Rohm and Haas Brain Cancer Case Tossed Over Expert Report

A brain cancer case against Rohm and Haas was properly thrown out because the testimony of the plaintiff's sole expert on causation was not admissible, the state Superior Court has ruled.

Special Report: Your Taxes

Whistle-blowers’ tips are pouring in to the I.R.S. But cash awards aren’t pouring out.

Unless and until Congress renews all sorts of deductions, tax specialists warn, it will be hard for small businesses to plan for expansion.

Rohm and Haas Brain Cancer Case Tossed Over Expert Report

A brain cancer case against Rohm and Haas was properly thrown out because the testimony of the plaintiff's sole expert on causation was not admissible, the state Superior Court has ruled.

Weak Jobs Report Adds to Uncertainty on Fed’s Move

The Labor Department’s snapshot of the job market in August had several discouraging details underneath a relatively mundane headline number, which showed the economy added an estimated 169,000 jobs. Perhaps the most striking was a plunge in the share of Americans who are either working or looking for work, which fell to its lowest level since 1978.

“If you had a more optimistic view of the economy, which I think the Fed does, this should give you some pause,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR. “It’s been a real struggle here in the labor market.”

At the same time, earlier estimates of job growth in July and June were revised sharply downward, and hiring over the summer months was largely driven by low-wage sectors like retail, food services and health care.

Still, economists said they believed that Fed governors would find enough bright spots in this report to justify scaling back their monthly purchases of long-term Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities — measures that help push down long-term interest rates — after their next meeting on Sept. 17 and 18.

“There’s just barely enough in that report and in other forward-looking indicators we’ve seen to give Fed governors the confidence they need on the 18th to taper,” said Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

“For the record, I don’t think they should, given the risks posed by Syria and the impending fiscal chaos in Washington,” he said, noting the expected Congressional battles over the debt limit and spending measures. “The costs of delaying until some of those factors are sorted out is not very great. But the Fed has given no indication it’s thinking that way.”

Investors seemed to agree, with bond yields dipping slightly after the jobs report came out. As for stocks, after a topsy-turvy day, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average both closed about where they began on Friday. In Friday trading, the Dow closed down 14.98 points, or 0.1 percent, at 14,992. The S.& P. 500 edged up 0.09 points, or 0.01 percent, closing at 1,655.17. The Nasdaq climbed a slight 1.23 points, or 0.03 percent, to finish at 3,660.01. The price on a 10-year Treasury note rose 16/32, to
96 9/32, with the yield falling to 2.93 from 3.00 on Thursday. The number of payroll jobs added in August was just shy of the average pace of hiring over the last year, and the unemployment rate edged down to 7.3 percent from 7.4 percent. Unemployment, however, fell for the “wrong reasons,” Mr. Shapiro said: because people dropped out of the labor force and so were no longer counted as unemployed, and not because more unemployed people found jobs.

The jobless rate is now edging close to the 7 percent level that the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, had identified as the Fed’s target for ending its asset purchases altogether around the middle of next year. For several months, Fed governors have been saying that the Fed expected to begin reducing the monthly purchases “later this year,” which has been widely interpreted to point toward beginning the shift as early as September.

Charles L. Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and one of the more vocal proponents of highly accommodative monetary policy, used this phrasing in a speech on Friday, suggesting he was open-minded about the “exact pattern of the reduction in purchases that we eventually take.”

The Fed’s more hawkish members have been more explicit about their desired policy moves. Esther L. George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a leading critic of the asset purchases, said on Friday that the Fed should cut its bond buying to $70 billion a month in September, from the current $85 billion a month, split between Treasuries and mortgage bonds. “It is time to begin a gradual — and predictable — normalization of policy,” she said.

Some economists suggested that Fed governors could react to the latest economic data by tapering their bond purchases slowly over a longer period of time and perhaps in conjunction with other measures that would underscore the central bank’s commitment to helping the economy heal. For example, the Fed could announce that it is extending the period that it holds short-term interest rates near zero.

