Suspect, two others, killed in Ore. mall shooting

Updated 10:30 p.m. ET

PORTLAND, Oregon A gunman opened fire in a suburban Portland shopping mall Tuesday, killing two people and wounding another before apparently killing himself as people were doing their Christmas shopping, authorities said. One other person was reported injured.

Clackamas County sheriff's Lt. James Rhodes said authorities were still trying to get more details about the situation at the Clackamas Town Center. So far, the shooter has only been described as an "adult male."

Authorities said there was no indication that there was more than one gunman. Officials say police did not fire a shot during the incident.

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Cell phone video: Ore. mall evacuated after shooting

"At first no one really knew what was going down," Mario, a kiosk worker inside the mall, told CBS affiliate KOIN in Portland. "We heard six shots at first, and then people scattered like crazy, everybody left."

"The shots were really loud and really scary... It was echoing all through the mall, so nobody knew where it was coming from at first," witness Larisa Tereahova said.

Another witness said the Macy's inside the mall opens into the food court area, where it was reported the shootings took place. Bautista said it sounded like the shots were coming from that direction.

Macy's employees Pam Moore and Austin Patty told the AP the shooter was short, with dark hair, dressed in camouflage. He had body armor and a rifle and was wearing a white mask, they said.

"I heard about 20 shots and everyone hit the ground," Moore said. "That's when we all just ran."

Governor John Kitzhaber released a statement late Tuesday, saying: "My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. I appreciate the work of the first responders and their quick reaction to this tragic shooting. Oregon State Police Superintendent Rich Evans is on the scene. I have directed State Police to make any and all necessary resources available to local law enforcement."

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Gunman 'Tentatively' Identified in Oregon Shooting

A masked gunman who opened fire in the crowded Clackamas Town Center mall in suburban Portland, Ore., killing two individuals before killing himself, has been "tentatively" identified by police, though they have not yet released his name.

The shooter, wearing a white hockey mask, black clothing, and a bullet proof vest, tore through the mall around 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, entering through a Macy's store and proceeding to the food court and public areas spraying bullets, according to witness reports.

Police have not released the names of the deceased. Clackamas County Sheriff's Department Lt. James Rhodes said authorities are in the process of notifying victims' families.

The injured victim has been transported to a local hospital, where she is "fighting for her life," according to Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts.

PHOTOS: Oregon Mall Shooting

Nadia Telguz, who said she was a friend of the injured victim, told ABC News affiliate KATU-TV in Portland that the woman was expected to recover.

"My friend's sister got shot," Teleguz told KATU. "She's on her way to (Oregon Health and Science University hospital). They're saying she got shot in her side and so it's not life-threatening, so she'll be OK."

Christopher Onstott/Pamplen Media Group/Portland Tribune

911 Calls From New Jersey Supermarket Shooting Watch Video

Witnesses from the shooting rampage said that a young man who appeared to be a teenager ran through the upper level of Macy's to the mall food court, firing multiple shots, one right after the other, with what is believed to be a black, semi-automatic rifle.

More than 10,000 shoppers were at the mall during the day, police said. Roberts said that officers responded to the scene of the shooting within minutes, and four SWAT teams swept the 1.4 million-square-foot building searching for the shooter. He was eventually found dead, an apparent suicide.

"I can confirm the shooter is dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," Rhodes said. "By all accounts there were no rounds fired by law enforcement today in the mall."

Roberts said more than 100 law enforcement officers responded to the shooting, and at least four local agencies were working on the investigation, including the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which is working to trace the shooter's weapon.

READ: Guns in America: A Statistical Look

Roberts also said that shoppers, including two emergency room nurses and one physician who happened to be at the mall, provided medical assistance to victims who had been shot. Other shoppers helped escort individuals out of the mall and out of harm's way, he said.

"There were a huge amount of people running in different directions, and it was chaos for a lot of citizens, but true heroes were stepping up in this time of high stress," Roberts said. "E.R. nurses on the scene were providing medical care to those injured, a physician on the scene was helping provide care to the wounded."

