Winnipeg firefighters have brought a fire under control on the rooftop of a north Main Street building that houses a drugstore and coffeeshop.
That's why we had to give these cool sticks from Almay a try — they're little cotton swabs that are pre-dosed with remover so you can get rid of beauty boo boos no matter where you are. See what our senior beauty editor Megan had to say about them in this video.
Almay Makeup Eraser Sticks, $4.40, available at
Drugstore.com
Video still by Eric Chakeen
Utah cancer docs: Use of small 'practice' pharmacy in question
The Salt Lake Tribune
Published Feb 3, 2012 10:59AM MDT
Copyright 2011 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Washington Post
columnist Ezra Klein
teamed up recently with some folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to calculate which recent president's policies have led to the largest growth in the national debt. George W. Bush was the winner. And not by a nose.
From 2001 to 2009, Bush's policies, including two wars, higher Pentagon spending in addition to those wars, tax cuts, higher discretionary spending and the prescription drug program contributed $5.1 trillion to the nation's debt. From 2009 to 2017 (using projections for 2011-2017), Obama's policies have added or will add $983 billion. Not even in the same ballpark. Klein:
There is a way to tally the effects Obama has had on the deficit. Look at every piece of legislation he has signed into law. Every time Congress passes a bill, either the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the effect it will have on the budget over the next 10 years. And then they continue to estimate changes to those bills. If you know how to read their numbers, you can come up with an estimate that zeros in on the laws Obama has had a hand in. [...]
So the center built a baseline that includes everything that predated Obama and everything we knew about the path of the economy and the actual trajectory of spending through August 2011. Deviations from the baseline represent decisions made by the Obama administration. Then we measured the projected cost of Obama’s policies.
Here are the calculations:
For Bush:
$1.812 trillion from the "Bush tax cuts"; $853 billion from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; $616 in higher Pentagon spending outside those wars; $608 billion in non-defense discretionary spending; $480 billion in "other tax"-related matters; $293 billion in entitlement changes; $224 billion in spending for Trouble Assets Relief Program (TARP) and the Housing and Economic Recovery Act; and $180 billion for the prescription drug bill.
For Obama:
$874 billion for the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (the stimulus package); $620 billion for the two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts; $324 in "other mandatory spending"; and $113 billion in "other revenue." Subtotal: $1.931 trillion. Subtracted from that are policies that reduce the net deficit: $502 billion in automatic spending cuts; $271 reduction in defense spending; $123 billion in reduced health care spending; $51 billion in reduced non-defense discretionary spending. Total: $983 billion.
There are all kinds of complications in this kind of calculation. It can be argued, for one thing, that we have a good handle, three years after Bush left office, on how big a debt pile his deficit spending ended up being. But, with Obama, we've only got three years of actual results and five years of "projection," which, in layperson's terms, amounts to "educated speculation."
Klein offers some other caveats, too. It is taken as a given by far too many in our national economic conversation, that "all deficit spending is equal and all of it is bad." That is completely wrong, and the austerity measures that the British government has imposed and the budget balancing of the Roosevelt administration in 1937 provide a perfect examples of why it's wrong: It can make economic downturns worse and cripple recoveries already under way.
In Keynesian terms, the better solution is to increase demand by stimulating the economy in recession, even if you have to borrow big do it. In good times, you pay off what you have borrowed and store up a surplus against the bad times. Modern Monetary Theorists challenge—
from the left
—the efficacy of the Keynesian approach in today's economy. But that's a long discussion for another time. What President Bush did pleased neither.
Eleven Februarys ago, in his first major speech to Congress, Bush
vowed that the entire national debt would be paid off by ... well, by right now. Not quite what happened. Indeed, what did happen on Bush's watch is somewhat reminiscent of what took place under another fellow who made big talk about reducing the national debt: Ronald Reagan.
He came into office talking about how the not-quite-yet $1 trillion in national debt at the time would make a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high. Like so much else, he got that wrong; at four inches per million, it would only be 63 miles high. At any rate, by the time he left office eight years later, the debt had nearly tripled, to $2.7 trillion, and his metaphorical stack of $1,000s had soared 164 miles high. During Bush's eight years, based on Klein's and the CBPP's calculations, another 321 miles were added to the stack.
So next time Mitt Romney mouths off about the national debt and one of your TGIF or Facebook friends declares that the guy has a point, you might remind her exactly who was in office when most of that debt was accumulated.
