Liberal Democratic Party Returns to Power in Japan

Christopher Jue/European Pressphoto Agency

Japanese poll workers counted ballots at a polling station in Tokyo during parliamentary elections on Sunday.

TOKYO — Japan’s voters handed a landslide victory to the Liberal Democratic Party in parliamentary elections on Sunday, giving power back to the conservative party that had governed Japan for decades until a historic defeat three years ago.

In a chaotic election crowded with new parties making sweeping promises, from abolishing nuclear power after the disaster at Fukushima to creating an American-style federal system, the Liberal Democrats prevailed with their less radical vision of reviving the recession-bound economy and standing up to an increasingly assertive China. The win was a dramatic comeback for the party that built postwar Japan, but was ejected from power in 2009 after failing to end two decades of social and economic stagnation.

A victory all but ensures that the Liberal Democratic leader, Shinzo Abe, a former prime minister who is one Japan’s most outspoken nationalists, will be able to form a government with himself as prime minister.

However, many Japanese saw Sunday’s vote not as a weakening of Japan’s desire for change, or a swing to the anti-Chinese right, but as a rebuke of the incumbent Democrats, who had swept aside the Liberal Democrats with bold vows to overhaul Japan’s sclerotic postwar order, only to disappoint voters by failing to deliver. Mr. Abe acknowledged as much, saying that his party had simply ridden a wave of public disgust in the failures of his opponents.

“We recognize that this was not a restoration of confidence in the Liberal Democratic Party, but a rejection of three years of incompetent rule by the Democratic Party,” Mr. Abe told reporters on Sunday.

In the powerful lower house, the Liberal Democrats held a commanding lead, winning 266 of the 400 seats that had been decided. NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, was forecasting that the Liberal Democrats could win more than 300 of the 480 seats up for grabs, which would almost mirror the results in 2009, when the Democrats won 308 seats. The Democrats won only 44 of the seats that had been decided, putting them in a dead heat for a distant second place with the news Japan Restoration Party, which was started by Osaka’s popular mayor. It was a crushing defeat for a party whose victory three years ago was heralded as the start of a vigorous two-party democracy.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda resigned as head of the Democratic Party to take responsibility for the loss, despite holding onto to his own seat in Chiba, outside Tokyo.

“We failed to meet the people’s hopes after the change of government three years and four months ago,” Mr. Noda told reporters.

In a sign of how far the pendulum had swung against the incumbents, former Prime Minister Naoto Kan was fighting to keep his seat from an unknown Liberal Democratic challenger in a contest that remained too close to call. Other prominent members also lost their seats in what was increasingly looking like a rout.

“We tried the Democratic Party for three years, and it was a total disaster,” said Hideyuki Takizawa, a 52-year-old stockbroker at a polling station in the Tokyo suburb of Kawagoe. Mr. Takizawa said he had voted for the Democrats in the last election but had opted for the Liberal Democrats this time. “I have higher hopes now in the Liberal Democratic Party, especially in foreign affairs,” he said.

On declaring victory, Mr. Abe quickly promised to pass a massive spending bill, and said stimulating the faltering economy and ending deflation were his top priorities. He also promised help for the nation’s beleaguered export sector including more aggressive steps to drive down the yen and make Japanese products cheaper abroad.

There had been concerns that the hawkish Mr. Abe might try to fan Japanese anxieties over China’s growing strength, particularly that nation’s increasingly assertive claims to disputed islands in the East China Sea known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in Chinese. But Mr. Abe promised to move quickly to improve ties with China, Japan’s largest trading partner.

Makiko Inoue in Kawagoe, Japan, contributed reporting.

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Viral Justice: Domestic Abuse Victim Calls Out Attacker on Facebook

Amber Taylor had been living in a Missouri motel with her boyfriend, Austin “Wildboi” McCauley, until this week, when he reportedly beat her unconscious with a baseball bat.

Two days later, the 23-year-old took a picture of herself recovering from her injuries and posted it to McCauley’s public Facebook page, calling him out for his abuse and prompting his arrest.

Since its posting online, the photo has accumulated almost 10,000 “Likes” and close to 1,000 comments. Its caption includes the sentence, “I’m not the only girl he’s done this to but I’m not scared anymore I’m going to speak up.”  

McCauley has since been arrested and charged with second-degree domestic assault.