Binyamin Appelbaum contributed reporting from Washington.

DealBook: J.C. Penney Shares Jump on Report of Push for Permanent Chief

Your Money: An $18 Million Lesson in Handling Credit Report Errors

That indifference should surprise no one who has ever tried to deal with any of the three big credit reporting agencies, Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. “You feel trapped, like you are in a box,” said Ms. Miller, a 57-year-old nurse who works in a dermatologist’s office. “You have no control over this, and you can’t call them up and say, ‘You’re fired.’ ”

So she tried suing. That worked.

A jury in Federal District Court in Portland, Ore., last week awarded her a whopping $18.4 million in punitive damages, which, according to consumer lawyers, is the largest individual case on record.

If you think this has taught Equifax and the other credit reporting companies a lesson, you are a lot more optimistic than close observers of the industry. They say that despite the huge judgment, little is going to change for the millions of Americans who discover errors in their credit reports.

The credit bureaus are willing to tolerate these errors — and settle with consumers out of court — as a cost of doing business, according to credit experts and lawyers who work on these cases.

“Their business model is to keep doing the same thing over and over again,” said Justin Baxter, the lead lawyer on Ms. Miller’s case. “They can buy off a number of consumers with small dollar amounts and get rid of the vast majority of cases. To Equifax, that’s the cost of doing business.”

Ms. Miller made every effort to fix her report, exactly as consumers are advised to do. She initiated the company’s dispute process about seven times, and in most instances, Equifax would spit back a form letter saying it needed more proof of her identity. So she sent her pay stub and her phone bill. When that didn’t work, she sent her pay stub and her driver’s license. And when that failed, she sent her W-2 form and an insurance bill — at least three times.

But nothing ever changed: Ms. Miller, a model financial citizen who once had the credit score to prove it, had become mixed up with another, much less creditworthy Julie Miller. After she was denied a line of credit from KeyBank, she discovered 38 collection accounts on her credit report, none of which belonged to her, along with an inaccurate Social Security number and birth date. Her financial life was no longer her own.

Mixed files, as they are known in the credit industry, most frequently involve people who share common names with individuals who have similar Social Security numbers, birth dates or addresses. These errors are notorious for being among the most difficult to fix, credit experts said, and require human intervention to untangle the mess. But given the huge number of disputes, the process to address them is largely automated. And that is the excuse the industry advances to consumers who get stuck in its web.

The bureaus often outsource thousands of disputes daily to workers overseas. Those workers, often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases, are largely told to translate the problem into a two- or three-digit code that defines the gist of the problem (account not his/hers, for instance) and feed it into a computer.

But that process won’t untangle a mixed credit report. The reason files become mixed to begin with can be traced back to the computer formula the bureaus use to match credit data to a specific person’s credit report. It allows credit data, say a late payment on a credit card, to be inserted into a person’s file even if the identifying information isn’t an exact match. In other words, the system might add a late payment to the credit report of someone like Julie Miller even if the Social Security number is off by two digits or a birth date is off by two years, but enough of the other identifying information matches. That’s roughly what happened to Ms. Miller.

Partial matches aren’t always wrong, of course. Solid estimates on the number of mixed files are hard to find, though a 2004 study from the Federal Trade Commission said that partial matches occurred in about 1 to 2 percent of credit files, citing data from the bureaus. That might not sound like much, but when you consider that there are 200 million individuals with credit files at each of the big three bureaus, that translates to two million to four million consumers.

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

Report Finds Legal Fees Out of Control in Local Governments

A report released Tuesday by the state comptroller found local governments are failing to control excessive and improper payments for legal services.

Report Shows Racial Disparity in Pot Arrests

With new data showing that blacks are far more likely than whites to get arrested for marijuana offenses, the New York Civil Liberties Union is pushing for late-session legislation that would decriminalize possession of small quantities.