Mall shopper Daniel Martinez told KATU that he had just sat down at a Jamba Juice inside the mall when he heard rapid gunfire. He turned and saw the masked gunman, dressed in all black, about 10 feet away from him.

"I just saw him (the gunman) and thought, 'I need to go somewhere,'" Martinez said. "It was so fast, and at that time, everyone was moving around."

Martinez said he ran to the nearest clothing store. As he ran, he motioned for another woman to follow; several others ran to the store as well, hiding in a fitting room. They stayed there for an hour and a half until SWAT teams told them it was safe to leave the mall.

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Doha summit launches climate damage aid

The latest summit to stop climate change, held in Doha, Qatar, over the past two weeks has been roundly slammed. Little was agreed to curb greenhouse gas emissions and the latest modelling, carried out by the Climate Action Tracker consortium shows global averages temperatures are still set to rise by at least 3 °C above pre-industrial levels.

There was one breakthrough: developing countries won a promise from developed ones that they would compensate them for losses and damage caused by climate change. The deal offers the promise of large amounts of climate aid. But first, science will have to catch up with politics.

All countries will suffer from climate change. There will be consequences even if humanity slashed its emissions and stopped temperatures rising more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, the stated goal of the UN negotiations. In actual fact, with emissions rising faster than ever, a 3 or 4 °C rise is likely this century.

The consequences will be manifold. Deserts will spread and lethal heatwaves become more frequent. Changes in rainfall will bring droughts, floods and storms, while rising seas will swamp low-lying areas, obliterating valuable territory. Food production will fall.

Before Doha kicked off, the charities ActionAid, CARE International and WWF released a report arguing that rich countries should compensate poor countries for such damages. Tackling the Limits to Adaptation points out that climate change will cost countries dearly, both economically and in less tangible ways such as the loss of indigenous cultures.

Two-pronged approach

So far, climate negotiations have taken a two-pronged approach to the problem. On the one hand, they have sought to create incentives or imperatives to cut emissions. On the other, they have established a pot of money for poor countries to pay for measures that will help them fend off the unavoidable consequences of climate change – such as sea walls and irrigation systems.

That, according to some, leaves a third element missing. Helping those who suffer the consequences of climate change is a moral obligation and must be part of any treaty on climate change, says Niklas Höhne of renewable energy consultancy Ecofys. The idea of climate compensation has been around since the early 1990s, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated.

In Doha, a coalition including China, the Alliance of Small Island States and the G77 group of developing countries pushed for it to revived.

They proposed a scheme that would decide when countries had suffered climate harms, and compensate them. It would be a form of insurance, and the greatest international aid scheme ever. The idea gained momentum after Typhoon Bopha struck the Philippines last week, and that country's negotiator Naderev "Yeb" Saño broke down in tears during a speech. And, although developed nations had little incentive to agree, the conference concluded with a promise to set something up next year.

Compensation poses a fundamental challenge to climate science, which still struggles to work out if trends and events are caused by greenhouse gases or would have happened anyway. "We can't say that an individual event was caused by climate change," says Nigel Arnell of the University of Reading, UK. "What we can do is say that the chance of it happening was greater."

Systematic tests

Some climatologists are now running systematic tests to decide whether extreme weather events are caused by climate change. They run climate models with and without humanity's emissions. If the odds of a particular event are different, it suggests it was at least partially driven by emissions. By this measure, the 2003 European heatwave and 2011 Texas drought were both made more likely by human emissions.

But this science is in its infancy. We can confidently attribute large-scale trends and temperature changes, says Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. But changes in rainfall, and short-term events like hurricanes, are harder because we do not really understand them. Trenberth speculates that superstorm Sandy would not have flooded the New York subways without climate change, but says it's not possible to prove.

Arnell says that might prove unworkable. Gradual changes – such as rising sea levels, melting glaciers and ocean acidification – are easy to attribute to climate change but their consequences difficult to cost; sudden events are easy to cost but difficult to attribute.

There may be another possibility. Rather than examining individual events, climate models could predict the extra climate-related costs each country would experience, allowing regular payouts. "That would be a way round it," says Arnell. Delegates at next year's conference will have to consider these questions.