If the New England Patriots try to run a fake sweep on Sunday, there's an awfully good chance that Osi Umenyiora or Jason Pierre-Paul of the New York Giants will be there to shut things down. And if fake Super Bowl merchandise is being sold, then Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be there to shut that down, too.
Operation "Fake Sweep," which began on Oct. 1, 2011 and ended this past week, is an anti-counterfeit operation which resulted in $4.8 million worth of fake NFL merchandise being confiscated, including 42,692 non-authentic Super Bowl items. Special agents with ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) along with officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) were part of the national sweep which targeted stores, flea markets and street vendors. This effort also included targeting several hundred websites where contraband came into the country from overseas.
Last year, a similar operation resulted in $3.72 million in fake NFL related apparel and collectibles being seized. The uptick in merchandise and dollar value this year is a sign to ICE that counterfeiting is a real and growing problem.
"Counterfeiting is a modern-day crime of global proportions, and selling counterfeit football jerseys is just the tip of the iceberg of intellectual property rights crime. Nearly any item that will turn a profit is subject to being counterfeited. Counterfeiters are pervasive, increasingly sophisticated, and a real threat to the U.S. economy," Gail Montenegro, spokeswoman for ICE, told Yahoo! Sports.
"This type of crime takes jobs away from American workers and profits away from U.S. businesses."
The NFL, which assisted in this operation, was not the only professional sports league to feel the pinch of counterfeit sales. The dragnet for "Fake Sweep" netted items from Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League. All told, ICE reports 65,262 counterfeit items worth $6.4 million taken in by the four-month operation.
"Our message to consumers is simple — 'buyer beware.' Purchase from reputable dealers. Just as guns and drugs are smuggled into the U.S., these counterfeit items were brought into the country by criminals and the profits go to further their criminal activities. Look for quality stitching, NFL holograms, and substandard goods, just to name a few," Montenegro said.
"Counterfeiters use inferior materials and craftsmanship to produce look-alike products that do not benefit the teams, the players, or the hard working employees of legitimate U.S. companies and trademark holders."
ICE will continue "Fake Sweep" throughout the Super Bowl.
Follow Kristian R. Dyer on Twitter
@KristianRDyer
In its
final investigation update Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 20 people in seven states were infected with an antibiotic-resistant strain of
Salmonella Typhimurium.
That's one more case than was reported in the CDC's
Jan. 5 update. "This particular outbreak appears to be over," the CDC stated.
New Hampshire and New York each reported six outbreak cases, while Maine reported four. Hawaii, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Vermont each reported one individual sickened by the outbreak strain of bacteria.
Their illnesses began around Oct. 8, 2011. The ill people ranged in age from one year to 79 years. Median age was 45. Of 17 ill people with information available, 8 were hospitalized.
The epidemiologic investigation showed that among 19 of the ill people who provided food histories, 14 - or 74 percent - reported eating ground beef in the week before they were sick. Fourteen of those reported buying the ground beef from Hannaford stores.
Testing by public health labs in New York and Maine isolated the outbreak strain of Salmonella Typhimurium from two different samples of leftover ground beef purchased from Hannaford supermarkets and collected from unrelated case patients' homes.
On Dec. 15, when the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced the recall of an undisclosed amount of fresh ground beef sold by Hannaford, it said the Scarborough, ME-based grocery chain kept only "limited records," so that the agency could not determine who had supplied the contaminated beef.
Hannaford regrinds its own beef using meat from several suppliers.
The
Portland Press Herald reported Jan. 28 that FSIS plans to close its investigation into the source of the contaminated beef.
Daniel Engeljohn, FSIS assistant administrator, told the newspaper Hannaford ground meat from various suppliers without cleaning the equipment in between batches, which he said raised the possibility of cross-contamination from commingling.
Although there is no requirement that retailers clean grinding equipment between batches of meat from different suppliers, Engeljohn said the USDA recommends it, along with more detailed information about suppliers in grinding logs. He said those recommendations may soon become requirements.
U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-ME, of Maine, has said that if the USDA does not issue new rules on its own, she will propose legislation mandating it do so.
"We definitely need stricter regulations for large retailers so they are required to keep more detailed records on the ground beef they sell, so it's possible to track down the source of contamination," she said in a prepared statement.
CDC Outbreak Map:
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