Bucks Blog: Banks Rake In Overdraft Fees, Report Finds

Overdraft penalties represent well over half of banks’ fees from consumer checking accounts, a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finds.

The report, based in part on confidential data provided by some of the nation’s larger banks, estimated that 61 percent of bank fees from consumer accounts were for overdrafts and insufficient funds, penalties charged when customers spent more than their accounts had available. Based on that finding, the bureau said it estimated conservatively that the banking industry earned $12.6 billion in such fees from consumers in 2011.

The report represents preliminary findings of a bureau inquiry into bank overdraft practices announced early last year. The bureau is not making any policy recommendations yet, but says it will conduct further reviews of account-level data.

The report found that overdraft protection can be very expensive for consumers and varies widely from bank to bank. Overdraft protection is a service in which the bank pays the amount in question, even though the account lacks the necessary funds, but then charges the customer a fee for doing so. The average customer overdrawing an account paid $225 in charges per year, the study found. And more than a quarter (27 percent) of checking accounts paid at least one overdraft charge in 2011.

The bureau did not identify the banks included in the report or even specify how many were included in the analysis, which also incorporated comments submitted by the public, consumer advocates and industry groups. The bureau said, however, that the banks in the study represented more than half of all deposit accounts. The bureau has supervisory authority over banks with more than $10 billion in assets, or more than 100 institutions.

Since the middle of 2010, the Federal Reserve has barred banks from charging overdraft fees for A.T.M. withdrawals or most debit card transactions unless a customer actively  chooses the service. The report found that customers who accept the coverage were more likely to end up paying higher fees and were more likely to end up having their account involuntarily closed than those who did not.

“What is marketed as overdraft protection can, in some instances, put consumers at greater risk of harm,” said Richard Cordray, the bureau’s director, in prepared remarks.

Opt-in rates vary widely among banks, suggesting that bank marketing of the service plays a role. At some banks in 2011, more than 40 percent of new customers opted in, while fewer than 10 percent did so at other banks.

Mr. Cordray said the findings did not indicate that banks should not charge overdraft fees. “Nonetheless,” he said, “our findings raise concerns about the number of consumers who are incurring heavy overdraft fees or account closures, and the wide variations across institutions indicate that certain practices and procedures merit further analysis.”

Have you paid overdraft fees? Do you think new rules are necessary to regulate banks’ use of them?

Report Urges Higher Pay for Texas Judges

Texas judges haven't gotten a raise since 2005, and they earn less than judges made in 1990 when considering inflation, says a recent report by the Judicial Compensation Commission.

Increasing judicial salaries for district judges, intermediate appellate justices and jurists of the two high courts by more than 21 percent is necessary to attract qualified lawyers to the bench and stop experienced jurists from leaving, says the report.

Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Dale Wainwright says financial considerations factored significantly into his decision to leave the high court in September. For a Supreme Court justice, he says, "The difference between what they are making in the public sector and what they could be making in the private sector can be several million dollars every few years."

Judges and their families make a financial sacrifice so the judge can serve, he says, and the relatively low salary shortens their tenures.

"I have the utmost respect to folks who do public service. … Anything the Legislature can do to help compensate the members of our judiciary better would only improve the bench," says Wainwright, partner in Bracewell & Giuliani in Austin.

Judicial Compensation Commission member Pat Mizell notes that judges' compensation is "extraordinarily low" compared to the pay of private-sector lawyers. For example, the salary of a district judge is much lower than a starting lawyer at his firm, Vinson & Elkins in Houston.

"It's $40- to $50,000 less than what a 25-year-old kid out of law school makes," he says, adding, "We're already in a situation where it is starting to affect the quality of the judiciary. Good judges are having a very difficult time making ends meet under the current salary structure."

The 80th Legislature created the commission, and the governor appoints members, subject to Senate consent.

THE REPORT

The state pays the entire salary of jurists of the two high courts. Intermediate appellate justices and district court judges receive the majority of their salaries from the state, with supplemental pay from counties. The commission recommends increasing state salaries across the board by 21.1 percent to 21.5 percent.

