ESPN’s Hannah Storm returns 3 weeks after accident

NEW YORK (AP) — ESPN anchor Hannah Storm returns to the air New Year’s Day, exactly three weeks after she was seriously burned in a propane gas grill accident at her home.

Storm suffered second-degree burns on her chest and hands, and first-degree burns to her face and neck. She lost her eyebrows and eyelashes, and roughly half her hair.

Storm will host ABC’s telecast of the 2013 Rose Parade on Tuesday. Her left hand will be bandaged and she said viewers might notice a difference in her hair texture where extensions have been added.

“I’m a little nervous about things I used to take for granted,” she said by phone this weekend from Pasadena, Calif. “Little things like putting on makeup and even turning pages on my script.”

The award-winning sportscaster and producer was preparing dinner outside her home in Connecticut on the night of Dec. 11 when she noticed the flame on the grill had gone out. She turned off the gas and when she reignited it “there was an explosion and a wall of fire came at me.”

“It was like you see in a movie, it happened in a split-second,” she said. “A neighbor said he thought a tree had fallen through the roof, it was that loud. It blew the doors off the grill.”

With her left hand, she tore off her burning shirt. She tried to use another part of her shirt to extinguish the flames that engulfed her head and chest, while yelling for help. Her 15-year-old daughter, Hannah, called 911 and a computer technician who was working in the house grabbed some ice as Storm tried to cool the burns.

Soon, police and rescue teams arrived at the house. Storm’s husband, NBC sportscaster Dan Hicks, also had returned home with another of the couple’s three daughters. As her mother was being treated, the younger Hannah calmly said something that, days later, her mom could laugh about.

“OK, Mommy, I’m going to do my homework now,” she said.

Storm was taken by ambulance to the Trauma and Burn Center at Westchester Medical Center and was treated for 24 hours.

“I didn’t see my face until the next day and you wonder how it’s going to look,” she said. “I was pretty shocked. But my overarching thought was I’ve covered events with military members who have been through a lot worse than me, and they’ve come through. I kept thinking, ‘I can do this. I’m fortunate.’”

Other than going to Christmas Eve Mass, Storm hadn’t been outside until her trip to California. ESPN reworked its anchor schedule while she was recovering, and NBC and the Golf Channel rearranged their staffing while Hicks attended to his wife.

Storm is set to host her fifth Rose Parade, with some changes. She’s left-handed, and taking notes is almost impossible. Dressing and showering are challenges, too.

Storm said that long before her accident, she’d been inspired by Iraq War veteran, actor and “Dancing With the Stars” winner J.R. Martinez, the grand marshal at last year’s parade. He was severely burned in a land mine accident while serving overseas.

One attraction of this year’s parade that she was eager to see — the Nurses’ Float, and she hoped to use that moment on air to thank everyone who had taken care of her.

Storm wants to anchor “SportsCenter” in Bristol, Conn., next Sunday. After that, the Notre Dame alum is ready to go in person to watch the No. 1 Irish play Alabama in the national championship game at Miami. She said the school reached out after hearing about her injuries and had been very supportive.

“More than anything, I feel gratitude,” she said. “Something like this really makes you appreciate everything you have, even the chance to wake up on New Year’s Day and do your job.”

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Hispanic Pregnancies Fall in U.S. as Women Choose Smaller Families

ORLANDO, Fla. — Hispanic women in the United States, who have generally had the highest fertility rates in the country, are choosing to have fewer children. Both immigrant and native-born Latinas had steeper birthrate declines from 2007 to 2010 than other groups, including non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, a drop some demographers and sociologists attribute to changes in the views of many Hispanic women about motherhood.

As a result, in 2011, the American birthrate hit a record low, with 63 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, led by the decline in births to immigrant women. The national birthrate is now about half what it was during the baby boom years, when it peaked in 1957 at 122.7 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.

