful to the process," he said.

It is still possible this dispute eventually could be settled in the courts if the sides can't reach a deal on their own.

The NHL filed a class-action suit this month in U.S. District Court in New York in an effort to show its lockout is legal. In a separate move, the league filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, contending bad-faith bargaining by the union.

Those moves were made because the players' association took steps toward potentially declaring a "disclaimer of interest," which would dissolve the union and make it a trade association. That would allow players to file antitrust lawsuits against the NHL.

Union members voted overwhelmingly to give their board the power to file the disclaimer by Wednesday. If that deadline passes, another authorization vote could be held to approve a later filing.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-01-01-NHL%20Labor/id-cf24696c8f924c89aa59d03affaf9b71

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Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Happy New Year! Taste the science of champagne

Francois Nascimbeni / AFP - Getty Images

French researcher Gerard Liger-Belair works on a glass of champagne in his laboratory in Reims, located in the Champagne region in eastern France.

By Alan Boyle

If you really want to impress your bubbly-sipping friends tonight, be sure to chill a big bottle of Champagne to somewhere between 39 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit (4 to 9 degrees Celsius), bring out the narrow glasses (not those wide plastic cups!) and pour the stuff gently down the angled side of the glass like beer.

This is the scientific way to treat Champagne sparkling wine, based on research conducted over the years by Gerard Liger-Belair, a physicist at the University of Reims in France's Champagne region. His studies on the behavior of bubbly?? including high-speed photography of popping bubbles and infrared imaging of carbon dioxide flow?? have made him the world's highest-profile expert on Champagne science.

It's a tough job?? but somebody's gotta do it.

"I love the beauties behind bubble science," Liger-Belair said in an email. "Since I became a scientist, many people have remarked that I seem to have landed the best job in all of physics, since my research on bubbles requires that I work in a lab stocked with top-notch Champagne ??and I'd be inclined to agree."

For Liger-Belair and his colleagues, it's mostly about the bubbles. To be sure, there's much more to sparkling wine than the sparkle: As many as 80 different vintages of wine may be blended together to create one batch of Champagne using the traditional process. A small amount of yeast and sugar is added, and the bottles are sealed up for fermentation. Months later, the yeast sediment is blown out through the bottle's neck ? and then the bottle is quickly corked up and wired shut.

Liger-Belair's research focuses on what happens next, when the cork is popped off. The CO2 that was created through the fermentation process bubbles out of the wine???tickling the nose with a fizzy aerosol of alcohol and flavorful ingredients known as volatile organic compounds. The more CO2 that can be liberated after the champagne is poured into the glass, the better.

That's where science comes into play. Liger-Belair and his colleagues recently reported that larger bottles of Champagne retain more CO2 in the wine as it's being poured into the glasses. So if you have a choice between several small bottles and fewer big bottles, go for the big ones. But be sure those bottles are well-chilled: Warm champagne loses its CO2 quickly as it's being poured, leaving less to fizz up out of the glass.

Ray Isle, executive wine editor of Food & Wine, shares five ways to get the most out of your New Year's bubbly.

Speaking of the glass: Liger-Belair's team determined that tall, narrow-rimmed flutes produce a better effect than the wide-rimmed "coupes" that folks more typically associate with sparkling wine. That's because the CO2 rises out of a wide-rimmed glass too quickly, over a wider surface area. Also, glass flutes are better than plastic cups, and not just for aesthetic reasons: The plastic material is hydrophobic?? that is, liquid-repellent?? which means the bubbles are more likely to adhere to the sides of the cup and less likely to contribute to a nice fizz.

If you really want to get your fizz on, wash your glasses before the party and dry them with a towel rather than letting them air-dry: The microscopic fibers of cellulose that are left inside the glass actually contribute to bubble production. Some glass-makers add tiny scratches to their Champagne glasses to create pleasing patterns of bubbles, and you can feel free to experiment with the same technique. (Just not with the expensive glassware.)

When it comes to the pouring, don't splash the Champagne straight down into the bottom of the glass. Instead, trickle it down the side, like beer. That preserves more of the carbon dioxide for the bubbles that rise while you're drinking the wine. "The beer-like way of serving champagne much less impacts its dissolved CO2 concentration than the Champagne-like way of serving it, and especially at low Champagne temperatures (4 degrees C and 12 degrees C)," Liger-Belair reported.

Liger-Belair has laid out many more findings about Champagne in a decade's worth of research papers?? and in his book, "Uncorked: The Science of Champagne," which is being updated with the latest revelations for a new edition. One of his recent papers, an 88-page survey written for the European Physical Journal, is available for free download today.

Here's a sampling of sparkling facts:?