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Gun Shop Owners Report Spike in Sales as Enthusiasts Fear Possible New Laws

At Bud’s Gun Shop in Maryland, a message on the Web site said that customer service was “completely overwhelmed” and it discouraged customers from calling or e-mailing.

And on GunBroker.com, an Oracle .223 that normally retails for around $650 had been bid up to $1,175 with three days left in the auction.

With gun-control legislation getting more serious discussion than it has in years, gun sales are spiking as enthusiasts stock up in advance of possible restrictions.

Gun sales have been increasing over the past five years, with marked increases around the 2008 and 2012 elections, and after mass shootings like the one in Aurora, Colo., and now in Newtown, Conn.

“The largest factor by far is fears over a potential change in gun laws — that’s what’s driving most guns enthusiasts or even first-time buyers to go buy a gun,” said Nima Samadi, senior guns and ammunition analyst for the research firm IBISWorld.

There is increasing demands for guns in the United States. Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted 16.45 million background checks for firearm sales through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a 14 percent jump from the previous year. In the first 11 months of this year, the bureau conducted 16.8 million background checks, a record since the system’s founding in 1998.

Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, though, a few companies associated with gun sales have backed away. Cerberus Capital Management put the company that makes the Bushmaster, a gun used in the shootings, up for sale on Tuesday, saying, “The Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level.”

Dick’s Sporting Goods temporarily ceased selling all guns in its location closest to Newtown, and has also put a hold on sales of so-called modern sporting rifles, which include semiautomatic guns, nationwide.

And Deseret Digital Media, which owns KSL.com, a Web site that has been criticized by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for allowing unregulated gun sales, said it was suspending classified advertisements for guns.

Elsewhere, though, consumers are hurrying to buy guns, leading to some models being out of stock, warnings of shipping and customer-service delays, and significant premiums on assault rifles.

“We are seeing a total madhouse of buying everything in sight,” said Bob Irwin, owner of the Gun Store, a Las Vegas shooting range and retailer. Thursday, he said, was the largest sales day in the history of the store, which has been open for 30 years. “We have not only a run on the guns, but a run on ammunition.”

Mr. Irwin has begun limiting how much of some types of ammunition customers can buy, and he has canceled employees’ days off to handle the demand.

Walmart, the largest retailer of guns and ammunition in the United States, indicated that several semiautomatic guns were out of stock at locations across the country. Kory Lundberg, a spokesman, said the company was not sold out of guns altogether, but had low inventory in some situations. Walmart carries guns in about half its stores, and about one-third carry so-called modern sporting rifles, the category including the Bushmaster and other AR-15 weapons.

Other retailers around the country were selling out of guns and accessories. On Friday on ImpactGuns.com, the Bushmaster .223 was out of stock. Davidson’s, a supplier to gun retailers, placed a notice on its Web site that said it was seeing “unprecedented demand,” and at MidwayUSA.com, more than 100 parts for AR-15 guns were out of stock and on back order.

On AR15.com, a gun-enthusiast Web site, a user posted that a barrel for a gun disappeared from an online shopping cart overnight, and is now on back order. Another user, named warplg8654, responded, “Dealers can’t keep anything in stock for what I think are obvious reasons given the current political climate.”

When a user called JazzFan asked whether paying a $100 premium for a Stag Model 3 was a good deal, another user said that seemed “reasonable with all of the panic buying.”

Gavin Gear, the founder of the enthusiast site Northwest Gun, said gun owners were feeling “apprehension.”

“People are trying to think ahead, and if they want to own a particular firearm and they think it’s going to be outlawed or restricted, they’re more likely to buy now,” he said.

Report Urges Higher Pay for Texas Judges

Texas judges haven't gotten a raise since 2005, and they earn less than judges made in 1990 when considering inflation, says a recent report by the Judicial Compensation Commission.