The decline in birthrates was steepest among Mexican-American women and women who immigrated from Mexico, at 25.7 percent. This has reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers accounted for a rising share of births in the United States, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. In 2010, birthrates among all Hispanics reached their lowest level in 20 years, the center found.

The sudden drop-off, which coincided with the onset of the recession, suggests that attitudes have changed since the days when older generations of Latinos prized large families and more closely followed Roman Catholic teachings, which forbid artificial contraception.

Interviews with young Latinas, as well as reproductive health experts, show that the reasons for deciding to have fewer children are many, involving greater access to information about contraceptives and women’s health, as well as higher education.

When Marucci Guzman decided to marry Tom Beard here seven years ago, the idea of having a large family — a Guzman tradition back in Puerto Rico — was out of the question.

“We thought one, maybe two,” said Ms. Guzman Beard, who gave birth to a daughter, Attalai, four years ago.

Asked whether Attalai might ever get her wish for a little brother or sister, Ms. Guzman Beard, 29, a vice president at a public service organization, said: “I want to go to law school. I’m married. I work. When do I have time?”

The decisions were not made in a vacuum but amid a sputtering economy, which, interviewees said, weighed heavily on their minds.

Latinos suffered larger percentage declines in household wealth than white, black or Asian households from 2005 to 2009, and, according to the Pew report, their rates of poverty and unemployment also grew more sharply after the recession began.

Prolonged recessions do produce dips in the birthrate, but a drop as large as Latinos have experienced is atypical, said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. “It is surprising,” Mr. Frey said. “When you hear about a decrease in the birthrate, you don’t expect Latinos to be at the forefront of the trend.”

D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center and an author of the report, said that in past recessions, when overall fertility dipped, “it bounced back over time when the economy got better.”

“If history repeats itself, that will happen again,” she said.

But to Mr. Frey, the decrease has signaled much about the aspirations of young Latinos to become full and permanent members of the upwardly mobile middle class, despite the challenges posed by the struggling economy.

Jersey Garcia, a 37-year-old public health worker in Miami, is in the first generation of her family to live permanently outside of the Dominican Republic, where her maternal and paternal grandmothers had a total of 27 children.

“I have two right now,” Ms. Garcia said. “It’s just a good number that I can handle.”

“Before, I probably would have been pressured to have more,” she added. “I think living in the United States, I don’t have family members close by to help me, and it takes a village to raise a child. So the feeling is, keep what you have right now.”

But that has not been easy. Even with health insurance, Ms. Garcia’s preferred method of long-term birth control, an IUD, has been unaffordable. Birth control pills, too, with a $50 co-payment a month, were too costly for her budget. “I couldn’t afford it,” she said. “So what I’ve been doing is condoms.”

According to research by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the overwhelming majority of Latinas have used contraception at some point in their lives, but they face economic barriers to consistent use. As a consequence, Latinas still experience unintended pregnancy at a rate higher than non-Hispanic whites, according to the institute.

And while the share of births to teenage mothers has dropped over the past two decades for all women, the highest share of births to teenage mothers is among native-born Hispanics.

“There are still a lot of barriers to information and access to contraception that exist,” said Jessica Gonzáles-Rojas, 36, the executive director of the institute, who has one son. “We still need to do a lot of work.”

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DealBook: Major Investigations Could Bring Penalties in 2013

It is not really of question of whether there will be a major white-collar crime that captures the public’s attention in 2013; it’s a question of when and how costly it will be.

If the cases of 2012 can serve as a guide, too many loopholes in the system allow fraud to go undetected.

Take for instance the onetime futures trading firm PFGBest, whose founder confessed to having committed fraud for years at the company, which has about $200 million missing from its accounts. Though futures regulators have spent months wringing their hands on how such a fraud could have gone on for so long, the fact remains that some financiers may keep one step ahead of law enforcement when it comes to white-collar crimes.