Positive step

Harjeet Singh of ActionAid in New Delhi, India, calls the Doha deal "a positive step forward". But it is only an agreement in principle: no money was committed, and even a promise to do so in the future was left out of the final text. Edward Davey, the UK's secretary of state for energy and climate change, said it was "far too early" to talk about committing money. "We aren't saying there should be compensation," he said.

Singh says the developed world would save money by cutting emissions now, rather than letting temperatures rise and then paying compensation. Small island states were keen to get an agreement on loss and damage because emissions cuts are going so slowly, making dangerous climate change almost certain. The Doha agreement is a first step towards dealing with the consequences of that failure.

On 'other business'

Aside from agreeing to make compensation available for loss and damage, the Doha summit achieved little. Nearly two decades ago, the world's governments set out to agree a binding deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Doha included some baby steps towards a deal in 2015, but that is not guaranteed and in any case will come too late to stop dangerous climate change. Only Lebanon and the Dominican Republic made new emissions pledges.

The talks were bogged down in rows over financing. In a deal that was separate to the adaptation fund, developed countries had promised in 2009 to deliver $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor nations prepare for climate change. Between 2009 and 2012 they allocated $10 billion a year. In Doha they refused to say how they would scale that up, simply promising to "continue" – leaving developing countries unsure if or when they would get more.

The Kyoto protocol was renewed until 2020, but its global effect is likely to be limited. Its value is partly symbolic, to show that binding agreements can be reached, and as one of many small and medium-scale projects to cut emissions.

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China bank lending rises in November

SHANGHAI: Chinese banks boosted lending in November from October, official figures showed Tuesday, as Beijing seeks to preserve the budding recovery in the world's second largest economy.

Chinese banks extended 522.9 billion yuan ($83.9 billion) in new loans last month, up from 505.2 billion yuan in October, the central bank said in a statement.

But the figure was below market expectations of 550 billion yuan, according to an average forecast of 15 economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires.

China has been encouraging bank lending to bolster economic growth, which has slowed for seven straight quarters and hit a more than three-year low of 7.4 per cent in the third quarter, hurt by weak demand overseas and at home.

Policymakers have cut interest rates twice this year and trimmed the amount of cash banks must place in reserve three times since December 2011 as they try to encourage lending and pump up growth.

The government over the weekend released a series of figures showing continued strength in the domestic economy, but lower-than-expected trade data for November released on Monday underlined the fragility of the recovery.

Economists said the central bank will continue to maintain its relatively loose monetary policy but some ruled out the likelihood of immediate cuts in interest rates and banks' reserve requirements.

"We expect the government to sustain the current policy stance which could be featured as marginally pro-growth without big-bang stimulus," Lu Ting, China economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said in a research note.

- AFP/ck

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SEAL killed in Afghan rescue identified

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: High School classmates say Checque always knew he wanted to join the military


• The Defense Department identifies the SEAL slain in the rescue effort


• Dr. Dilip Joseph was among three abducted while returning from a rural clinic, officials say


• Two local Afghan leaders say smugglers were responsible; ISAF blames the Taliban

Read a version of this story in Arabic.

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- The U.S. Defense Department on Monday identified the SEAL killed during a successful raid to free a captive doctor in Afghanistan.

Petty Officer 1st Class Nicolas D. Checque, 28, of Monroeville, Pennsylvania, died Saturday during the effort to free Dr. Dilip Joseph, the Navy said. NATO commanders believed Joseph was in imminent danger from his captors when the raid took place.

While the Defense Department announcement said only that Checque belonged to an "East Coast-based Special Warfare Unit," a U.S. official said the man was a member of the Navy's Special Warfare Development Group, more commonly known as SEAL Team Six. The elite unit is the same one that took part in the raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The official didn't know if the SEAL who died was involved in that operation.

"He gave his life for his fellow Americans, and he and his teammates remind us once more of the selfless service that allows our nation to stay strong, safe and free," President Barack Obama said of the slain SEAL before his identity was made public.

Armed men kidnapped Joseph and two other staff members for the international aid group Morning Star on Wednesday as they returned from a rural medical clinic in eastern Kabul province.

