3 killed, 4 wounded in Tulare County shooting

Three people were fatally shot and four others wounded, including two young children, Saturday night on the Tule River Reservation in Tulare County, authorities said.

The suspect, who fled with his two young daughters, was later shot by sheriff’s deputies and taken into custody, according to the Tulare County Sheriff’s Department. The two girls, who were among those shot, were rescued.

The incident began about 7:45 p.m. when the Sheriff’s Department received a 911 call about shots fired in the 100 block of Chimney Road of the Tule River Indian Reservation about 60 miles northeast of Bakersfield, according to a Sheriff’s Department statement.

In a trailer on the property, deputies discovered an adult male and an adult female who had been fatally shot, authorities said. A male juvenile who suffered a gunshot wound was transported to a hospital. 

At a shed on the property, deputies found another male victim who had been fatally shot, authorities said.

The suspect, identified as Hector Celaya, 31, of the Tule River Indian Reservation, fled the scene in a Jeep Cherokee with his two daughters, Alyssa, 8, and Linea, 5, authorities said. An Amber Alert was issued around 11 p.m.

Detectives used Celaya’s cellphone to locate him.

A deputy spotted the vehicle and after failing to make a traffic stop, a slow-speed pursuit began, authorities said.

The suspect eventually stopped and fired his weapon at deputies, who returned fire and struck the suspect twice, seriously wounding him, authorities said.

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New Crowdfunding Site Seeks to Protect Backers of Industrial Design

Entrepreneur Jamie Siminoff wants to build more credibility into crowdfunding — so he’s launching a new platform that takes responsibility for ensuring the viability of new projects.

The crowdfunding process, pioneered by sites like Kickstarter, has had its share of huge successes, as well as failures. The problem, says Siminoff, is that when a venture fails, the funders are left holding the bag. That’s all well and good if you were investing in an artist’s crazy project. It’s much more of a problem if you thought you were pre-ordering a nearly finished gadget.

The biggest culprit for these kinds of issues are physical products. Witness the anger unleashed when Kickstarter darling Pebble announced a further delay alongside underwhelming color choices.

This kind of issue is why Kickstarter recently made some changes, undertaking a combination of education and rule revision. They reminded consumers that Kickstarter is not a store while requiring that all projects disclose risks and challenges, as well as forbidding renderings and concept videos in hardware products.

Siminoff’s answer is Christie Street, a crowdfunding site devoted exclusively to physical products. The promise of Christie Street is that it will vet the projects that it launches carefully, and provide guarantees of progress along the way. The idea is that these protections will make consumers feel safer about the products they’re backing. “We built something that we felt we needed,” he says.

Christie Street, named for the New Jersey road where Edison’s workshop was located, will require that all funders go through an auditing process before they are allowed to go live. Siminoff says that the idea will be to check for basic viability, a kind of sanity test.

“You look at the chips they say they want to use, the size of components that will need to fit in, and so on,” he says, “You check that things conform to what’s available on the market.” From there, they also perform third-party audits of the places where the product will be manufactured, and look at things like production cost and likely shipping time, to ensure that all of this seems realistic.

It’s an all-or-nothing audit. Either the new project meets Christie Street’s approval or it doesn’t. “Our feeling is that the customer that’s buying doesn’t have the sophistication to make the right decision [about whether a design's production targets are reliable],” says Siminoff, “The only way is create a place where you can trust to buy.”

Even after the initial approval, Christie Street stays involved in the project. Successfully funded projects get their money in stages, with Christie Street holding the rest in escrow. Inventors get one-third of the money on funding, one-third of the money once they have a production-ready prototype, and the final one-third when they have a golden prototype, which means they are ready for full manufacturing.

If at any time along the way the project fails, Christie Street will can the project and refund the remaining money to investors.

What constitutes failure? Siminoff ticks off four conditions.

First, the inventor could for whatever reason announce that they couldn’t finish.

Second, if the project ends up more than six months late. “This forces people to be more careful with their delivery dates,” says Siminoff.