Federal prosecutors, however, are likely to remain strongly focused on the insider trading cases. The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan has already racked up an impressive record of winning convictions in every insider trading case that went to trial. They are even winning cases the old-fashioned way by relying primarily on the testimony of cooperating witnesses.

The one black eye that remains for the government is the lack of signature prosecutions emerging from the near collapse of the financial system in 2008. Although the Justice Department and the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, have filed civil cases seeking billions in recovery for the sale of questionable securities tied to toxic subprime mortgages, the cases are likely to take years to play out.

Looking ahead to 2013, several major investigations remain open and are likely to bring significant criminal or civil penalties:

Still More to Come on Libor

The investigation of manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, had been moving quietly along until the British bank Barclays announced a $450 million settlement in June 2012. The subsequent firestorm in Parliament over the bank’s conduct led to the resignation of its chief executive, Robert E. Diamond Jr., and a push to shift control of the interest rate mechanism into more trustworthy hands.

In hindsight, Barclays got off easily as the first bank to reach a settlement, although it probably did not feel like it in the days after the announcement. UBS has become the new focus of attention for Libor manipulation; it recently paid a $1.5 billion settlement, and its Japanese subsidiary pleaded guilty to fraud.
Other banks caught up in the investigation have to be dreading whether the UBS settlement is the new benchmark. If so, then a billion dollars may be the starting point for any negotiations with the Justice Department and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which have been leading the investigation in this country. Add to that any penalties assessed by foreign regulators, and the cost of resolving the investigation will be a significant hit to the bottom line of some global banks.

More ominous is the possibility that the Justice Department will demand guilty pleas from banks. That requires an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, which could prove to be useful in the numerous civil lawsuits that have been filed against the banks, meaning more money could be paid out to resolve those cases.

Tackling Bribery and Corruption

As The New York Times has detailed, Wal-Mart is dealing with significant corruption issues in its Mexican subsidiary. The company also acknowledged that it was reviewing its global operations, and had already spent nearly $100 million on its internal investigation.

Though the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was enacted in 1977, only in the past few years have the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission started to extract significant penalties, often in sectors that had not previously been involved in overseas bribery cases.

For example, among the settlements in 2012 included four companies in the medical field, which all paid significant penalties: Smith & Nephew, $22 million; Biomet, $22.8 million; Pfizer, $60 million; and Eli Lilly, $29 million.

As more companies get caught up in these investigations, it will be interesting to see whether the courts punish repeat offenders more harshly. For instance, I.B.M. reached settlements with the S.E.C. in 2000 and again in 2011 over violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. A federal district judge in Washington is demanding greater accountability from the company before he will approve the proposed resolution of the case.

Insider Trading in the Cross Hairs

Although insider trading cases have become a staple of federal action in the last three years, the new attention has been on Steven A. Cohen and his hedge fund firm, SAC Capital.

Prosecutors have charged a number of defendants with ties to SAC, and came close to Mr. Cohen in the insider trading indictment of the portfolio manager Mathew Martoma, Although Mr. Cohen is not named in the charges, prosecutors went out of their way to describe the “Hedge Fund Owner” as someone involved in the trading at issue, a sure sign the government is focusing on him.

Mr. Martoma’s lawyer said his client was innocent, which probably means that he will not cooperate with the government if it pursues a case against Mr. Cohen. Without that path to build a case, an interesting question is whether the S.E.C. will use its authority to hold SAC responsible as a “controlling person” for insider trading by its employees, which could result in a triple penalty being imposed. The firm received a so-called Wells notice stating that the agency is considering civil charges.

If the S.E.C. files such a case, this would be a new front in the fight over insider trading that shifts attention to the hedge funds and investment firms that employ the people who capitalized on confidential information. That could potentially expose firms to enormous liability even if their managers were not specifically aware of any legal violations.