MORE: Savannah Dietrich Calls Out Her Attackers, Sees Them Punished

In her interview with news station WDAF, Taylor explained she wanted to expose her boyfriend’s true nature to the people who thought they knew him best. “I just wanted his friends to actually see the true him,” she said.

The young mother reports that she’s not only received support from McCauley’s own friends, but also from people across the country. “I’m actually glad that I have people that are writing me and telling me they care. Because being with him, I didn’t get to have any friends.”

This isn’t the first time social media has provided an outlet for a victim in need of support. Earlier this year, 17-year-old Savannah Dietrich violated a court order when she announced the names of her two underage attackers on her public Twitter account. Though the maneuver had her facing contempt charges, Dietrich and her parents reported it was necessary to bring attention to what they characterized as the unfair nature of her trial.

Though public pressure on the court still didn’t result in the attackers receiving jail time, they were sentenced to harsher punishments than were originally conceived before Dietrich went public with their names. And in the melee, the teenager inadvertently rallied a nation’s support, serving as an example of how self-advocacy can facilitate healing.

That may be the take-away for Hillary Adams as well. The disabled daughter of Texas judge, William Adams, Hillary was the subject of her father’s relentless beatings and secretly videotaped one of those incidents. Seven years later, she posted the video online. Though Adams was already grown up and no longer living with her father, she claimed the posting had more to do with holding him personally accountable, even if the law wouldn’t.

Trauma sufferers often report that keeping abuse a secret is a move that backfires, creating a greater sense of personal shame, no matter how blameless they may be. But social media is an accessible avenue they can use to tell their stories, offering survivors the chance to shed their shame and reclaim their dignity.

Do you think social justice can really be achieved with social media? Would you use it to get justice? Let us know what you think in the Comments.

Related Stories on TakePart:

• Anna Breslaw’s 600-Word Sprint: The V-Word Dialogues

• Despite His ‘Legitimate Rape’ Fail, Todd Akin is Still a Senate Contender

• In U.S., a New Definition for Rape

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A Bay Area native, Andri Antoniades previously worked as a fashion industry journalist and medical writer.  In addition to reporting the weekend news on TakePart, she volunteers as a webeditor for locally-based nonprofits and works as a freelance feature writer for TimeOutLA.com. Email Andri | @andritweets | TakePart.com

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Kat Von D Engaged to Deadmau5 - Who Proposed on Twitter!

By Mike Fleeman

12/16/2012 at 01:15 PM EST

How, uh, romantic?

Electronic music star Deadmau5 took to Twitter to pose this question of girlfriend Kat Von D: "I can't wait for Christmas so ... Katherine Von Drachenberg, will you marry me?"

Deadmau5, whose real name is Joel Thomas Zimmerman, included a photo of a diamond ring with the disclaimer, "Changing the diamond to black diamond FYI. Sorry for the jpg … they'll finish the actual ring soon I hope."

Von D, 30, a tattoo artist and reality TV star, responded on her Twitter page with a string of exclamation points, then told her followers, "Please excuse me while I go squeeze the hell out of my fiancé!"

Deadmau5 then celebrated on Twitter with a three-part profanity and gushed, "brb while i spend the rest of my evening with my future wife :)"

This will be Von D's latest shot at marriage. She previously was engaged to Sandra Bullock's ex Jesse James, broke up, reunited, then broke up again.

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Fewer health care options for illegal immigrants

ALAMO, Texas (AP) — For years, Sonia Limas would drag her daughters to the emergency room whenever they fell sick. As an illegal immigrant, she had no health insurance, and the only place she knew to seek treatment was the hospital — the most expensive setting for those covering the cost.

The family's options improved somewhat a decade ago with the expansion of community health clinics, which offered free or low-cost care with help from the federal government. But President Barack Obama's health care overhaul threatens to roll back some of those services if clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with newly insured patients and can't afford to care for as many poor families.

To be clear, Obama's law was never intended to help Limas and an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants like her. Instead, it envisions that 32 million uninsured Americans will get access to coverage by 2019. Because that should mean fewer uninsured patients showing up at hospitals, the Obama program slashed the federal reimbursement for uncompensated care.

But in states with large illegal immigrant populations, the math may not work, especially if lawmakers don't expand Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor and disabled.

