Hasta La Gadget!

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles police detectives were meeting Friday with a woman who is a possible victim of sexual assault by comedian Bill Cosby, a department spokeswoman said.

Officer Jane Kim said detectives were meeting with the woman Friday but could not release any additional details. The meeting occurred one day after Police Chief Charlie Beck called on anyone who believed they were victims of sexual abuse by Cosby to come forward, regardless of whether their claims were too old to be prosecuted.

An email message sent to Cosby’s attorney Martin Singer was not immediately returned.

Attorney Gloria Allred wrote in an email that she will make a statement Friday evening outside a Los Angeles police statement about the police inquiry.

Cosby was sued Tuesday by Judy Huth, who claims the comedian forced her to perform a sex act on him with her hand in a bedroom of the Playboy Mansion around 1974 when she was 15 years old. Cosby’s attorneys denied her claims in a court filing Thursday and accused her and her attorney of extortion.

Huth’s lawyer in recent weeks increased a demand to stay quiet from $100,000 to $200,000, according to filings by Singer. The Riverside County resident also tried to sell her story about alleged abuse by Cosby to a tabloid a decade ago, which Singer contends undercuts her argument that she only recently discovered the psychological effects of the incident and is allowed to file a lawsuit under California law.

Cosby has been accused by more than 15 women in recent weeks of sexual misconduct, ranging from incidents of groping to incidents of drugging and raping. He has never been charged with a crime, and his attorneys have denied many of the allegations.

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Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP

Employers added workers at a much faster-than-expected clip last month, as payroll gains 321,000, the largest monthly gain since January 2012. Upward revisions to the prior two months added another 44,000, while the unemployment rate held steady at 5.8 percent. Even wage growth, which has been a critical missing piece of the recovery, got at least a monthly bump, up 0.4 percent, though the more relevant year-over-year growth rate remains stuck at around two percent (2.1 percent, Nov’13 – Nov ’14), where it has been since 2010.

While any one month’s results from these “high-frequency” data should be taken with a grain of salt (see the “JB smoother” below), I saw no obvious anomalies in the payroll data. Job growth was robust across industries, with almost 70 percent of private industries expanding, the highest level for this metric since 1998. Businesses added 86K, retail was up 50K, and manufacturing, a key sector that had been a laggard in recent months, added 28K, mostly in the higher paying durable goods sector.

Smoothing out monthly ups-and-downs, this month’s JB smoother©, which averages monthly gains over 3, 6, and 12 months, shows a nice acceleration in payroll gains. Over the past three months, net job growth is up 278,000 per month. Over the past year, this measure is up 228,000, showing an acceleration of 50,000 jobs per month.

Source: BLS, my analysis

[BTW, in deference to this simple way of smoothing out monthly noise, the BLS announced that in coming months it will add three-month averaging of monthly payroll gains to its summary table. Good for them!]

In another sign of improving labor market demand, average weekly hours ticked up a tenth, matching pre-recession levels. The unemployment rate, which comes from a survey of households (as opposed to business establishments, like the data discussed above) held steady at 5.8 percent (it actually ticked up a touch, from 5.76 percent to 5.82 percent, but who’s counting?).

But the key takeaways here are:

– Unlike the more reliable payroll survey, employment was unchanged in the household survey.

– In a solid sign for the job market recovery, the labor force participation rate continues to hold steady, at 62.8 percent last month — after falling sharply through the recession and recovery, this important measure of labor utilization has been flat now for over a year.

– While the numbers of long-term unemployed and involuntary part-timers remains high, especially more than five-years into an economic expansion, they both fell last month, continuing a downward trend.

Finally, turning to the wage story, as noted, average hourly wages got a nice $0.09 (0.4 percent) bump in November, but that just made up some lost ground from recent monthly stagnation. Thus, the year-over-year measure is still stuck around two percent, where it’s been since around 2010. With topline inflation last seen rising at 1.7 percent percent, this translates into quite modest real gains for the buying power of the hourly wage.

But with the added weekly hours, weekly earnings are up 2.4 percent, year-over-year, the highest growth rate in a year. Here again, however, real gains still equate to less than one percent, and they’re coming from more work at stagnant real earnings. The punchline of all this is that the job market appears to be solidly on the mend. Yet slack remains, and this is most clearly seen in the wage data.

As I’ll get to later in the day, recent developments in the relationship between slack and wage growth suggest that it will take more than falling unemployment and strong payroll gains to offset the historically low bargaining power of most American workers. For the benefits of growth to really show up in paychecks, we need to not only get to truly full employment, but to stay there for a good long while! That exclamation point is so they can hear me all the way over at the Fed building on Constitution Ave.

This post originally appeared at Jared Bernstein’s On The Economy blog.

WASHINGTON — One casualty of the House budget talks to avert a government shutdown may be a proposed rule requiring investment advisers to act in the best interests of their clients, according to multiple House Democratic sources.

Labor activists and financial reform experts have heralded the rule as a critical step toward enhancing retirement security. The policy would impose a “fiduciary duty” on financial professionals who oversee retirement accounts, barring them from considering the potential profits of their own firm when choosing investments. Instead, investment managers would have to pick stocks, bonds and other assets based only on what was in the best interest of retirees.