Tribal leader Malik Samad and district chief Muhammad Haqbeen told CNN that Joseph and an Afghan doctor were abducted near the village of Jegdalek in the Sarobi district, just outside Kabul.

The International Security Assistance Force said Taliban insurgents kidnapped the men. Samad and Haqbeen identified the kidnappers as smugglers.

Morning Star said negotiations began "almost immediately" with the captors and went on sporadically into Saturday night, when two of the three were released.

The Afghan doctor's family paid $12,000 to the smugglers, Haqbeen and Samad said. Morning Star denied paying any "ransom, money or other consideration" to win the release of its staffers, and the raid to free Joseph came 11 hours later after the other two were released.

U.S. officials provided few details about the rescue effort, but Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said the SEALs "knew they were putting their lives on the line to free a fellow American from the enemy's grip."

Checque joined the Navy in 2002 after graduating from high school, according to a brief service record provided by the Defense Department. After attending recruit training in Illinois and advanced training in Virginia, he entered the seal program in April 2003.

He was assigned to his first SEAL unit in August 2004, and transferred to a second unit, presumably SEAL Team Six, in September 2008.

He received the Bronze Star and several other awards during his 10-year Naval career.

His former high school superiors and classmates at Norwin High School in North Huntington, Pennsylvania, remembered him as diligent and enthused about joining the military.

"He worked hard everyday and never complained," his former wrestling coach Rich Ginther told CNN affiliate WPXI. "I remember his senior year him basically telling us what he was training for, and it was to get in special forces."

The current vice principal, who graduated two classes ahead of Checque, called him a role model for the current students.

"It's scary to hear these kind of stories that come out," said Micheal Choby, "but I'm going to testament to the kind of man Nick built himself to be for these kids who are here aspiring to be in the military."

Former classmate Stefanie Stewart told CNN she sat next to Checque on the school bus almost every day.

"He always knew he wanted to go into the military," she said. "He was a very driven individual, had a very keen sense of mind. A strong-minded person. But underneath that, you could tell he had a good heart."

The rescued doctor has worked with Morning Star for three years. He serves as its medical adviser, and travels frequently to Afghanistan, the agency said.

Morning Star did not release the identities of the other two men, citing safety concerns.

Joseph is expected to return home to Colorado Springs, Colorado, within a few days, after medical examinations and debriefings, the agency sad.

On Sunday, his family extended condolences to the slain sailor's family.

"We are incredibly grateful for the multiple agencies of the U.S. government that have supported us in this difficult time, and especially the quick response by our military and partner allies to rescue Dilip," the family said. "They showed great heroism and professionalism."

Despite the kidnappings of Joseph and its two other staffers, Morning Star reiterated its "commitment to continue its work" in Afghanistan.

Read more: Low-key general thrust into spotlight as he takes over Afghanistan command

Read more: U.S. has work cut out to make sure Afghan forces are combat ready

Read more: Karzai says assassination try planned in Pakistan

CNN's Barbara Starr, Maria Ebrahimji, Deborah Doft, Dugal McConnell and Greg Botelho contributed to this report.

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Chicago gang violence shows no signs of stopping

(CBS News) CHICAGO - There is a war going on -- not overseas, but right here on the streets of America. A gang war has taken over parts of Chicago.

Over the weekend, 14 people were shot. Two were killed.

So far this year, there have been more than 2,364 shootings and 487 homicides.

CBS News National Correspondent Dean Reynolds rode along with Commander Leo Schmitz of Chicago Police Department's 7th district. The area is a gang-related swath of the city's South Side. They started to drive as children were leaving school for the day.

"When you have them coming out of school, and there's any kind of gang conflicts, you've got a mix like fire and gasoline," Schmitz said.

The gangs are fighting a war over turf, drugs and money.

"It's crazy," he said. "What used to be a fist fight now turns into, 'Let's go to the guns,'" Schmitz said.

Bullet tax eyed in bid to curb Chicago crime

Report: Chicago shootings leave 9 dead, 28 wounded over the weekend

Chicago police sergeant: "Tribal warfare" on the streets

Shooting deaths are up 20 percent in the city this year, though in the 7th district Schmitz and his team have managed to cut homicides by 30 percent.

