A political summit on Friday at the White House left it to the Senate's top Democrat and Republican to work out a possible compromise to avoid the fiscal cliff, participants said. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, told reporters that the next 24 hours would be "very important" toward efforts to lessen the harshest impacts of the fiscal cliff, a combination of automatic tax hikes and deep spending cuts due to take effect at the start of the new year. "Whatever we come up with is going to be imperfect. Some people aren't going to like it, some people are going to like it less," Reid said on the Senate floor ... (full story)