There are six bottles' worth of gaseous CO2 packed into every bottle of Champagne.
A significant amount of that CO2 leaks out of the bottle through the cork. Liger-Belair's study of Champagne bottled in the 1990s suggested that almost a third of the CO2 could be lost over the course of 15 years. "Because the size of bubbles is linked with the level of dissolved CO2 in Champagne, bubbles get thinner over time when Champagne ages," Liger-Belair said.
The higher the wine's temperature, the bigger the "pop" when the cork is released. That's because the CO2 pressure increases with temperature. Some folks might keep their Champagne warm to maximize the pop, but be careful: A popped cork can travel as fast as 50 mph (80 kilometers per hour). Every year, the American Academy of Opthalmology warns that sparkling-wine corks rank among the top holiday-related eye hazards ? and provides tips for proper cork removal.
Only 5 percent of the pop goes toward the cork's kinetic energy. Most of the rest goes toward generating the popping sound's shock wave.?The pattern of CO2 that's set loose when the cork is popped is similar to the mushroom cloud created by an exploding atom bomb.
If you see a white wisp of mist rising from a just-popped bottle, that's not carbon dioxide. That's a fog of ethanol and water vapor, triggered by the sudden drop in gas temperature when the pressure is released. (That's what's known as adiabatic expansion.)?

It might seem frivolous to devote so much attention to the physics of fizz, but Liger-Belair said his research is about much more than your single bottle of bubbly on New Year's Eve.

"In fact, bubbles are a fantastic example of bubble dynamics in general, and studies dealing with champagne bubbles can be extended to many other areas where bubbles play a role, in natural as well as industrial processes. For example, marine aerosols created by bursting bubbles behave like champagne's bursting bubbles. ... The scales are different, but the basic principles are identical," he said in his email.

Liger-Belair's research at the University of Reims is generally funded by enological and agricultural programs in France and Europe ??such as L'Association Recherche Oenologique Champagne et Universit

?, which was created to boost the Champagne region's best-known industr

"As far as champagne is concerned, 350 million bottles sold per year all over the world deserve particular attention. The job may seem fun indeed, as any job made with passion should be," Liger-Belair said. "I am aware that devoting so much energy to studying champagne bubbles may seem 'weird,' but the implications of bubble dynamics are universal."

So just before you take a sip of cool, sparkling beverage from your towel-dried flute, raise a toast to Liger-Belair ... and the science of champagne.

Update for 12:45 p.m. ET:?Legend has it that the wide-rimmed, bowl-like champagne coupe was modeled after the breast of Marie Antoinette (or the Empress Josephine, or Helen of Troy ...), but Snopes.com says?there's no truth to the legend.?

More about the science of alcoholic drinks:

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's?Facebook page, following?@b0yle on Twitter?and adding the?Cosmic Log page?to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out?"The Case for Pluto,"?my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Source: http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/31/16255128-the-science-of-champagne-bubbles-up-again-for-new-years-eve?lite

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Reid says 2 sides still apart on 'fiscal cliff'

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the two sides are still apart as they race against a midnight deadline for resolving their differences over the "fiscal cliff."

The Nevada Democrat says negotiations are continuing. But he cautioned that bargainers are running out of time and still have differences over some issues, though he did not say what still divides them.

Reid's remarks came Monday morning after the two sides narrowed their differences during an evening of bargaining between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden.

Without agreement by midnight, wide-ranging tax increases and budget-wide spending cuts ? the so-called fiscal cliff ? will begin taking effect. Though the impact of those changes would be felt gradually, economists have warned that they could cause recession if left intact.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-12-31-Fiscal%20Cliff-Reid/id-5febd6d27b6441f3a680bcd6a9f3504d

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Eleven 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 Lutheran 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?

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=99ab2efd4ff4dcf471ab956bd98de747

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Intel rumored to launch set-top box, 'virtual cable TV service' at CES

With CES 2013 just days away, TechCrunch has posted a juicy rumor that chipmaker Intel will announce a major plunge into TV, choosing to go it alone after several failed partnerships in an effort to "do it right" this time. Claiming an unnamed source in the video distribution industry, the rumor suggests a plan to deliver a set-top box with DVR, rolled out on a city-by-city basis as it negotiates channel agreements. Despite a number of demos through the years, the Intel-powered TV boxes that have landed in our living rooms so far have been the first gen Google TV and Boxee Box units. Both struggled to make a significant impact and switched to ARM CPUs for the second generation of their products.