He credits better intelligence from informants, increased patrols and a citywide crime-tracking database.

"We use the knowledge," Schmitz said. "So, if there's a shooting right here, we know that the retaliation will be a block down."

The police gave us a bulletproof vest for the trip, and within minutes it because crystal clear why.

A block away, a man walking was a target. The suspect was fleeing the scene.

"He done shot at me right here!" the man said.

Police apprehended a Chicago suspect who allegedly shot another man. The shooting supposedly has roots in gang violence.

/

CBS News

The commander and his men ran down the suspected shooter, 21-year-old Julian Gayles. Police think the shooting was probably gang-related.

The police also received the weapon. Schmitz described it as a 9mm Beretta.

"If you can see the hammer's already (up)," he said. "That means he just shot it."

Chicago has seized more guns this year than New York and Los Angeles combined. The violence is so bad that the heavily armed police now attend gang funerals to prevent revenge killings. Schmitz said he doesn't just want to maintain a level of clam.

"I want to win," Schmitz said. "So, we're going to always try to do better than we did before."

It didn't get much better this weekend. Among the victims was an off-duty cop.

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Woman Gets Life for Lottery Winner's Murder

DeeDee Moore, the Tampa woman accused of swindling and then killing lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare, was found guilty today of first degree murder and other charges, after she declined to take the stand and the defense rested without calling a single witness.

In addition to the murder charge, Moore was also found guilty of possessing and discharging a firearm resulting in death. Prosecutors did not pursue the death penalty in the case, and Moore was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

"After trial and listening to all of this over two weeks, words that were said cool, calculated, manipulated. Abraham Shakespeare was your prey and victim. Money was the route of evil you brought to Abraham. You are sentenced to life in prison you shall not be elegible for parole," Judge Emmet Battles said.

Jurors deliberated for more than three hours Monday before delivering their verdict.

Prosecutors argued that Moore, 40, befriended Shakespeare before he vanished in April 2009 after he'd won $30 million in the Florida lottery. After Shakespeare had given away most of his money to people who simply asked for it, Moore agreed to manage the little he had left, but instead, prosecutors said, stole his winnings and killed him.

During a dramatic trial Moore has broken down in tears several times, and at one point said that she went into anaphylactic shock while in custody after taking the drug Bactrim when she was having problems with cuts on her ankles from being cuffed every day.

Early today the defense announced it would rest its case without calling any witnesses. Moore did not testify during her trial.

Jay Conner/The Tampa Tribune/AP Photo

Florida Lotto Murder Trial: Bizarre Moments Watch Video

Florida Lottery Murder Trial: Letters to Victim's Family Watch Video

Dee Dee Moore Trial: Woman Accused of Murdering Lottery Winner Watch Video

"There is no witness that can say she ever admitted to doing the killing or participating as a principle in helping anyone else do the killing," Moore's defense attorney Byron Hileman said today.

In the courtroom this morning, Moore's friend, former inmate Rose Condora was accused of threatening witnesses by Tampa Judge Emmett Battles, and was thrown out of the courtroom.

Authorities say Shakespeare, 47, was shot twice in the chest by a .38-caliber pistol sometime in April 2009. He wasn't reported missing until November 2009. His body was found under a slab of cement in a backyard in January 2010.

Polk County authorities claim Moore offered someone a $200,000 house in exchange for reporting a false sighting of Shakespeare. She also allegedly sent the victim's son $5,000 in cash for his birthday, and used the victim's cellphone to send text messages purportedly from him.

Shakespeare's mother, Elizabeth Walker, also testified that Moore tried to hide that her son was missing, and said that he had AIDS.

Sentorria Butler, Shakespeare's ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child, also testified. Butler told the court last week that Moore is a divisive and manipulative woman who told her Shakespeare "ran off with the lady from the bank."

During the trial, jurors also watched a Walmart surveillance video that the prosecution said links Moore to Shakespeare's killing. The footage shows Moore making a $104 cash purchase of gloves, duct tape, plastic sheeting and other items detectives later found close to where Shakespeare's body was buried.