Third, if the product falls short of what was promised. “If the pre-production sample is more than 15 percent worse than what was promised, we will not allowed you to manufacture the product,” says Siminoff. (For example, if you promised me 512GB and only delivered 256.)

Last, says Siminoff there are other nuances that they’ll have to work out as the site develops. For example, if a product ends up requiring significant redesign, then Christie Street might end up withholding funds. “Design is a tougher one to quantify,” he says, “but it’s important that the design overall fits what was promised to the customer.”

For the extra cautious, Christie Street goes even further than the refund of remaining money. For 10 percent of their pledge value, backers can insure their entire pledge. If the project goes wrong they’ll get all of it back. Combine that with a pledge from inventors that the product will retail for at least 10 percent more than the pledge amount, and you can either take a 10 percent discount for some additional risk or pay full retail, with a money-back guarantee.

In effect, Christie Street is navigating a space between crowfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which expect backers to handle a lot of their own due diligence while allowing the inventors to be entrepreneurs, and crowdsourcing design sites like Quirky, which handles all of the business elements in-house.

Christie Street is an effort at drawing the lines of trust in a new way, one tied directly to the realities of post-industrial product design. Rather than a blanket ban on renderings and early designs, or a Wild West ‘anything goes’ approach, they instead seeks to tame the parts where production can go really wrong, in the devilish details of prototyping and manufacturing. It leaves questions of whether or not the thing is cool to the wisdom of the crowds, while taking on the question of whether or not the thing is possible.

This is obviously a lot more intervention between middleman and inventor than you’d see on a site like Indigegogo or Kickstarter. Siminoff says that they can still take the same 5 percent cut as their competitors because physical products tend to be involved higher dollar-value projects from the start. “If all goes well, we’ll be doing 10 to 15 live projects a months a year from now,” he says, “We think we can be profitable in the product world.”

“We’re not trying to make it where inventors are just be a name on a product,” says Siminoff, “We still want them to be entrepreneur and build this thing. We just want to make sure that they don’t fail in a way that hurts the customer.”

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Cablevision to raise Internet prices by $5 a month

(Reuters) – Cablevision Systems Corp, the New York-based cable operator, said on Thursday it would raise its Internet prices by $ 5 in January, representing an average hike of 3.2 percent for customers’ total monthly bills.

The company said in a statement that prices for its video and phone services will not be affected and that prices for promotional packages, which generally last one year, will not rise.

But all customers who have Internet service as part of their video or phone package will see prices rise.

Cablevision said it had not raised Internet prices in a decade. It raised video prices in 2011, which saw customer bills rise by 2.88 percent on average.

The company said it has invested $ 140 million in improving its Internet network, deployed more than 50,000 WiFi “hotspots,” and puts no usage caps on its service, unlike some cable competitors.

Canaccord Genuity analyst Tom Eagan downgraded his Cablevision rating from “buy” to “hold” on November 27 and said that Cablevision would lose customers if it were to decide to raise prices not long after Superstorm Sandy.

“Given the massive service outages among its subscribers (after Sandy), we don’t believe the company can raise rates … without incurring material customer churn,” Eagan said.

The cable provider, which is controlled by the Dolan family, said in early November that costs from Sandy, which knocked out service for as many as half its customers, would be substantially higher than its $ 16 million bill from Hurricane Irene in 2011.

Like bigger operators Comcast and Time Warner Cable, Cablevision has been losing customers to rivals such as satellite television provider DirecTV and telephone operator Verizon Communications.

Cablevision shares closed up 2.6 percent, at $ 14.16, on Thursday.

(Reporting By Liana B. Baker; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Leslie Adler)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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New Taxes to Take Effect to Fund Health Care Law

WASHINGTON — For more than a year, politicians have been fighting over whether to raise taxes on high-income people. They rarely mention that affluent Americans will soon be hit with new taxes adopted as part of the 2010 health care law.