When the reform has been fully implemented, illegal immigrants will make up the nation's second-largest population of uninsured, or about 25 percent. The only larger group will be people who qualify for insurance but fail to enroll, according to a 2012 study by the Washington-based Urban Institute.

And since about two-thirds of illegal immigrants live in just eight states, those areas will have a disproportionate share of the uninsured to care for.

In communities "where the number of undocumented immigrants is greatest, the strain has reached the breaking point," Rich Umbdenstock, president of the American Hospital Association, wrote last year in a letter to Obama, asking him to keep in mind the uncompensated care hospitals gave to that group. "In response, many hospitals have had to curtail services, delay implementing services, or close beds."

The federal government has offered to expand Medicaid, but states must decide whether to take the deal. And in some of those eight states — including Texas, Florida and New Jersey — hospitals are scrambling to determine whether they will still have enough money to treat the remaining uninsured.

Without a Medicaid expansion, the influx of new patients and the looming cuts in federal funding could inflict "a double whammy" in Texas, said David Lopez, CEO of the Harris Health System in Houston, which spends 10 to 15 percent of its $1.2 billion annual budget to care for illegal immigrants.

Realistically, taxpayers are already paying for some of the treatment provided to illegal immigrants because hospitals are required by law to stabilize and treat any patients that arrive in an emergency room, regardless of their ability to pay. The money to cover the costs typically comes from federal, state and local taxes.

A solid accounting of money spent treating illegal immigrants is elusive because most hospitals do not ask for immigration status. But some states have tried.

California, which is home to the nation's largest population of illegal immigrants, spent an estimated $1.2 billion last year through Medicaid to care for 822,500 illegal immigrants.

The New Jersey Hospital Association in 2010 estimated that it cost between $600 million and $650 million annually to treat 550,000 illegal immigrants.

And in Texas, a 2010 analysis by the Health and Human Services Commission found that the agency had provided $96 million in benefits to illegal immigrants, up from $81 million two years earlier. The state's public hospital districts spent an additional $717 million in uncompensated care to treat that population.

If large states such as Florida and Texas make good on their intention to forgo federal money to expand Medicaid, the decision "basically eviscerates" the effects of the health care overhaul in those areas because of "who lives there and what they're eligible for," said Lisa Clemans-Cope, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute.

Seeking to curb expenses, hospitals might change what qualifies as an emergency or cap the number of uninsured patients they treat. And although it's believed states with the most illegal immigrants will face a smaller cut, they will still lose money.

The potential impacts of reform are a hot topic at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In addition to offering its own charity care, some MD Anderson oncologists volunteer at a county-funded clinic at Lyndon B. Johnson General Hospital that largely treats the uninsured.

"In a sense we've been in the worst-case scenario in Texas for a long time," said Lewis Foxhall, MD Anderson's vice president of health policy in Houston. "The large number of uninsured and the large low-income population creates a very difficult problem for us."

Community clinics are a key part of the reform plan and were supposed to take up some of the slack for hospitals. Clinics received $11 billion in new funding over five years so they could expand to help care for a swell of newly insured who might otherwise overwhelm doctors' offices. But in the first year, $600 million was cut from the centers' usual allocation, leaving many to use the money to fill gaps rather than expand.

There is concern that clinics could themselves be inundated with newly insured patients, forcing many illegal immigrants back to emergency rooms.

Limas, 44, moved to the border town of Alamo 13 years ago with her husband and three daughters. Now single, she supports the family by teaching a citizenship class in Spanish at the local community center and selling cookies and cakes she whips up in her trailer. Soon, she hopes to seek a work permit of her own.

For now, the clinic helps with basic health care needs. If necessary, Limas will return to the emergency room, where the attendants help her fill out paperwork to ensure the government covers the bills she cannot afford.

"They always attended to me," she said, "even though it's slow."

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Sherman can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrisshermanAP .

Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP .

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Wall Street Week Ahead: Holiday "on standby" as clock ticks on cliff

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The last two weeks of December are traditionally quiet for stocks, but traders accustomed to a bit of time off are staying close to their mobile devices, thanks to the "fiscal cliff."

Last-minute negotiations in Washington on the so-called fiscal cliff - nearly $600 billion of tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect in January that could cause a sharp slowdown in growth or even a recession - are keeping some traders and analysts from taking Christmas holidays because any deal could have a big impact on markets.