Jurors hearing the case also heard a rambling two-page letter that witness Greg Smith, a police informant who was a former friend of Shakespeare and supposed friend of Moore, says Moore allegedly forged while at a Comfort Inn & Suites in Lakeland, Fla.

The letter was meant to appear to be from Shakespeare, prosecutors said. They say the letter was a ruse to convince Shakespeare's mother that he was still alive. Moore attempted to cover her tracks while it was written, according to prosecutors.

During the trial, jurors had to be accompanied by a security escort into the courtroom after they told the judge Smith and Shakespeare's family and friends were making them feel uncomfortable outside the courthouse. None of the jurors had to be excused by the judge.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Female lemurs avoid the wrong love in the dark

IT IS the ultimate voice-recognition system. Without ever meeting him, a female lemur still knows the call of her father.

The ability to identify family members is important to avoid inbreeding. For large-brained mammals like apes that engage in complex social interactions this is relatively straightforward. Now, a team has shown that nocturnal grey mouse lemurs appear to do the same, even though lemurs are reared exclusively by their mothers (BMC Ecology, doi.org/jvx).

Study leader Sharon Kessler of Arizona State University in Tempe, believes that the young lemurs may associate calls similar to their own, or to those of male siblings, with their fathers.

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Tortoiseshell craftsmen adapt to new century

PARIS: What did Yves Saint Laurent, Jackie Kennedy and the architect Le Corbusier have in common? Their eyewear, for one, as clients of the luxury French tortoiseshell artisan, Bonnet.

Four decades after the trade in tortoiseshell was banned under the 1973 CITES convention, the fourth-generation family firm sees itself as custodian of a rare craft, fashioning made-to-measure spectacles from stocks amassed before the ban.

Bonnet describes its customers -- among them Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas or presidents Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac -- as "aesthetes" more concerned about timeless style than fashion.

Christian Bonnet, who learned the trade from his father and grandfather, holds the rank of "maitre d'art", an honorific title granted by France's culture ministry and currently held by just over 100 craftsmen nationwide.

Today jointly headed by Christian and his sons Franck and Steven, Bonnet turns out around 100 pairs of handmade tortoiseshell glasses per year for prices ranging from 3,500 to 30,000 euros (approximately S$5,520 to S$47,310)

"My father didn't want me to go into the trade, because of the problem with tortoiseshell supply," produced mainly from the shell of the endangered hawksbill turtle, Franck Bonnet told AFP.

With 12 grammes of tortoiseshell needed for one pair of glasses, the firm says it uses around two to three kilos per year.

Declared part of French national heritage in 2007, Bonnet will not say how much stock it holds, but the supply is finite.

"It is inconceivable that we would ever fish another turtle out of the ocean," says the 41-year-old, himself a staunch environmentalist.

So he decided a few years ago it was time to look to the future -- and to a wider market.

"For my father, my grandfather and great-grandfather before them, it was tortoiseshell, tortoiseshell, tortoiseshell only.

"I said to my father, 'You are the last tortoiseshell craftsman, but you are also the last hand-made eyewear maker. If we could only use more readily available materials, maybe I can keep our craft alive?'"

That is how from 2008 onwards, he introduced buffalo horn -- lowering the average frame price to between 1,200 and 1,500 euros, and acetate, for budgets between 850 and 1,150 euros.

Tortoiseshell aside, the dozen workers at its Paris boutique and workshop in Sens, a few hours southeast of the capital, now produce some 700 pairs using new materials.

The next step towards broadening what they offer is to come from customisation -- allowing people to change the size and colour on standard models.

Franck Bonnet says he loves watching Japanese tourists inspect his wares, and is mulling opening a boutique in Tokyo.

"They go over every last detail. You know you haven't put the effort in for nothing!"

Bonnet was snared in controversy recently when a star journalist, Audrey Pulvar -- then in a relationship with a Socialist minister -- was outed for wearing a pair of their steeply-priced glasses.

"It wasn't 12,000 euros, it wasn't 15,000 euros or 18,000!", as reported in the media, Bonnet told AFP, "Five thousand is more like it."