The new levies, which take effect in January, include an increase in the payroll tax on wages and a tax on investment income, including interest, dividends and capital gains. The Obama administration proposed rules to enforce both last week.

Affluent people are much more likely than low-income people to have health insurance, and now they will, in effect, help pay for coverage for many lower-income families. Among the most affluent fifth of households, those affected will see tax increases averaging $6,000 next year, economists estimate.

To help finance Medicare, employees and employers each now pay a hospital insurance tax equal to 1.45 percent on all wages. Starting in January, the health care law will require workers to pay an additional tax equal to 0.9 percent of any wages over $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.

The new taxes on wages and investment income are expected to raise $318 billion over 10 years, or about half of all the new revenue collected under the health care law.

Ruth M. Wimer, a tax lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery, said the taxes came with “a shockingly inequitable marriage penalty.” If a single man and a single woman each earn $200,000, she said, neither would owe any additional Medicare payroll tax. But, she said, if they are married, they would owe $1,350. The extra tax is 0.9 percent of their earnings over the $250,000 threshold.

Since the creation of Social Security in the 1930s, payroll taxes have been levied on the wages of each worker as an individual. The new Medicare payroll is different. It will be imposed on the combined earnings of a married couple.

Employers are required to withhold Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes from wages paid to employees. But employers do not necessarily know how much a worker’s spouse earns and may not withhold enough to cover a couple’s Medicare tax liability. Indeed, the new rules say employers may disregard a spouse’s earnings in calculating how much to withhold.

Workers may thus owe more than the amounts withheld by their employers and may have to make up the difference when they file tax returns in April 2014. If they expect to owe additional tax, the government says, they should make estimated tax payments, starting in April 2013, or ask their employers to increase the amount withheld from each paycheck.

In the Affordable Care Act, the new tax on investment income is called an “unearned income Medicare contribution.” However, the law does not provide for the money to be deposited in a specific trust fund. It is added to the government’s general tax revenues and can be used for education, law enforcement, farm subsidies or other purposes.

Donald B. Marron Jr., the director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, said the burden of this tax would be borne by the most affluent taxpayers, with about 85 percent of the revenue coming from 1 percent of taxpayers. By contrast, the biggest potential beneficiaries of the law include people with modest incomes who will receive Medicaid coverage or federal subsidies to buy private insurance.

Wealthy people and their tax advisers are already looking for ways to minimize the impact of the investment tax — for example, by selling stocks and bonds this year to avoid the higher tax rates in 2013.

The new 3.8 percent tax applies to the net investment income of certain high-income taxpayers, those with modified adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 for single taxpayers and $250,000 for couples filing jointly.

David J. Kautter, the director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University, offered this example. In 2013, John earns $160,000, and his wife, Jane, earns $200,000. They have some investments, earn $5,000 in dividends and sell some long-held stock for a gain of $40,000, so their investment income is $45,000. They owe 3.8 percent of that amount, or $1,710, in the new investment tax. And they owe $990 in additional payroll tax.

The new tax on unearned income would come on top of other tax increases that might occur automatically next year if President Obama and Congress cannot reach an agreement in talks on the federal deficit and debt. If Congress does nothing, the tax rate on long-term capital gains, now 15 percent, will rise to 20 percent in January. Dividends will be treated as ordinary income and taxed at a maximum rate of 39.6 percent, up from the current 15 percent rate for most dividends.

Under another provision of the health care law, consumers may find it more difficult to obtain a tax break for medical expenses.

Taxpayers now can take an itemized deduction for unreimbursed medical expenses, to the extent that they exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income. The health care law will increase the threshold for most taxpayers to 10 percent next year. The increase is delayed to 2017 for people 65 and older.

In addition, workers face a new $2,500 limit on the amount they can contribute to flexible spending accounts used to pay medical expenses. Such accounts can benefit workers by allowing them to pay out-of-pocket expenses with pretax money.

Taken together, this provision and the change in the medical expense deduction are expected to raise more than $40 billion of revenue over 10 years.