Increasing judicial salaries for district judges, intermediate appellate justices and jurists of the two high courts by more than 21 percent is necessary to attract qualified lawyers to the bench and stop experienced jurists from leaving, says the report.

Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Dale Wainwright says financial considerations factored significantly into his decision to leave the high court in September. For a Supreme Court justice, he says, "The difference between what they are making in the public sector and what they could be making in the private sector can be several million dollars every few years."

Judges and their families make a financial sacrifice so the judge can serve, he says, and the relatively low salary shortens their tenures.

"I have the utmost respect to folks who do public service. … Anything the Legislature can do to help compensate the members of our judiciary better would only improve the bench," says Wainwright, partner in Bracewell & Giuliani in Austin.

Judicial Compensation Commission member Pat Mizell notes that judges' compensation is "extraordinarily low" compared to the pay of private-sector lawyers. For example, the salary of a district judge is much lower than a starting lawyer at his firm, Vinson & Elkins in Houston.

"It's $40- to $50,000 less than what a 25-year-old kid out of law school makes," he says, adding, "We're already in a situation where it is starting to affect the quality of the judiciary. Good judges are having a very difficult time making ends meet under the current salary structure."

The 80th Legislature created the commission, and the governor appoints members, subject to Senate consent.

THE REPORT

The state pays the entire salary of jurists of the two high courts. Intermediate appellate justices and district court judges receive the majority of their salaries from the state, with supplemental pay from counties. The commission recommends increasing state salaries across the board by 21.1 percent to 21.5 percent.

Subscribe to Texas Lawyer

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Report Bolsters Case for Large U.S. Natural Gas Exports

The Obama administration has been cautious on whether to embrace large exports of gas out of concern that consumers who rely on gas for heating and cooking could see their utility prices rise. Higher exports could raise costs to manufacturers that now benefit from a glut of cheap gas, some economists warn, although huge terminal projects would generate thousands of construction jobs and gas could be a lucrative export earner.

The new report, prepared by NERA Economic Consulting for the government, concluded that domestic gas prices would not rise sharply as a result of exports and that expanded export revenue would generally help most Americans.

Noting that gas exports could produce up to $47 billion in new economic activity in 2020, when many new terminals would be up and running, the report said, “welfare improvement is highest under the high export volume scenarios because U.S. consumers benefit from an increase in wealth transfer and export revenues.”

Only a decade ago, it appeared that the country’s domestic gas supplies were drying up, and that huge amounts of expensive gas in liquefied form would have to be imported from Trinidad, Africa and the Middle East. But over the last few years, a technological revolution has occurred in shale gas fields across the country, producing a glut that has driven the price of natural gas down by two-thirds since 2008.

The report, the second Energy Department study this year, is likely to be challenged by manufacturing and chemical companies like Dow Chemical warn that large-scale exports that raise domestic gas prices would hurt their ability to compete with foreign firms.

Yet oil and gas companies are eager for exports to bolster the lagging price of natural gas, and the report is likely to spur a competitive lobbying campaign for regulatory approval of export terminals. Executives in the oil and gas industry were enthusiastic about the report. “It’s great news,” said Rodney Waller, a senior vice president at Range Resources, a natural gas producer. “It’s encouraging to see that experts are joining the expectation that we are in a global marketplace and the United States has a huge opportunity to generate economic growth and at the same time reduce our energy costs.”

But several powerful members of Congress, including Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who is in line to be the next chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, have opposed large-scale exports.

In a recent letter to the energy secretary, Steven Chu, Senator Wyden noted the importance of the country’s newfound gas wealth to “improve the economic competitiveness of American manufacturers” and that “U.S. law has long held that imports and exports of energy must be considered differently than other commodities.”

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have joined the opposition to exports in a bid to limit domestic production, which is increasingly dependent on hydraulic fracturing, a technique that blasts open shale rock with water, sand and chemicals to release gas and oil. Environmentalists say drinking water supplies can be put in jeopardy, a charge disputed by the oil industry.