Rogue Traders

Every year seems to bring news of a major trading loss as a result of a breakdown in the internal controls at a major financial institution. In 2011, UBS revealed that actions by Kweku Adoboli, a trader in London, cost the bank about $2.3 billion. In 2012, JPMorgan Chase said that a hedging strategy by traders in London had cost the bank at least $6 billion in losses.

On a smaller scale, the boutique brokerage firm Rochdale Securities suffered a $5 million loss when a trader bought about $1 billion in Apple shares, far beyond what he was permitted to do.

Although many of the outsize losses hurt banks’ shareholders rather than the general public, such actions have drawn public calls for accountability.

Prosecutors in London successfully obtained a conviction against Mr. Adoboli this year, and UBS was fined $47.5 million over failing to prevent the actions.

More cases like these are likely to play out. As DealBook reported in October, investigators are looking into the actions of four people who previously worked for JPMorgan in London.

The nature of the markets may allow for more such blowups. Lightning-fast electronic trading allows huge positions to be built up in minutes, heightening the risk of sizable losses if anything goes awry.

And even when there is no sign of intentional wrongdoing, a small error can easily affect global markets. A software glitch at Knight Capital ended up costing the firm about $460 million, while memories of the 2010 “flash crash” are still fresh.

As the new year comes, white-collar cases will continue to serve up new object lessons of the perils and the pitfalls of the financial system. Some will come as a result of creative maneuverings by financiers, and some may call into question whether regulators are effectively overseeing the markets.

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With clock ticking, still no deal to avert 'fiscal cliff'

Efforts to save the nation from going over a year-end "fiscal cliff" are still in disarray as lawmakers continue negotiations to confront the tax-and-spend crisis.

WASHINGTON – Senate leaders remain shy of a deal to avert the automatic tax increases due to take effect at midnight on New Year’s Eve, despite conversations that continued overnight between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said on the Senate floor Monday morning that “there are a number of issues in which the two sides are still apart” but that negotiations “are continuing as I speak.”

“We really are running out of time,” he added, about 13 hours before the nation would go over the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

Biden and McConnell, after trading phone calls Sunday afternoon, spoke again at 12:45 a.m. and again at 6:30 a.m. Monday. Biden’s role in the negotiations emerged on Sunday as McConnell, his former colleague of two decades in the Senate, appealed for a “dance partner” in his effort to find a workable solution on tax rates.

QUIZ: How much do you know about the fiscal cliff?

Republicans have said they are willing to raise taxes on wealthier households while stopping the tax increases for most Americans. But one of the sticking points remains the threshold at which current tax rates would be maintained. On Sunday, Republicans suggested taxing income of more than $550,000 for couples, while Democrats set their latest offer at $450,000.

Despite Biden’s lead role, there’s no guarantee any solution would meet with Democratic’ support. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said Monday that he was concerned about the reported details of the deal, indicating that he believed it was preferable to see all tax rates revert to Clinton-era levels.

“I ask, what’s so bad about that?” he said on the Senate floor, noting the economic boom of the 1990s at those tax rates. “As I see this thing developing … no deal is better than a bad deal. And this looks like a very bad deal.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who has supported a higher tax threshold, was more cautious. “One party doesn’t control everything. So we are going to have to meet somewhere in the middle,” she said.

The House was set to hold unrelated votes Monday afternoon but would be ready to vote if the Senate acts. The House Rules Committee waived the Republicans’ 72-hour rule, allowing the chamber to vote on legislation introduced the same day.

PHOTOS: Notable moments of the 2012 presidential election

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The Best of Exploration: Top 8 Stories of Space Exploration in 2012

Our recap of the year’s best exploratory exploits continues today with a look at the biggest developments in space exploration. 2012 saw the stunning debut of new spacecraft (Curiosity), the continued contributions of geriatric ones (Voyager), and the first full year since the end of the Space Shuttle program. Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society nominated 8 particularly meaningful developments from the last twelve months.