"A lot of firms are saying to their trading desks, 'You can take days off for Christmas, but you are on standby to come in if anything happens.' This is certainly different from previous years, especially around this time of the year when things are supposed to be slowing down," said J.J. Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.

"Next week is going to be a Capitol Hill-driven market."

With talks between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner at an apparent standstill, it was increasingly likely that Washington will not come up with a deal before January 1.

Gordon Charlop, managing director at Rosenblatt Securities in New York, will also be on standby for the holiday season.

"It's a 'Look guys, let's just rotate and be sensible" type of situation going on," Charlop said.

"We are hopeful there is some resolution down there, but it seems to me they continue to walk that political tightrope... rather than coming up with something."

Despite concerns that the deadline will pass without a deal, the S&P 500 has held its ground with a 12.4 percent gain for the year. For this week, though, the S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent.

BEWARE OF THE WITCH

This coming Friday will mark the last so-called "quadruple witching" day of the year, when contracts for stock options, single stock futures, stock index options and stock index futures all expire. This could make trading more volatile.

"We could see some heavy selling as there is going to be a lot of re-establishing of positions, reallocation of assets before the year-end," Kinahan said.

RETHINKING APPLE

Higher tax rates on capital gains and dividends are part of the automatic tax increases that will go into effect next year, if Congress and the White House don't come up with a solution to avert the fiscal cliff. That possibility could give investors an incentive to unload certain stocks in some tax-related selling by December 31.

Some market participants said tax-related selling may be behind the weaker trend in the stock price of market leader Apple . Apple's stock has lost a quarter of its value since it hit a lifetime high of $705.07 on September 21.

On Friday, the stock fell 3.8 percent to $509.79 after the iPhone 5 got a chilly reception at its debut in China and two analysts cut shipment forecasts. But the stock is still up nearly 26 percent for the year.

"If you owned Apple for a long time, you should be thinking about reallocation as there will be changes in taxes and other regulations next year, although we don't really know which rules to play by yet," Kinahan said.

But one indicator of the market's reduced concern about the fiscal cliff compared with a few weeks ago, is the defense sector, which will be hit hard if the spending cuts take effect. The PHLX Defense Sector Index <.dfx> is up nearly 13 percent for the year, and sits just a few points from its 2012 high.

(Reporting by Angela Moon; Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)

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Syrians Face a Bread Shortage in Aleppo and Elsewhere

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

A bakery in Aleppo. The price has shot up from 25 Syrian pounds, about 35 cents, for a bag of about eight flat, pitalike loaves to more than 200 pounds, nearly $3.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Jalal al-Khanji, the closest thing the Syrian city of Aleppo has to a mayor, hopes to organize elections there within two weeks, but he fears that residents with empty stomachs are in no mood for an experiment in democracy.

Since late November, bread has been scarce, with a lack of fuel and flour shutting most bakeries in Aleppo.

“We cannot hold elections while people are hungry; we have to solve that problem first,” he said in an interview in this southern Turkish city, where many leaders of Aleppo’s civil society have sought refuge. “People are angry, frustrated and depressed. They can understand how countries like France and Britain and the United States might hold back on the issue of weapons, but not on the issue of bread and diesel.”

The revolution that erupted across Syria in March 2011 only slowly engulfed Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital. Long after major cities were convulsed by demonstrations, Aleppo’s residents still showed up in Gaziantep by the busload every weekend to scour the malls.

The armed struggle for the city began in earnest last July.

In August, the prominent doctors, engineers, pharmacists and businessmen sheltering here established the Aleppo Transitional Revolutionary Council, a kind of city government in exile for the liberated portions of the city. Mr. Khanji, 67, a civil engineer with a long history of opposing the Syrian government, serves as its president.

Dividing their time between Gaziantep and Aleppo, council members found the chaos convulsing their city worrisome. What if all the competing militias on the ground, even if nominally part of the loosely allied Free Syrian Army, continued to fight for the spoils even after the government’s forces were driven from the city?

They decided the remedy was an elected council of about 250 members who would run both the city and the province of Aleppo, roughly one representative for every 20,000 people in the liberated areas. The council would choose a smaller group to actually govern the city.

The idea is for the council to serve as a liaison between the military and the civilian populations. “If civilian life is not organized, if we cannot do anything, then the chaos will continue,” said a 29-year-old businessman who is also on the transitional council. Several members of the council declined to give their names because they still travel to government-controlled areas.

