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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced on Tuesday that it plans to ban the sale of “the most toxic rat and mouse poisons, as well as most loose bait and pellet products” to residential customers. The goal is to better protect children, pets and wildlife. “These changes are essential to reduce the thousands of accidental exposures of children that occur every year from rat and mouse control products and also to protect household pets,” said Steve Owens, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. The EPA also will require that all rat and mouse poisons

The economy gained 244,000 net jobs in April - the third straight month of solid gains. Yet the unemployment rate rose from 8.8 percent to 9 percent. How did that happen? It's because the government relies on two surveys for those figures, and they can diverge sharply from time to time. One is called the payroll survey. It asks companies and government agencies how many people they employ... The other is called the household survey. Government workers ask households about the employment status of adults living there. Those without jobs are asked whether they're looking for one. If they're not,...

...In 1996, top-loaders were pretty much the only type of washer around...Consumer Reports tested 18 models, 13 were "excellent" and five were "very good." By 2007, though, not one was excellent and seven out of 21 were "fair" or "poor." ...The culprit is the federal government's obsession with energy efficiency...washer standards demonstrate the harmfulness of the ever-growing body of efficiency mandates.

TAMPA, Fla. - There are new concerns for parents, as a common household spice is now being abused by teenagers to get high.  Video of kids smoking, eating and drinking large quantities of nutmeg to get high can be found all over YouTube.com. According to various online reports, Nutmeg contains Myristicin, a compound that can cause euphoria and hallucinations. Potential side effects from getting high off Nutmeg include: vomiting, dizziness and convulsions. When shown some of the YouTube videos, random people on the street were shocked to hear this was happening.  "What other kind of seasoning could you possibly try...

A Cabinet minister was branded 'abhorrent' today after saying that the state should not provide limitless support to benefits claimants with large families. Campaigners reacted with fury after the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt savaged the policy of sizeable handouts totalling more than the average household earns. Mr Hunt claimed that the Government's proposed cap on benefits reflected the need for claimants to 'take responsibility' for their children.

What do banking crises have to do with consumption? Jul 4th, 2010 by Michael Pettis Just three days after returning to Beijing from New York, I had to leave again, this time to a series of conferences in Torino, Italy, so it is hard to do much writing for my blog, especially since I won’t spend my free time in the hotel when there is so damned much food out here that urgently needs sampling. Still, I did want to write a hurried note about a topic of conversation that came up a lot while I was in the US...

While the market cheers on the fantastic job “growth” of March 2010, the more astute of us are concerned with a growing tide of personal bankruptcies. March 2010 saw 158,000 bankruptcy filings. David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff notes that this is an astounding 6,900 filings per day. This latest filing is up 19% from March 2009’s number which occurred at the absolute nadir of the economic decline, when everyone thought the world was ending. It’s also up 35% from last month’s (February 2010) number. Given the significance of this, I thought today we’d spend some time delving into numbers for the...

Whenever a demagogue wants to whip up hysteria about federal budget deficits, he or she invariably begins with an analogy to a household’s budget: “No household can continually spend more than its income, and neither can the federal government”. On the surface that, might appear sensible; dig deeper and it makes no sense at all. A sovereign government bears no obvious resemblance to a household. Let us enumerate some relevant differences. 1. The US federal government is 221 years old, if we date its birth to the adoption of the Constitution. Arguably, that is about as good a date as...

IMAGE: Most indoor household dust that collects on furniture and floors actually comes from outdoors, a new study finds. Where does it come from? Scientists in Arizona are reporting a surprising answer to that question, which has puzzled and perplexed generations of men and women confronted with layers of dust on furniture and floors. Most of indoor dust comes from outdoors. Their report is scheduled for the Nov. 1 issue of ACS' Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal. In the study, David Layton and Paloma Beamer point out that household dust consists of a potpourri that includes dead skin...

I thought other freepers might be interested in hearing about real world swine flu cases. This is my story. My children were to get their regular flu shoots last week, but the pediatrician office ran out. They were rescheduled for next week. We opted against the swine flu vaccination. On 10/20/2009 we received a phone call from the school nurse saying that one of my children was not feeling well and wanted to come home. No fever but was at the nurses office twice in the morning asking to come home. Strange, I thought, because my child was fine in...

Going into "household income" vs individual income. And CEO pay.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. households suffered a record-large 9 percent drop in wealth and pared debt in the fourth quarter as a deepening recession battered confidence and finances, Federal Reserve data showed on Thursday. Household net worth dropped by $5.1 trillion from the prior quarter to $51.5 trillion. For the full year, net worth dropped by $11.2 trillion, reflecting steep declines in the housing and stock markets. The declines in household net worth were the largest since quarterly and annual records began in 1951 and 1946, respectively, the Fed said. Since a second-quarter 2007 peak of $64.4 trillion, household wealth...

China to leapfrog Britain in household wealth Last Updated: 10:47am BST 07/05/2008 Chinese households will have the third greatest spending power in the world within a decade, leapfrogging their British counterparts. Barclays Wealth and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) ranked China's total household sector spending power at number seven in 2007. The UK was ranked third. But in a global forecast released today, Barclays and the EIU will say China's booming economy will propel it to number three by 2017, just ahead of Britain at number four. Although the figures are skewed because China is so populus, it is also...

Spending our way to financial ruinDec 22, 2007 6:00 AM (4 hrs ago) The San Francisco Examiner Newspaper SAN FRANCISCO - It is no coincidence that U.S. Comptroller General David Walker’s latest warning that the United States is literally spending its way into bankruptcy came the same week Congress passed a 3,416-page omnibus spending bill that no senator or representative will read. Walker’s warning is made all the more urgent because Congress — aided and abetted in many respects by the president — continues to pass massive spending bills with no idea of what’s contained in them. The federal government...

WASHINGTON — Friday brought good news on the economic front, with the Labor Department reporting that 308,000 jobs were added last month. But total payroll employment still appears sickly if one looks back over the last three years. There have been two million jobs lost since March 2001. Or have there? It depends, as usual, on which statistics you use. And there is reason to doubt the numbers from the payroll survey, which the Labor Department has used since 1939, because they give a misleading picture of the 2004 economy. The payroll survey counts jobs, not workers. But counting payroll...

<p>Sarah Kalliney doesn't have time to do her laundry, visit her parents or change the cat's litter box. She eats out six nights a week, uses a personal shopper and gets her groceries delivered to her doorstep.</p> <p>But the time-starved Manhattan executive, who bills at roughly $200 an hour, recently spent nearly 10 hours battling her cellphone company, Sprint PCS, over $9 in late fees.</p>

HOW MOM TEACHES DAUGHTER TO YELL AT DAD J. Grant Swank, Jr., POB 1984, Windham ME 04062 Pastor, New Hope Church, Windham ME It is very, very subtle — over time, involving complicated life situations, supported by fem bonding, allowing for anti-male emotions, pulling from the baser nature of the female, and so forth. Writing about this subject can be raw and refined. The refined part has to do with psychology and ethics. The raw part has to do with real life — madness, meanness, and basically lack of respect for father / husband. So let’s start with the bottom...