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Changes to Agriculture Highlight Cuba’s Problems

HAVANA — Cuba’s liveliest experiment with capitalism unfolds every night in a dirt lot on the edge of the capital, where Truman-era trucks lugging fresh produce meet up with hundreds of buyers on creaking bicycle carts clutching wads of cash.

“This place, it feeds all of Havana,” said Misael Toledo, 37, who owns three small food stores in the city. “Before, you could only buy or sell in the markets of Fidel.”

The agriculture exchange, which sprang up last year after the Cuban government legalized a broader range of small businesses, is a vivid sign of both how much the country has changed, and of all the political and practical limitations that continue to hold it back.

President Raúl Castro has made agriculture priority No. 1 in his attempt to remake the country. He used his first major presidential address in 2007 to zero in on farming, describing weeds conquering fallow fields and the need to ensure that “anyone who wants can drink a glass of milk.”

No other industry has seen as much liberalization, with a steady rollout of incentives for farmers. And Mr. Castro has been explicit about his reasoning: increasing efficiency and food production to replace imports that cost Cuba hundreds of millions of dollars a year is a matter “of national security.”

Yet at this point, by most measures, the project has failed. Because of waste, poor management, policy constraints, transportation limits, theft and other problems, overall efficiency has dropped: many Cubans are actually seeing less food at private markets. That is the case despite an increase in the number of farmers and production gains for certain items. A recent study from the University of Havana showed that market prices jumped by nearly 20 percent in 2011 alone. And food imports increased to an estimated $1.7 billion last year, up from $1.4 billion in 2006.

“It’s the first instance of Cuba’s leader not being able to get done what he said he would,” said Jorge I. Domínguez, vice provost for international affairs at Harvard, who left Cuba as a boy. “The published statistical results are really very discouraging.”

A major cause: poor transportation, as trucks are in short supply, and the aging ones that exist often break down.

In 2009, hundreds of tons of tomatoes, part of a bumper crop that year, rotted because of a lack of transportation by the government agency charged with bringing food to processing centers.

“It’s worse when it rains,” said Javier González, 27, a farmer in Artemisa Province who described often seeing crops wilt and rot because they were not picked up.

Behind him were the 33 fertile, rent-free acres he had been granted as part of a program Mr. Castro introduced in 2008 to encourage rural residents to work the land. After clearing it himself and planting a variety of crops, Mr. Gonzalez said, he was doing relatively well and earned more last year than his father, who is a doctor, did.

But Cuba’s inefficiencies gnawed at him. Smart, strong, and ambitious, he had expansion plans in mind, even as in his hand he held a wrench. He was repairing a tractor part meant to be grading land. It was broken. Again.

The 1980s Soviet model tractor he bought from another farmer was as about good as it gets in Cuba. The Cuban government maintains a monopoly on selling anything new, and there simply is not enough of anything — fertilizer, or sometimes even machetes — to go around.

Government economists are aware of the problem. “If you give people land and no resources, it doesn’t matter what happens on the land,” said Joaquin Infante of the Havana-based Cuban National Association of Economists.

But Mr. Castro has refused to allow what many farmers and experts see as an obvious solution to the shortages of transportation and equipment: Let people import supplies on their own. “It’s about control,” said Philip Peters, a Cuba analyst with the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based research group.

Other analysts agree, noting that though the agricultural reforms have gone farther than other changes — like those that allow for self-employment — they remain constrained by politics.

“The government is not ready to let go,” said Ted Henken, a Latin American studies professor at Baruch College. “They are sending the message that they want to let go, or are trying to let go, but what they have is still a mechanism of control.”

For many farmers, that explains why land leases last for 10 years with a chance to renew, not indefinitely or the 99 years offered to foreign developers. It is also why many farmers say they will not build homes on the land they lease, despite a concession this year to allow doing so.

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Surgeon infected patients during heart procedure, Cedars-Sinai admits

A heart surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center unwittingly infected five patients during valve replacement surgeries earlier this year, causing four of the patients to need a second operation.