About 65 percent of the villages have already chosen their representatives, he said, but the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo forced a postponement of the choice of about 150 representatives from the city itself.

The transitional council is in the process of establishing a 500-member police force and runs a few courts, but members view the bread crisis as their first big test. “We represent a civil government to some extent, so if we cannot solve this problem there will be a lack of trust in such rule in the future,” said the businessman.

There is also competition. While about 70 percent to 80 percent of the Free Syrian Army commanders in the province have agreed to support the elected council, election organizers said, opponents include jihadi groups hostile to the very idea of democratic elections.

One such prominent group, Jibhat al-Nusra, which the United States sought to ostracize last week by labeling it a terrorist organization, has been distributing bread in and around Aleppo.

“The so-called terrorists are the ones who have been giving us bread and distributing it fairly,” said Tamam Hazem, a spokesman in Aleppo’s news media center, reached via Skype. “Free Syrian Army battalions have been trying to help, but they just don’t have the same kind of experience.”

Council members pleaded for outside help to counter the jihadists’ efforts. “They are offering bread to people to obtain their sympathy and respect,” said Mr. Khanji, the council’s president. “Prolonging the Syrian crisis will allow the extremist cells in Syria to grow and become more difficult to remove in the future.”

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Sebnem Arsu from Kilis, Turkey.

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Manitoba Tories to oust youth president over social media comments

WINNIPEG – An official with Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative party is being ousted over social media comments about aboriginals.

Brayden Mazurkiewich, the president of the party’s youth wing, is being asked to resign over a post on his Facebook page today.

The post concerns a planned urban reserve on a former Winnipeg military base, and says the land was designed for — quote — “hard-working men and women of the military, not free-loading Indian.”

Party president Ryan Matthews says the comments are unacceptable.

Matthews says if Mazurkiewich doesn’t quit voluntarily, the party’s management committee will convene next week to deal with the matter.

Mazurkiewich was not immediately available for comment.

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Connecticut Shooting: Bodies Removed from School, Positively Identified

By Mike Fleeman

12/15/2012 at 10:25 AM EST

Connecticut State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance

Mary Altaffer/AP

A horrific day turned to a night of unspeakable grief as parents received formal notifications that their children were killed in the Connecticut school massacre.

The last of the dozens of bodies – most of them children – were removed by early Saturday from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

"Our objective certainly was to positively identify the victims to try to give the families some closure," State Police Spokesman Lt. Paul Vance tells CBS News. "Our detectives worked well through the night. By early this morning, we were able to positively identify all of the victims and make some formal notification to all of the families of the victims."

The gunman, identified by multiple law enforcement sources as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, killed 20 children between the ages of 5 and 10 and six adults, before taking his own life at the school. His mother also was killed at a different location, bringing the total death toll to 28.

Eighteen children were pronounced dead at the scene and two at the hospital; six adult victims were pronounced dead at the scene, the Los Angeles Times reports.

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APNewsBreak: Texas cancer probe draws NCI scrutiny

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The National Cancer Institute confirmed Friday that federal officials are taking a closer look at a troubled $3 billion cancer-fighting effort in Texas that is under a criminal investigation over a lucrative taxpayer-funded grant awarded by the state agency.

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas has coveted status as an NCI-approved funding entity — an exclusive group headlined by the nation's most prominent cancer organizations. The list is fewer than two dozen and includes the American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and federal entities like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The designation is a federal seal-of-approval that signals high peer review standards and conflict of interest policies. Yearlong turmoil within the Texas institute, or CPRIT, reached a new peak this week when the agency's beleaguered chief executive asked to resign and prosecutors opened cases following an $11 million grant to a private company that was revealed to have bypassed an independent review.

NCI spokeswoman Aleea Farrakh Khan told The Associated Press that officials are "evaluating recent events" at CPRIT. She said officials have not made decisions or contacted the agency directly.

Members of CPRIT's governing board did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

NCI designation is not required for CPRIT to continue running the nation's second-largest pot of cancer research dollars, Khan said. But jeopardizing that status — and especially losing it — would be a severe blow to CPRIT's reputation, which already has been battered by sweeping resignations, internal accusations of politics trumping science and now a criminal investigation.