The Center for Liquefied Natural Gas, a trade group whose members include ExxonMobil, Sempra Energy and Royal Dutch Shell, has argued that more gas exports will bolster domestic gas production and with it expand demand for oil field equipment and steel piping.

The Energy Department report noted that large exports of gas would produce “some shifts in output by industrial sectors” and “the electricity sector, energy-intensive sector and natural gas dependent goods and services producers will all be impacted by price increases.” Industries that are likely to be most impacted, economists say, would be producers of chemicals and fertilizers.

But the report said that natural gas exports could produce $10 billion to $30 billion of annual export revenue. The country now exports some gas by pipeline.

Torts: Judge OKs Battery Claim Against Hospital Absent Expert Report

A battery claim against a Pennsylvania hospital may proceed, a Lawrence County judge has decided, ruling that the hospital lacked consent to continue administering a test after the patient asked doctors to stop because she was in excruciating pain.

Modest Jobs Growth in Final Report Before Election

Whoever wins the election on Tuesday might even inherit an accelerating economy in 2013, if (and that is a big if) Congress is able to smooth over that pesky fiscal cliff in the few weeks after the election.

The nation’s employers added 171,000 positions on net in October, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and more jobs than initially estimated in August and September. Hiring was broad-based, with just nearly every industry except state government adding jobs. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September, but for a good reason: more workers joined the labor force and so officially counted as unemployed.

None of this makes for a game-changer in the presidential race, analysts said. But it appeared to provide some relief for President Obama, whose campaign could have been sideswiped by bad news from the volatile monthly jobs report. With the latest numbers, the economy finally shows a net gain of jobs during his presidency. His record had previously been weighed down by huge layoffs in his first year in office after the financial crisis.

The report also allayed widespread suspicion that September’s plunge in the unemployment rate — to below 8 percent for the first time since the month he took office — might have been a one-month statistical fluke.

“Generally, the report shows that things are better than we’d expected and certainly better than we’d thought a few months ago,” said Paul Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics. “But we’re still not making enough progress to bring that unemployment rate down significantly and rapidly.”

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement that the jobs report was evidence of the need to change the nation’s economic policies.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” he said. He also noted that October’s unemployment rate of 7.9 percent was higher than the 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office in January 2009. Unemployment peaked at 10 percent in October of Mr. Obama’s first year in office, and has been skidding downward very, very slowly since then.

Economists were hopeful that once the election was over and Congress addressed the major fiscal tightening scheduled for the end of this year, job and output growth could speed up further.

“If we can do this kind of job growth with all the uncertainty out there, imagine if we were to clear up those tax issues and hold back the majority of tax increases that are pending at the end of the year,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We could do much better in 2013, maybe as well as we appeared to be doing earlier this year.”

The jobs snapshot for October was based on surveys conducted too early in the month to capture work disruptions across the East Coast caused by Hurricane Sandy. Economists expect that businesses and employment will resume their normal activity by the next jobs survey, in mid-November, and that some industries will even show an increase in hiring because of the storm.

“We had a lot of lost hours worked and production stuff still delayed, but much of that will be offset by hiring of emergency workers, government workers and construction, to do all that emergency fixing,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial.

In October, the biggest job gains were in professional and business services, health care and retail trade, the Labor Department said. Government payrolls dipped slightly. State and local governments have been shedding jobs in most months over the last three years.

One of the low points of the report was in hourly wages, which remained flat in October after showing barely any growth in the previous several months.

“Perhaps the decline in real wages is a factor here in being able to employ more people,” Mr. Ryding said. “It’s something to keep in mind when we think about creating jobs and whether we’re maybe creating the wrong sort of jobs.”

A report from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy organization that focuses on labor issues, found that while the majority of jobs lost in the downturn were middle-income jobs, the majority of the jobs created since then had been lower-wage ones.