Image: Dreier’s pick for image of the year, a Cassini photograph of Saturn’s north pole through an infrared filter. (Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / Emily Lakdawalla)

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Lake Superior State’s 38th list of banished words

DETROIT (AP) — Lake Superior State University‘s 38th annual list of banished words:

— fiscal cliff

— kick the can down the road

— double down

— job creators/creation

— passion/passionate

— YOLO

— spoiler alert

— bucket list

— trending

— superfood

— boneless wings

— guru

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Memphis Aims to Be a Friendlier Place for Cyclists

Lance Murphey for The New York Times

The Shelby Farms Greenline, which replaced a Memphis rail line.

MEMPHIS — John Jordan, a 64-year-old condo appraiser here, has been pedaling his cruiser bicycle around town nearly every day, tooling about at lunchtime or zipping to downtown appointments.

“It’s my cholesterol-lowering device,” said Mr. Jordan, clad in a leather vest and wearing a bright white beard. “The problem is, the city needs to educate motorists to not run over” the bicyclists.

Bike-friendly behavior has never come naturally to Memphis, which has long been among the country’s most perilous places for cyclists. In recent years, though, riders have taken to the streets like never before, spurred by a mayor who has worked to change the way residents think about commuting.

Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr., elected in 2009, assumed office a year after Bicycling magazine named Memphis one of the worst cities in America for cyclists, not the first time the city had received such a biking dishonor. But Mr. Wharton spied an opportunity.

In 2008, Memphis had a mile and a half of bike lanes. There are now about 50 miles of dedicated lanes, and about 160 miles when trails and shared roads are included. The bulk of the nearly $1 million investment came from stimulus money and other federal sources, and Shelby County, which includes Memphis, was recently awarded an additional $4.7 million for bike projects.

In June, federal officials awarded Memphis $15 million to turn part of the steel truss Harahan Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River, into a bike and pedestrian crossing. Scheduled to open in about two years, the $30 million project will link downtown Memphis with West Memphis, Ark.

“We need to make biking part of our DNA,” Mr. Wharton said. “I’m trying to build a city for the people who will be running it 5, 10, 15 years from now. And in a region known to some for rigid thinking, the receptivity has been remarkable.”

City planners are using bike lanes as an economic development tool, setting the stage for new stores and enhanced urban vibrancy, said Kyle Wagenschutz, the city’s bike-pedestrian coordinator, a position the mayor created.

“The cycling advocates have been vocal the past 10 years, but nothing ever happened,” Mr. Wagenschutz said. “It took a change of political will to catalyze the movement.”

Memphis, with a population of 650,000, is often cited among the unhealthiest, most crime-ridden and most auto-centric cities in the country. Investments in bicycling are being viewed here as a way to promote healthy habits, community bonds and greater environmental stewardship.

But as city leaders struggle with a sprawling landscape — Memphis covers about the same amount of land as Dallas, yet has half the population — their persistence has run up against another bedeviling factor: merchants and others who are disgruntled about the lanes.

A clash between merchants and bike advocates flared last year after the mayor announced new bike lanes on Madison Avenue, a commercial artery, that would remove two traffic lanes. Many merchants, like Eric Vernon, who runs the Bar-B-Q Shop, feared that removing car lanes would hurt businesses and cause parking confusion. Mr. Vernon said that sales had not fallen significantly since the bike lanes were installed, but that he thought merchants were left out of the process.

On McLean Boulevard, a narrow residential strip where roadside parking was replaced by bike paths, homeowners cried foul. The city reached a compromise with residents in which parking was outlawed during the day but permitted at night, when fewer cyclists were out. Mr. Wagenschutz called the nocturnal arrangement a “Cinderella lane.”

Some residents, however, were not mollified. “I’m not against bike lanes, but we’re isolated because there’s no place to park,” said Carey Potter, 53, a longtime resident who started a petition to reinstate full-time parking.

The changes have been panned by some members of the City Council. Councilman Jim Strickland went as far as to say that the bike signs that dot the streets add “to the blight of our city.”