The rule was first introduced by the Department of Labor in 2010, but was tabled in 2011 after massive pushback from the financial industry. Consumer advocates have been pressing the Labor Department to implement the rule. But according to House Democratic staffers, top negotiators in the latest budget talks are considering a plan that would effectively gut it.

Republicans are pushing a budget rider that would require the Labor Department to mediate its rule with the more corporate-friendly Securities and Exchange Commission, which financial reform experts said they believe would render the proposal toothless, if it ever made it out of the bureaucratic negotiations at all. The GOP-led House has voted to block the Labor Department from moving forward with the rule in the past.

As defined-benefit pensions gradually disappear from the U.S. workplace, workers are increasingly relying on 401(k) plans for retirement security. Backers of the fiduciary rule say it would give workers some basic protection by discouraging 401(k) brokers from pushing plans based on the fees going to those brokers’ firms — fees that, over the course of a worker’s career, can significantly eat into a retirement plan’s potential growth.

“That’s why it’s needed — to have some consumer protection,” said Robert Hiltonsmith, an expert on retirement security at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “Now, unless they voluntarily become a fiduciary … they are not legally required to act in your best interests at all. They work in their firms’ best interest, which is not yours.”

By subjecting the Labor Department rule to SEC consideration, opponents of the rule would be able to vote to hamstring it without formally casting a vote to terminate a straightforward retirement security provision.

Opponents of rules targeting Wall Street derivatives — the complex financial products at the heart of the 2008 banking meltdown — have pushed several bills that would have required the SEC to sign off on new regulations required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

House leadership is taking the plan seriously, however, in talks over the so-called CROmnibus — a budget package that would fund parts of the government through the end of next year, and other parts for only a few weeks.

While most of the talk over the funding bill has revolved around Republican retribution for President Barack Obama’s executive order shielding millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, Wall Street lobbyists have been advocating for their own relief. Banks are also pressing Congress to curb one reform to the derivatives market that were passed under Dodd-Frank. That bill had banned banks from trading some derivatives from subsidiaries that receive taxpayer insurance, a provision that lawmakers are considering delaying or rolling back.

“We cannot allow Wall Street banks to add any provisions to the year-end spending bill that would continue to leave taxpayers on the hook and undermine the ability of regulators to prevent future bailouts,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Friday in a statement.

It was unclear whether either the fiduciary duty law or the derivatives language will make the final House budget bill, or whether the Senate would include either in its own legislation. A House proposal is expected by Monday evening. If Congress does not vote to fund the government for at least a short period by Thursday, the government will shut down.

HAZELWOOD, Missouri — After high school students across the country walked out of class earlier this week calling for greater police accountability, one school district in the very Missouri county where teenager Michael Brown was killed chose to highlight the repercussions for students who left their classrooms.

Hazelwood School District in north St. Louis County also consulted with local law enforcement to increase school security. The stricter security measures made Hazelwood West High School feel like “a prison,” one student said.

“At lunch there are officers at every exit, and you can’t leave class to use the bathroom without a police escort,” the student told The Huffington Post.

After Hazelwood high school students walked out on Tuesday, Superintendent Grayling Tobias issued a statement noting that the district does “not condone disruptive behavior.” On Wednesday, he provided an update warning that students will face consequences if they “choose to be disruptive.”

Students who participated in walkouts could face consequences affecting “A+ status, attendance at prom or graduation, participation in athletic or other extracurricular activities and academic grades,” Tobias announced. That “A+ status” refers to a program that awards students two tuition-free years at a junior college.

Tobias, who sits on the new Ferguson Commission formed by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D), stated that the school district respects its students’ First Amendment rights. But he encouraged parents to talk with their children about “the importance of attending class.”

Parents responded on Facebook to Tobias’ letter. Some expressed approval of the threatened consequences and increased security, while others felt that more should be done to shield students from any disruption in their education.

One post read, “Wrong tactic to take. You should be more concerned about the students that stayed in class and were trying to learn something. Obviously you are not the person we should be trusting our children’s safety too.”

Some students at Hazelwood East High School were seen yelling at police officers during a walkout this week. According to the school district’s Facebook page, “students identified on the video did face consequences.”

Hazelwood School District, which covers a large chunk of north St. Louis County, has three public high schools: Hazelwood West, East and Central. Nationally, it may be best known as the subject of a landmark 1988 Supreme Court decision holding that student newspapers at public high schools are not entitled to full First Amendment protections. That case arose after Hazelwood East administrators nixed articles about divorce and teen pregnancy from the student newspaper.

Earlier this week, high school students in the neighboring Ferguson/Florissant School District also took part in the nationwide walkouts. But their protests were treated more like a field trip on free speech and public dissent — and didn’t come with heavy consequences.

Alphonse Boure, 15, a student at McCluer South-Berkeley High in Ferguson, said his school’s walkout was supported by the head principal.