In other words, almost an entry-level model.

"It's true it is costly," Bonnet said. "But we artisans are not millionaires; this kind of high craft is extremely time-consuming."

Making glasses to measure means studying the face in minute detail.

"How high your ears are, the shape of your nose -- all have an incidence on the tilt of the lenses, and therefore on how well you see," he explained. And that is before all the different steps of shaping and polishing the frame.

"You can spend a crazy length of time on a pair of spectacles, redoing them two, three, five times to get them exactly right. What costs money is not marketing, it's what goes on the client's nose!"

-AFP/fl

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Obama, Boehner tackle fiscal cliff face-to-face

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• President Obama and House Speaker Boehner meet at the White House


• Their spokesmen issue identical statements about the first such talks in 23 days


• Democrats and the GOP have been sparring about efforts to avert the fiscal cliff


• Sen. Corker joins some Republicans as open to hiking tax rates on the wealthy

Washington (CNN) -- Twenty-three days since they last met face-to-face and 23 days before the fiscal cliff becomes a harsh reality, the two men most pivotal to the contentious budget talks sat down Sunday.

There was no evidence of a breakthrough, though President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner at least did agree on something: what, and what not, to say.

Sunday's White House meeting caught some by surprise, considering it had not been on the president's official schedule and the two sides have been sparring publicly, accusing each other of failing to work sincerely toward a compromise. After the talks ended, White House spokesman Josh Earnest and Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck issued identical statements.

"This afternoon, the president and Speaker Boehner met at the White House to discuss efforts to resolve the fiscal cliff. We're not reading out details of the conversation, but the lines of communication remain open."

The statements didn't give much insight into developments on the effort to prevent the U.S. government from going over the fiscal cliff, the term referring to the widespread automatic tax hikes and spending cuts that will take effect in January without a deal.

On Sunday, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde echoed numerous economic experts in predicting a sharp drop in confidence and "zero" U.S. economic growth if there's no agreement.

But the two political camps' matching words were remarkable, given what they have been saying about each for weeks.

Last Friday, for instance, Boehner reported "no progress" and accused the White House of having "wasted another week."

"There are a lot of things that are possible to put the revenue that the president seeks on the table, but none of it's going to be possible if the president insists on his position, insists on 'my way or the highway,'" the Ohio Republican told reporters.

Obama has held his ground, especially on his insistence that tax rates return to 1990s' levels for families with incomes higher than $250,000, while they'd remain the same for those making less than that.

After campaigning against any tax increases, many top Republicans have expressed willingness since the election to raise revenue by adjusting deductions and loopholes.

But Boehner and others have said any revenue hikes must be packaged with major spending cuts, including reforms to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. And they've resisted any tax rate hikes -- including for the wealthiest Americans -- as part of any deal.

There have been some public departures from that thinking however. On Sunday, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said he'd support raising taxes on the top 2% of households, arguing it will better position Republicans to negotiate for larger spending cuts to Social Security and Medicare despite opposition from many Democrats.

"A lot of people are putting forth a theory, and I actually think it has merit, where you go ahead and give the president ... the rate increase on the top 2%, and all of a sudden the shift goes back to entitlements," Corker said on "Fox News Sunday."

Corker is not entirely alone, as fellow Republican Sens. Tom Coburn, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe have said they could vote for such a limited tax hike.

There have been fewer higher-profile voices express that opinion in the House, though. One of them, Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, reiterated Sunday that he could go along with this scenario.

"You have to do something, and doing something requires the cooperation of the Senate, which the Democrats run, and the signature of the president," Cole said on CNN's "State of the Union."

But one of his colleagues, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, said the Republicans shouldn't budge. Despite the loss of Republican seats in the House and Senate, Blackburn argued voters affirmed support for the GOP on Election Day and "clearly said we don't want our taxes to go up."

"The president thinks he has momentum, I think he is running on adrenaline from the campaign," the Tennessee lawmaker told CNN.

This story was reported by Jessica Yellin, CNN's chief White House correspondent, in Washington and written by Greg Botelho in Atlanta.

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