The infections occurred after tiny tears in the latex surgical gloves routinely worn by the doctor allowed bacteria from a skin inflammation on his hand to pass into the patients' hearts, according to the hospital. The patients survived the second operation and are still recovering, hospital officials said.

The outbreak led to investigations by the hospital and both the L.A. County and California departments of public health. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was also consulted.

Hospital officials called it a "very unusual occurrence" probably caused by an unfortunate confluence of events: the nature of the surgery, the microscopic rips in the gloves and the surgeon's skin condition. Valve replacement requires the surgeon to use thick sutures and tie more than 100 knots, which can cause extra stress on the gloves, they said.

Nevertheless, the hospital's goal is to have zero infections, said Harry Sax, vice chairman of the hospital's department of surgery. "Any hospital-acquired infection is unacceptable," he said.

The infections raise questions about what health conditions should prevent a surgeon from operating and how to get the best protection from surgical gloves. Surgeons with open sores or known infections aren't supposed to operate, but there is no national standard on what to do if they have skin inflammation, said Rekha Murthy, medical director of the hospital's epidemiology department. She added that there were also no national standards on types of gloves used, whether to wear double gloves or how many times surgeons should change those gloves during a procedure.

Healthcare-acquired infections are very common throughout the United States. Each year, infections cause 99,000 deaths in the country, including about 12,000 in California. Hospitals in the state are required to report certain infections to the California Department of Public Health. That reporting makes the public more aware of the quality of care provided at local hospitals and is an important tool for reducing infections, said Debby Rogers, deputy director of the department's Center for Health Care Quality.

Cedars-Sinai has low rates for hospital-acquired infections compared with the state and national average but has not performed as well on other surgical quality measures recently, according to the Leapfrog Group, an employer-backed nonprofit focused on healthcare quality. The organization gave the hospital a C rating last month on its national report card, down from an A in June, though it was not related to the infection outbreak.

"Clearly this hospital is making attempts to reduce infections, but they have more work to do," said Leah Binder, Leapfrog's chief executive.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center conducts about 360 valve replacement surgeries each year and said infections occur in fewer than 1% of its cases — lower than the national average.

The hospital learned about the problem in June after three patients who had undergone valve replacement surgery showed signs of infection. Doctors diagnosed the patients with an infection called endocarditis. Concerned there might be a connection among the cases, epidemiologists analyzed the bacteria, staphylococcus epidermidis, and determined that it was an identical strain and therefore must have come from a single source. "It led to the question of gee, I wonder where it came from?" Murthy said.

Epidemiologists homed in on the surgeon with the skin inflammation. The bacteria matched, and then they made a surprising discovery: microscopic tears in the gloves typically worn by surgeons after performing valve replacement surgery. The surgeon, whose name was not released, was not allowed to operate again until he healed. He is still a member of the medical staff but no longer performs surgeries at the hospital.

The hospital soon found the same infection in two more patients. Officials also reached out to 67 patients who had heart valve replacements with the same surgeon but didn't find any other cases. One of the five infected patients was treated with antibiotics, and the other four had new valve replacement surgeries. Sax said the hospital apologized to the patients and has continued to monitor their health. The hospital has also covered the cost of their care, including follow-up treatment and all the related surgeries.

All surgeons doing valve replacements are now required to change gloves more frequently, officials said. Some surgeons are wearing double gloves during the operations, Sax said.

Following the outbreak, Cedars-Sinai did the proper follow-up to ensure the safety of their patients, said Dawn Terashita, a medical epidemiologist with L.A. County, who was notified in September. What occurred at Cedars-Sinai was an unintentional consequence of the surgery, she said.

"There is no way to keep a room entirely sterile and all the people in it sterile," she said. "You will always have risk of infection."

anna.gorman@latimes.com

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15 Agonizing Automotive Atrocities

Yugo.

There, we got it out of the way. When you read the headline, of course an image of a tiny Cold War-era hatchback popped into your head. We bet you also shuddered at the thought of a Pontiac Aztek.