“At first, the kids were all rowdy because we didn’t think the principal was going to go with it — until he told us to go to the auditorium. We sat down and we talked about it. He said if this is what we want to do, then he’ll walk with us. We walked down the street. Then we got on a bus to take us back to school,” said Boure.

He suggested the principal’s presence was part of the reason he decided to join the demonstration. “I felt safe because I was with the principal. If I just walked out and there wasn’t any guards around, then I would’ve felt like I was in trouble,” said Boure.

Similarly, at Normandy High, the school that Brown had attended, the superintendent and principal joined students in protesting on Friday, according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter.

On a recorded phone call, sent out to Hazelwood School District parents on Friday evening, Superintendent Tobias said how pleased he was that no students walked out of class that day. Tobias explained that it was important for them to remain in school because of this week’s state testing. He noted that the test scores would affect the school district’s rating, which could in turn affect local property values.

By Christine DiGangi, Credit.com

After years of keeping his credit cards locked in a fire safe, Peter got an unpleasant surprise: a collection of statements totaling more than $55,000. Peter alleges his wife had broken into the safe and gone on a shopping spree at high-end department stores. To say the least, he wasn’t happy about it, but they remained married for a few years, eventually divorcing in 2012.

“Then she cheated on me, hired an attorney, and I ended up being stuck paying $60K to her in alimony, and ended up with the $55K all stuck in my name,” he claimed to Reddit recently. He proceeded to describe how he paid off that $115,000 in just 2 years.

How He Tackled Six-Figure Debt in 2 Years

The newly divorced Peter couldn’t stand owing that sum. It bothered him enough to quickly come up with a plan to get rid of it as fast as possible.

“I don’t like bad things hanging over my head,” he told Credit.com. “It’s kind of a silly backstory. Back when I was a kid, if my mom would serve broccoli, and that was the only thing on the plate I didn’t like, I would eat it first. It’s an approach I carried with me.”

He gathered his bank statements and figured out what he needed to do in order to pay the $115,000 in a year and a half. That timeline expanded to 2 years after his company experienced a decline in sales and he had to give himself a sizable pay cut (he started a medical device sales company in 2006).

“By the time I came up with the plan, it was really just a matter of being disciplined,” he said. He sold everything he could on Craigslist and eBay. He called every credit card company and asked for a break on interest rates, which all but one card issuer granted. He canceled everything he could live without, including cable, home Internet and his cellphone. He never ate out and never went shopping — not even at thrift stores. His fridge went without beer. The only need he mentioned in his Reddit post? Soap.

He also said he didn’t have too much trouble maintaining a social life where he lived in Kansas City.

“There’s plenty of things you can do for free,” Peter said. “Going over to friends’ houses, going to church events — 30 years ago nobody had Internet, nobody had cellphones, and they were just fine.”

As far as modern connectivity went, he still had Internet access at his office and public libraries if he needed it, and he figured he could run over and bang on the neighbor’s door if he had an emergency.

“It was probably more extreme than most people would want to be,” he said.

How Others Can Learn From His Plan

For those curious about his ex-wife’s alleged spending escapades: Peter said she didn’t buy much, so he didn’t notice the extra items. What she bought, however, was incredibly expensive, Peter says. There was a $20,000 diamond bracelet and a $7,000 designer purse among her purchases.

Peter, 34 and now remarried, eliminated the $115,000 (a $10,000 credit card payment) on July 20, and he celebrated by buying himself a new car. He drives thousands of miles a week for work, and he rode his car to 250,000 miles while he was repaying the debt. He now keeps his credit cards in a safe deposit box.

He knows he had an easier time with his debt than others may have — he had no one to provide for but himself, and he had a great salary (about $80,000) to work with. Regardless, had things been different, he would have been happy with making as much progress as possible, he said.

“I got a lot of private messages on Reddit saying ‘You’re rich, you make $80,000 a year so your story is stupid,” Peter said. “If I was making $20,000 a year and I paid off $1,000 a year, I would feel good about it. … If you’re married with kids and have a lot of responsibilities, it may not be possible to cut everything out like that, but if you’re a single person in your 20s or 30s with a lot of debt, there are always options.”

Cutting out expenses was huge to his plan’s success, but so was his communication with the credit card companies. With the exception of one credit card, he was able to lower his rates with every other card for several months, so he attacked them one by one to pay them off by the time they would have raised his rates again. The card that didn’t budge on his rate was paid off first. The hard thing wasn’t getting the company to accommodate his plan — it was sticking to his payment schedule so that plan actually worked.

Having a large credit card balance, particularly if your debt takes up a high percentage of your available credit, can hurt your credit standing because debt utilization is the second most important factor in your credit scores. (Paying on time is the most important.) If you want to see how your debt is affecting your credit, Credit.com’s free tools let you see two of your credit scores along with a breakdown of what factors are affecting your scores. When you understand how your credit behaviors affect your credit standing, it’s easier to come up with a targeted plan to get out of debt, and to build your credit over time.

This article originally appeared on Credit.com. Christine DiGangi covers personal finance for Credit.com. Previously, she managed communications for the Society of Professional Journalists, served as a copy editor of The New York Times News Service and worked as a reporter for the Oregonian and the News & Record.