A recent internal audit at CPRIT discovered an $11 million funding request from Dallas-based Peloton Therapeutics was approved without the agency ever scrutinizing the proposal's merits. The revelation came only months after two Nobel laureates and other top scientists left the agency in protest over a $20 million grant some accused of being rushed to approval without a proper peer review.

While CPRIT is funded by taxpayers, donors to cancer nonprofits might look to an NCI designation for assurance that their money is in good hands.

"It says, 'If I'm donating money to this agency, if NCI is approving them, that means NCI says it's handling its money well,'" Khan said.

Khan added that CPRIT's inclusion on the list does not mean all of its funding mechanisms are NCI-approved.

An entire page of CPRIT's website is devoted to boasting its NCI designation. The agency says the status is important because it means cancer centers in Texas seeking its own NCI designation — so as to reassure patients or bolster recruitment — can include CPRIT research dollars in their calculations to maintain levels needed to be NCI approved.

"This enhances Texas' ability to leverage additional federal funding for cancer research and raises Texas' profile as a center for cancer research," according to the website.

Executive Director Bill Gimson submitted his resignation letter Tuesday but offered to stay on through January. He has described Peloton's improper funding as an honest mistake and said no one associated with CPRIT stood to personally profit from the company's award.

Prosecutors have not made any specific criminal allegations. Launching separate investigations into CPRIT are the Texas attorney general's office and the Travis County district attorney's public integrity unit, which investigates criminal misconduct within state government.

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Follow Paul J. Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pauljweber

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Wall Street drops as Apple falls, "cliff" looms

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell on Friday, led by losses in the Nasdaq after another drop in shares of Apple, and as the overhang of "fiscal cliff" negotiations kept buyers on the sidelines.

Apple slid 4.2 percent to $507.21 after UBS cut its price target on the stock to $700 from $780. The stock of the most valuable U.S. company has been hit hard in the last three months. On Friday, Apple's stock fell after a tepid reception for the iPhone 5 in China.

The S&P Information Technology Index <.gspt> lost 0.9 percent as Apple fell and Jabil Circuit Inc shed 5 percent to $17.61 after UBS cut its price target.

The possibility of a "fiscal cliff" deal not taking place until early 2013 is rising. The back-and-forth negotiations over the fiscal cliff in Washington have kept markets on hold in what would already be a quiet period for stocks.

"We're faced with uncertainty ... and that's going to continue now into January. It basically puts everybody on hold and (you) just have the markets kind of thrash around," said Larry Peruzzi, senior equity trader at Cabrera Capital Markets Inc in Boston.

President Barack Obama and U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner held a "frank" meeting on Thursday at the White House to discuss how to avoid the tax hikes and spending cuts set to kick in early in 2013.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> shed 19.68 points, or 0.15 percent, to 13,151/04. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> slipped 3.79 points, or 0.27 percent, to 1,415.66. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> dropped 19.24 points, or 0.64 percent, to 2,972.97.

American Express Co shares fell 1.5 percent to $56.83 and ranked as the heaviest weight on the Dow.

The S&P 500 dropped 0.6 percent on Thursday after six straight positive sessions. Investors are concerned that going over the cliff could tip the economy back into recession. While a deal is expected to ultimately be reached, a drawn-out debate - like the one seen over 2011's debt ceiling - can erode confidence.

Still, expectations of an eventual agreement have helped the S&P 500 bounce back over the last month. On Wednesday, the index hit its highest intraday level since late October. For the year, the S&P has climbed 12.6 percent.

"It's quieter than it has been recently. I think it's the Friday before the holiday week and people are starting to go away, and absent some big news out of Washington, I think things will be quieter," said Jeff Meyerson, head of trading for Sunrise Securities in New York.

Best Buy Co Inc slid 14 percent to $12.13 after the electronics retailer agreed to extend the deadline for the company's founder to make a bid. Shares jumped as much as 19 percent on Thursday after initial reports of a bid this week from founder Richard Schulze.

Consumer prices fell in November for the first time in six months, indicating U.S. inflation pressures were muted. A separate report showed manufacturing grew at its swiftest pace in eight months in December.

Data out of China was encouraging, as Chinese manufacturing grew at its fastest pace in 14 months in December. The news was seen as helping U.S. materials companies, including U.S. Steel , which rose 6 percent to $23.66.

(Reporting by Gabriel Debenedetti; Additional reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jan Paschal)

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