Tensions aside, the mayor’s office says that the potential economic ripple effect of bike lanes is proof that they are a sound investment.

A study in 2011 by the University of Massachusetts found that building bike lanes created more jobs — about 11 per $1 million spent — than any other type of road project. Several bike shops here have expanded to accommodate new cyclists, including Midtown Bike Company, which recently moved to a location three times the size of its former one. “The new lanes have been great for business,” said the manager, Daniel Duckworth.

Wanda Rushing, a professor at the University of Memphis and an expert on urban change in the South, said bike improvements were of a piece with a development model sweeping the region: bolstering transportation infrastructure and population density in the inner city.

“Memphis is not alone in acknowledging that sprawl is not sustainable,” Dr. Rushing said. “Economic necessity is a pretty good melding substance.”

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Shape of Fiscal Deal Emerging, but Spending Still at Issue

WASHINGTON — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, on Monday reached agreement on a tentative deal to stave off large tax increases starting on Tuesday, but remained stuck on whether and how to stop $110 billion in across-the-board spending cuts in 2013, an official familiar with the negotiations said.

Under the emerging deal, income taxes would rise to 39.6 percent from 35 percent on income over $400,000 for single people and $450,000 for couples. Above those income levels, dividends and capital gains tax rates would also rise, to 20 percent from 15 percent.

Speaking at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, President Obama took note of the progress.

“Today it appears that an agreement to prevent this New Year’s tax hike is within sight, but it is not done,” he said. “There are still issues left to resolve, but we are hopeful that Congress can get it done. But it is not done.”

The official familiar with the deal stressed that taxes would rise in some sense on the top 2 percent of earners, as Mr. Obama had wanted. That is because the deal would reinstate provisions to tax law, ended by the Bush tax cuts of 2001, that phase out personal exemptions and deductions for the affluent. Those phaseouts, under the agreement, would begin at $250,000 for single people and $300,000 for couples.

The estate tax would also rise, but considerably less than Democrats had wanted. The value of estates over $5 million would be taxed at 40 percent, up from the current 35 percent. Democrats had wanted a 45 percent rate on inheritances larger than $3.5 million.

Under the deal, the new rates on income, investment and inheritances would be permanent.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats would be granted a five-year extension of tax cuts they won in the 2009 stimulus law for middle-class and working-poor taxpayers. Those include a child credit that goes out as a check to workers who do not earn enough money to pay income taxes, an expanded earned income credit and a refundable credit for tuition.

Democrats also secured a full year’s extension of unemployment insurance without strings attached, a $30 billion cost.

All combined, the official said, the new package would raise about $600 billion over 10 years, compared to the revenue generated if current tax levels were simply extended. That, he said, is 85 percent of the revenue Democrats had wanted to raise under Mr. Obama’s initial proposal, which would have raised around $700 billion.

In addition, the deal would stave off sharp cuts for one year to health care providers who treat Medicare patients. That cost, about $30 billion, would be paid for with cuts to other health care programs.

The official said all those provisions are sealed, but a big issue remains open: what to do about automatic spending cuts. Democrats, including the White House, are demanding a one-year “pause” to give negotiators time to strike a broader deficit reduction deal. Republicans have offered a three-month hiatus but no more.

“It would be crazy to not come together on this,” the official said.

Democrats are more likely to protest the deal than Republicans. Liberals are already complaining that almost all of the Bush tax cuts would be made permanent, but that Democratic tax cuts secured in the stimulus law get only a five-year lease on life. Richard L. Trumka, the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., is demanding a separate vote to kill any cut to the estate tax, which goes to the richest of the rich.

Senator Tom Harkin, a liberal Democrat from Iowa, earlier Monday warned that the negotiations were producing what “looks like a very bad deal the way this is shaping up.”

Some conservatives in the House will almost immediately criticize the deal, saying it lacks sufficient spending cuts. House leaders were waiting to get full details of any agreement and were particularly interested in details on the sequester.