Stock markets opened higher after the jobs report on Friday, but fell for the day, apparently weighed down later by a number of concerns from the possible lingering effects of the storm to the uncertainty about the outcome of the election.

The United States has now posted job gains for 25 consecutive months, but the increases have been barely large enough to absorb the increase in the working population. About 12 million unemployed people remain waiting for work, with about two out of five of those people out of a job for more than six months.

That is in addition to more than eight million people who are working part time but really want full-time jobs.

“I’m not just competing against all the other people who are out of work,” said Griff Coxey, 57, of Cascade, Wis., who was laid off in May from his controller job at a small business. “I’m also competing against all those people who are actually working but are underemployed.”

Like two million other idle workers, Mr. Coxey is scheduled to lose his unemployment benefits the last week of the year, when the federal extensions expire. He said he still had some savings to fall back on, but many workers do not.

Labor advocates and many economists have been urging Congress to renew the benefits as part of their discussions of the “fiscal cliff” during their postelection session. So far, though, the issue has received little attention, and analysts worry that ending extended benefits could disrupt whatever forward momentum the economy has.

“Federal unemployment benefits are one of the most effective stimuli we have,” said Christine L. Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

“The recovery is still fragile,” she said, “and to pull that amount of income and expenditure out of the economy — particularly at a time when people thinking about the holiday season — will have a significant impact on not just those individuals and their families, but the economy as a whole.”

Friday’s jobs report was unlikely to affect policy from the Federal Reserve, which has pledged open-ended stimulus until the job market improves “substantially.”

“The Fed desires both a substantial and sustainable improvement in labor market conditions and is likely to read recent payroll growth as a positive step in the right direction, but just one step in a longer journey,” said Michael Gapen, director of United States research and global asset allocation at Barclays Capital.

Europe Nuclear Reactors Need Fixes, Report Says

The scale of the problems detailed in the draft report, as well as the size of the expected repair bill, may amplify public concerns about the safety of nuclear power on the part of Europeans, who are already deeply divided over the technology and whose governments still zealously guard control over energy policy at the national level.

The European Commission undertook the safety review of its nuclear plants after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which led to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Part of the assessment was the performance of so-called stress tests, which are meant to assess how a nuclear facility would fare in various kinds of failures and crises. National experts conducted the stress tests in conjunction with the commission’s advisory group on nuclear safety. The tests identified the need for “hundreds of technical upgrade measures,” the draft report says.

The two biggest previous civilian nuclear accidents — at Three Mile Island outside Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979, and at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986 — were both followed by similar scrutiny, and agreements were reached on extensive new safety measures. But the draft report notes that “even today, decades later, the implementation of those measures is still pending” in some of the union’s member countries.

Vulnerabilities found by the commission and identified in the draft report include a situation at four reactors in Finland and Sweden, where if the cooling systems failed or all electric power was lost, the operators would have less than an hour to restore safety functions before catastrophic damage took place. The draft report says that 10 reactors in countries including Spain, France and the Czech Republic lack adequate equipment to detect earthquakes.

Most of the upgrades called for in the draft report involve making European nuclear plants better able to withstand quakes, flooding and the loss of primary cooling — the factors that combined to devastating effect at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The draft report also says that rules ensuring the independence of national nuclear safety regulators “are minimal.” The European Union’s energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, is expected to announce plans on Thursday for unionwide legislation meant to improve reporting and protect the regulators’ independence.

Mark Breddy, a spokesman for Greenpeace European Unit, the environmental advocacy organization, said: “Cozy relationships between nuclear operators, regulators and politicians were pivotal to aggravating the Fukushima disaster. The situation isn’t much better in Europe.” Given those relationships, he said, he questioned whether the European Commission’s stress tests were as thorough and as impartial as they should have been.

Freeh Report Set to be Released Thursday

The findings of a team hired by Penn State to investigate university officials? response to sexual-abuse allegations against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky will be released on Thursday, the leader of the investigation announced Tuesday.