‘Fiscal Cliff’ Deal Also Doles Out Millions for Hollywood, Railroads, Rum Producers

The mix of tax perks covering the next year, but with budget implications for the next two years includes these:

$430 million for Hollywood through “special expensing rules” to encourage TV and film production in the United States.  Producers can expense up to $15 million of costs for their projects.

$331 million for railroads by allowing short-line and regional operators to claim a tax credit up to 50 percent of the cost to maintain tracks that they own or lease.

$222 million for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands through returned excise taxes collected by the federal government on rum produced in the islands and imported to the mainland.

$70 million for NASCAR by extending a “7-year cost recovery period for certain motorsports racing track facilities.”

$59 million for algae growers through tax credits to encourage production of “cellulosic biofuel” at up to
$1.01 per gallon.

$4 million for electric motorcycle makers by expanding an existing green-energy tax credit for buyers of plug-in vehicles to include electric motorbikes. Read more >>

Ban 'killer robots,' rights group urges

Hollywood-style robots able to shoot people without permission from their human handlers are a real possibility and must be banned before governments start deploying them, Human Rights Watch warned Monday.

The report "Losing Humanity" -- co-produced by Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic -- also raises the alarm over the ethics of the looming technology.

Calling them "killer robots," it urges "an international treaty that would absolutely prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons."

The US military already leads the way in military robots, notably the unmanned aircraft or drones used for surveillance or attacks over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere. But these are controlled by human operators in ground bases and are not able to kill without authorization.

Fully autonomous robots that decide for themselves when to fire could be developed within 20 to 30 years, or "even sooner," the 50-page report said, adding that weapon systems that require little human intervention already exist. Read more >>

Movies suffer worst box-office slump in a decade

The North American box office hit a slump at the weekend, with top earner "The Possession" taking in less than $10 million and what could be the gloomiest overall haul since the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

With only a couple of new releases to tempt movie fans, horror movie "The Possession" pulled in an estimated $9.5 million in the United States and Canada. That's the first time since 2008 that no film took $10 million or more at the domestic box office. Early September is historically sluggish. After blockbuster releases over the summer, Hollywood studios reserve their big films for the November and December holidays.

But revenues for the three-day movie-going weekend were particularly low, with the total gross for all films expected to be $65-$68 million. If the numbers hold when final figures come in on Monday, it could make the weekend the worst since September 21-23 2001 - two weekends after 9/11 - when revenue topped out at $59.7 million. Read more >>