Robert Pear, John M. Broder and Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

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Obama blames GOP for 'fiscal cliff' brinksmanship

WASHINGTON -- President Obama blamed Republican leaders for the latest round of brinkmanship in Washington and said it was now up to lawmakers to find a way back from the so-called fiscal cliff.

In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” aired Sunday, Obama said he had reached out to Republicans for weeks, but their refusal to raise taxes had blocked progress.

“They have had trouble saying yes to a number of repeated offers,” Obama said. In Friday’s meeting with congressional leaders at the White House, “I suggested to them if they can't do a comprehensive package of smart deficit reductions, let's at minimum make sure that people's taxes don't go up and that 2 million people don't lose their unemployment insurance.

“And I was modestly optimistic yesterday,” he added in the interview taped Saturday, referring to the aftermath of that meeting, “but we don't yet see an agreement. And now the pressure's on Congress to produce.”

PHOTOS: Notable moments of the 2012 presidential election

Senate leaders and their aides spent Saturday working on a deal that would protect most taxpayers from seeing their incomes taxes rise Jan. 1. The deal may also set new estate tax rates, prevent an expansion of the alternative minimum tax and extend unemployment insurance.

If the effort is successful, a final proposal is expected later Sunday, when senators are set to meet in party caucuses.

A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell responded to the president's criticism:

"While the president was taping those discordant remarks yesterday, Sen. McConnell was in the office working to bring Republicans and Democrats together on a solution," Don Stewart said. "Discussions continue today."

In the interview, Obama said he expected an “adverse reaction in the markets” and depressed consumer spending if lawmakers allow the tax increase to take effect as scheduled -- and he tried to lay the blame on Republicans. Economists have suggested the combination of the tax increases, along with nearly $65 billion in spending cuts, could knock the economy back into a recession.

Obama did not offer a clear strategy for avoiding those spending cuts, which Congress and the president agreed to in 2011 as a way to force themselves to act on a larger deficit reduction deal. That deal has remained elusive, and Obama said in the interview that Republicans have had trouble saying yes to his offers.

QUIZ: How much do you know about the fiscal cliff?

Pressed by host David Gregory on why that is, Obama answered:

“That's something you're probably going to have to ask them, because, David, you follow this stuff pretty carefully. The offers that I’ve made to them have been so fair that a lot of Democrats get mad at me. I mean, I offered to make some significant changes to our entitlement programs in order to reduce the deficit,” he said, referring specifically to a change in the way Social Security cost of living increases are calculated, which many liberal groups opposed.

“They say that their biggest priority is making sure that we deal with the deficit in a serious way, but the way they're behaving is that their only priority is making sure that tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are protected. That seems to be their only overriding, unifying theme.”

Obama has tried to frame the debate as a battle over taxes. One Republican acknowledged Sunday that the president appears poised to win the political battle on that front. If lawmakers agree on allowing taxes to rise on top earners, “it will accomplish a political victory for the president,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina

“Hats off to the president. He stood his ground; he’s going to get tax rate increases … on upper income Americans. And the sad news for the country is we’ve accomplished very little in terms of not becoming Greece or getting out of debt.… Hats off to the president -- he won.”

[For the Record, 8:05 a.m. PST  Dec. 30: This post has been updated to include reactions to Obama's comments from McConnell's office.]

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Wired Science's Top Image Galleries of the Year

Many of our most popular posts are image galleries, and this year our readers favorite collections included microscope photos, doomsday scenarios, auroras and lots of images of Earth from space.

The satellite image above of Brasilia is part of the most popular post of the year.

Above:

I think it's safe to say that our readers like looking at images of Earth from space almost as much as we do. Satellite imagery was the subject of four of Wired Science's 10 most popular galleries of 2012, with this gallery of planned cities topping the list.

See the full gallery.

Image: NASA/USGS

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