Ten Words from Today's NY Times - Dec. 27, 2012

With just five days left to make a deal, President Obama and members of the Senate were set to return to Washington on Thursday with no clear path out of their fiscal morass even as the Treasury Department warned that the government will soon be unable to pay its bills unless Congress acts.

If passed without a filibuster, that legislation could force the House speaker’s hand and quiet his raucous Republican conference.

The managers of this 164,000-employee factory, she surmised, believed that comfort encouraged sloth.

Foxconn, China’s largest private employer, pledged to sharply curtail workers’ hours and significantly increase wages — reforms that, if fully carried out next year as planned, could create a ripple effect that benefits tens of millions of workers across the electronics industry, employment experts say.

No other major manufacturer has pledged to abide by China’s work-hour laws in such a public manner.

The company has helped make China into a manufacturing juggernaut through strict discipline that is visible everywhere, even in the salutes managers give visiting executives.

Syria’s government suffered an embarrassing new setback as the top general responsible for preventing defections within the military became a defector himself, making what insurgents described on Wednesday as a daring back-roads escape by motorcycle across the border into Turkey.

“The regime army has lost control over most of the country,” the general said in an interview on the Saudi-owned channel, which has heavily criticized the Syrian government.

He also presided over a force that guarded prisons where civilian dissidents were held.

In the past few weeks, unconfirmed reports have also abounded about the possible defection of Syria’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, who had numerous foreign contacts and who disappeared from public view in early December.