We love to poke fun at failure, and no failure made a punchline better than the Yugo. We found that out while talking with Jason Vuic, author of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. Vuic was aware that the Yugo fell far short of being a good car, but what truly amazed him was how many people who had never driven a Yugo knew just how bad it was. In failure, it became a wild viral marketing success.

Not all cars rose to level of infamy embodied by the Yugo. To paraphrase Shakespeare, some cars were born awful while others had awfulness thrust upon them. Some automotive atrocities were the result of automakers trying something new and falling far short of the mark, while other cars failed from a lack of effort. Still others were perfectly adequate cars but came to represent a regrettable moment in time.

Here we display all three kinds of auto-trocities, highlighting famous failures and digging deep to dredge up detritus better off forgotten. Yes, we know there are many, many more automotive atrocities and this list only scratches the surface of the heap. You’ll have a chance to list your favorite heaps tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Above: Peel Trident 1965-1966

Famous from appearances on Top Gear and Monster Garage, the Peel Trident was a “shopping car” built on the Isle of Man. Along with the bubblelicious BMW Isetta and the fiberglass Reliant Robin, the Trident was ridiculed for its small size and three wheels.

Photo: Casaflamingo/Flickr

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Rolling Stones hit NY for 50th anniversary gig

NEW YORK (AP) — “Time Waits for No One,” the Rolling Stones sang in 1974, but lately it’s seemed like that grizzled quartet does indeed have some sort of exemption from the ravages of time.

At an average age of 68-plus years, the British rockers are clearly in fighting form, sounding tight, focused and truly ready for the spotlight at a rapturously received pair of London concerts last month.

On Saturday, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts hit New York for the first of three U.S. shows on their “50 and Counting” mini-tour, marking a mind-boggling half-century since the band first began playing its unique brand of blues-tinged rock.

And the three shows — Saturday’s at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, then two in Newark, N.J., on Dec. 13 and 15 — aren’t the only big dates on the agenda. Next week the Stones join a veritable who’s who of British rock royalty and U.S. superstars at the blockbuster 12-12-12 Sandy benefit concert at Madison Square Garden. Also scheduled to perform: Paul McCartney, the Who, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Eddie Vedder, Billy Joel, Roger Waters and Chris Martin.

The Stones‘ three U.S. shows promise to have their own special guests, too. Mary J. Blige will be at the Brooklyn gig, as well as guitarist Gary Clark Jr., the band has announced. (Blige performed a searing “Gimme Shelter” with frontman Jagger in London.) Rumors are swirling of huge names at the Dec. 15 show, which also will be on pay-per-view.

In a flurry of anniversary activity, the band also released a hits compilation last month with two new songs, “Doom and Gloom” and “One More Shot,” and HBO premiered a new documentary on their formative years, “Crossfire Hurricane.”

The Stones formed in London in 1962 to play Chicago blues, led at the time by the late Brian Jones and pianist Ian Stewart, along with Jagger and Richards, who’d met on a train platform a year earlier. Bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts were quick additions.

Wyman, who left the band in 1992, was a guest at the London shows last month, as was Mick Taylor, the celebrated former Stones guitarist who left in 1974 — to be replaced by Wood, the newest Stone and the youngster at 65.

The inevitable questions have been swirling about the next step for the Stones: another huge global tour, on the scale of their last one, “A Bigger Bang,” which earned more than $ 550 million between 2005 and 2007? Something a bit smaller? Or is this mini-tour, in the words of their new song, really “One Last Shot”?

The Stones won’t say. But in an interview last month, they made clear they felt the 50th anniversary was something to be marked.

“I thought it would be kind of churlish not to do something,” Jagger told The Associated Press. “Otherwise, the BBC would have done a rather dull film about the Rolling Stones.”

__

Associated Press writer David Bauder contributed to this report.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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U.S. economy adds 146,000 jobs in November

The U.S. economy added 146,000 jobs in November and the unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent, the lowest since December 2008. The government said Superstorm Sandy had only a minimal effect on the figures.