Based on some of the tech demos we've seen and earlier rumors, Intel's plans could include using facial recognition to personalize the experience for (and target advertising towards) different viewers, and offering smaller, cheaper bundles of channels than traditional providers. Another element from the TechCrunch post indicates a plan to provide a Catch Up TV-style service that lets users view anything that has aired in the last month on the channels they're subscribed to, although there's no word on what will power this technology.

Intel's participation in Comcast's Reference Design Kit program is also referenced, although given Big Cable's traditional reluctance regarding alternative delivery models, any sort of tie-in here seems like a long shot to us. A combo package of pay-TV channels and internet VOD has been tried before, although Sezmi's antenna-connected solution failed to catch on and fizzled late last year. Like recently rekindled Apple HDTV rumors, the potential of Intel's service may rely just as much on its success negotiating with content providers as any technology it's cooked up. Check out the rest of the rumor at the source link and a video from Intel's 2009 IDF demo after the break, we'll have any official announcements as they happen from the press conference January 7th.

Continue reading Intel rumored to launch set-top box, 'virtual cable TV service' at CES

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Intel

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Source: TechCrunch

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LG rumored to debut smartphone with edge-to-edge display, full-HD phablet and 7-inch tablet at CES

During an oddly jokey statement at the White House as the fiscal deadline bore down Monday afternoon, President Obama said, "I'm going to be president for the next four years. I?hope." He was warning Republicans that, yes, they'd have to deal with him for a while. But it was, to be sure, a strange moment. Could he actually have been joking about assassination? About impeachment? The?apocalypse? Or has everyone just had enough of these negotiations??

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lg-rumored-debut-smartphone-edge-edge-display-full-210003770.html

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Tentative "fiscal cliff" deal emerges in Senate

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate leaders were hammering out a last-minute deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff" on Monday, but it was still unclear if rank-and-file lawmakers would back the agreement, particularly those in the Republican-led House of Representatives.

A deal to avert the fiscal crisis was said to be in the works in the Senate that would raise tax rates on household income above $450,000, said a source familiar with the talks. The agreement would permanently extend the lower tax rates for those below the $450,000 cut off. These lower tax rates have been in place for all taxpayers since the Bush administration.

U.S. stocks rose modestly on the news, with the benchmark Dow Jones industrial average up less than one percent at 13,011.

President Barack Obama - who has said that failure to avoid the fiscal crisis would be a self-inflicted wound to the economy by Congress - was set to speak at 1:30 p.m. ET on Monday.

With only hours to go before the midnight deadline, the source said, the Senate deal would permanently fix the alternative minimum tax and postpone for an undetermined period the automatic, across-the-board federal spending cuts in defense and domestic programs.

The estate tax on inherited assets would increase under the Senate proposal. Corporate tax benefits would be extended, including the research and development tax credit, and unemployment insurance benefits for the long-term jobless would be extended for a year, the source said.

Dividends and capital gains would be taxed at 23.8 percent for high-income households under the Senate package. That would be an increase from the existing rate of 15 percent.

A Democratic aide cautioned that no deal was complete until all the elements were addressed and said it was unsure whether the package being negotiated could pass the Senate.

Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, walking into the Capitol after working late into the night on Sunday, told reporters he had been speaking with Democratic Vice President Joe Biden.

Senate leaders and Biden have been working to forge a pact that would have a chance of passage in both chambers.

HIGHER TAXES AHEAD

From wage-earners to investors, Americans were all but certain to face higher payroll taxes and investment income taxes even if Congress can pull off a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff.

The source made no mention of a tentative Senate compromise to extend Obama's payroll tax holiday that Americans have enjoyed for two years. Support for such an extension seems to have faded away, in part because the payroll tax funds Social Security. If it ends, the current 4.2 percent payroll tax rate paid by about 160 million workers will rise to the previous 6.2 percent rate after December 31.

That will be the most immediate hit to consumers, who will feel a squeeze on their wallets. Economists have warned that a recession could result if the full sweep of the fiscal cliff is allowed to take hold in January.

At midnight, low tax rates enacted under former President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 are set to expire. This remains the most contentious part of the ongoing negotiations, which has many other facets, including investment income tax increases.

A main sticking point has been whether to raise taxes on the wealthy. Republicans had opposed any tax rate hike, while Democrats for most of this year argued that household incomes above $250,000 should see higher tax rates.

If no deal is reached, the tax increases that will result from plunging off the fiscal cliff could be curbed later with retroactive legislation, but some economic damage seemed likely, dependent in part on the reaction of financial markets.

(Writing by Kevin Drawbaugh; Additional reporting Richard Cowan, Kim Dixon, Roberta Rampton, Jeff Mason, Rachelle Younglai and David Morgan; Editing by Jackie Frank)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fiscal-deal-stalls-clock-ticks-deadline-000951431--business.html

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