The Labor Department's report on Friday offered a mixed picture for the economy.

Hiring remained steady during the storm and in the face of looming tax increases. But the government said employers added 49,000 fewer jobs in October and September than initially estimated.

And the unemployment rate fell to a four-year low in November from 7.9 percent in October mostly because more people stopped looking for work and weren't counted as unemployed.

There were signs that the storm disrupted economic activity. Construction employment dropped 20,000. And weather prevented 369,000 people from getting to work — the most in almost two years. They were still counted as employed.

Stock futures jumped after the report. Dow Jones industrial average futures were down 20 points in the minutes before the report came out at 8:30 a.m., and just after were up 70 points.

As money moved into stocks, it moved out of safer bonds. The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note, which moves opposite the price, rose to 1.63 percent from 1.58 percent just before the report.

Since July, the economy has added an average of 158,000 jobs a month. That's a modest pickup from 146,000 in the first six months of the year.

The increase suggests employers are not yet delaying hiring decisions because of the “fiscal cliff.” That's the combination of sharp tax increases and spending cuts that are set to take effect next year without a budget deal.

Retailers added 53,000 positions while temporary help companies added 18,000 and education and healthcare also gained 18,000.

Auto manufacturers added nearly 10,000 jobs.

Still, overall manufacturing jobs fell 7,000. That was pushed down by a loss of 12,000 jobs in food manufacturing that likely reflects the layoff of workers at Hostess.

Sandy forced restaurants, retailers and other businesses to close in late October and early November in 24 states, particularly in the Northeast.

The U.S. grew at a solid 2.7 percent annual rate in the July-September quarter. But many economists say growth is slowing to a 1.5 percent rate in the October-December quarter, largely because of the storm and threat of the fiscal cliff. That's not enough growth to lower the unemployment rate.

The storm held back consumer spending and income, which drive economic growth. Consumer spending declined in October and work interruptions caused by Sandy reduced wages and salaries that month by about $18 billion at an annual rate, the government said.

Still, many say economic growth could accelerate next year if the fiscal cliff is avoided. The economy is also expected to get a boost from efforts to rebuild in the Northeast after the storm.

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The Naked V-Twin of Your Dreams Hits 200 MPH

Two-wheel obsessives, start coveting. This is the Benchmark Confederate X132 Hellcat Combat, a beautifully naked bike with a massive engine that not only flies, but sets records.

How fast is it? Salt Flats fast. A few months back, the bike set a record of 172.2 mph at Bonneville, making it the fastest big block v-twin engine on two wheels. Confederate says that number equates to about 200 mph on the street.

You’d think that hitting that speed with a 500-pound motorcycle (plus rider) would be no big deal, but drag and engine size form a performance plateau that’s hard to break through. But what confederate has done with a V-twin engine used to be the exclusive parlance of superbikes like the BMW S1000RR – with two more cylinders. And with no aerodynamic fairings to cut through the wind, the real engineering genius is all in the engine, with a displacement of 2,163cc good for 160 bhp and 160 lb-ft of torque.

The rest of the bike is a monument to obsessive precision. The engine, transmission, swingarm pivot and frame are mounted into a singular core made of aircraft-grade 6061 billet aluminum, and Confederate built the transmission with a patented drag race powertrain, including a vertical stack transmission tied to the swingarm pivot. The chassis has 3-inch-thick steel tubing throughout the bike, all with hand-welded joints. Carbon fiber wheels (17 by 3.5 inches in the front and 17 by 6 inches in the rear) keep weight low.

All that engineering prowess commands a monumental price tag, with the Hellcat coming in at a cool $72,000 for the privilege of riding a Bonneville-busting rolling piece of art. But the price tag isn’t the real hurdle. Confederate is only producing 36 examples, and if you manage to snag one, you’ll get your name engraved on the gas tank so onlookers know who has impeccable taste and a thick wallet.

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