pileofcrapola

When you take a vacation, you get to explore a new place and get away from the daily grind. Of course, vacations require a fair amount of prep work, and the super useful tool IFTTT can help with that.

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You may already know common plants, like oleander or holly, that are harmful to dogs and cats, but if you’re thinking of buying a plant and aren’t sure if it is safe for your pet, the ASPCA’s searchable index can help.

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Soggy pie crust is the scourge of the pie-making world, but it can be easily prevented with a little bit of pre-filling baking. Exactly how long you pre-bake your crust depends on the filling you will be using, and Bon Appetit has some tips to help you determine how golden you should get it.

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Most of us don’t have a lot of time in the morning to cook a luxurious breakfast, but this technique from Epicurious delivers one of the most delicious-looking egg sandwiches I’ve seen in minutes, and all you need is an egg, a microwave, and some sandwich fixings (you know: bread, cheese, and a few condiments.)

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Tea only plays second fiddle to water when it comes to global popularity, and yet so many of us know so little about it . That’s why this episode of Mental Floss’ List Show is dedicated to 36 different tea facts you may not know.

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Of all the games with tens of colorful heroes and millions of people playing incessantly, Overwatch is the least overwhelming. That said, it’s not entirely like anything else out there. Here are some tips to help you wrap your head around it. [Kotaku ]

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OWINGS MILLS, Md. (AP) — The Baltimore Ravens have forfeited one week of offseason practices for violating the labor agreement on such workouts.

The NFL also fined coach John Harbaugh $137,000 Thursday, while the team was fined $343,000 under current collective bargaining agreement guidelines.

When the Ravens had rookies and first-year players don pads at a minicamp, it was a violation of the CBA rules.

“It’s on me. It’s completely me,” Harbaugh said Thursday after overseeing an offseason practice session. “It was my decision. I told the team that not one coach or player should have any anxiety over this. This is all on me.”

In a statement, the Ravens said: “We made a mistake and we are sorry for that. We accept the NFL discipline.”

Baltimore’s June 1-3 voluntary workouts have been scrapped.

“We’ll adjust, we’ll figure out ways to get our work done for sure,” Harbaugh said. “In some ways, maybe the rest will be good for us. That’s kind of the way I look at it.”

The coach said the violation stemmed from him misinterpreting the rulebook.

“There’s a handbook and there are things that get added to the handbook regularly that come out in memos,” he said. “I read it the wrong way.”

The team will have OTAs on June 6-9 and a mandatory minicamp June 14-16.

___

AP NFL website: www.pro32.ap.org and www.twitter.com/AP_NFL

The post Ravens forfeit 1 week of workouts appeared first on WTOP.

The post Traffic, freebies and other things to know for Memorial Day weekend appeared first on WTOP.

From a business standpoint, it makes sense for Netflix to block VPNs — virtual private networks — to cut down on users accessing its content in foreign countries. But privacy activists who just want to use VPNs to keep their internet connections, well, private, aren’t too pleased with Netflix’s recent blocking campaign.

In protest, digital rights group OpenMedia parked a truck with a giant billboard on it across from Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, CA (h/t TorrentFreak) reading: “We [Heart] Our Privacy” on a background of Netflixesque red and the URL for the unblocking campaign, DefendOurPrivacy.org.

OpenMedia sent an open letter a few weeks ago to Netflix, inviting CEO Reed Hastings to talk about alternatives to VPN blocking that might work for everyone. One idea — linking accounts to credit card number addresses to users’ content libraries.

The group put up the billboard in the absence of a reply from Netflix, TorrentFreak says, and hopes that it will send a clear message.

“Right now, Netflix customers are being forced to choose between watching their favorite shows and safeguarding their privacy,” OpenMedia’s digital rights specialist, Laura Tribe, said. “Our mobile billboard is one more way we’re working to encourage Netflix to rethink their approach. The company has much better options available to it, than undermining the privacy of over 80 million paying Netflix customers in the post-Snowden world.”

Hastings said last month during an investor call that the VPN blocking efforts haven’t hurt Netflix’s bottom line, saying the complaints came from a “small but vocal minority,” TorrentFreak notes.

Welcome to the post-antibiotic world. Doctors say that a 49-year-old woman in Pennsylvania was infected with a “truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” in other words, a bacteria that will not respond to any known antibiotics.

Earlier this year, reports indicated that bacteria containing a gene (MCR-1) that makes them resistant to colistin — an antibiotic of last resort that had largely gone unused because of its potential for collateral damage to the patient — had spread to 19 countries on four different continents, but that it hadn’t been identified here in the U.S.

That was until, according to a report published today in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, on April 26 a woman who believed she had a urinary tract infection provided a urine sample at a Pennsylvania clinic.

It was subsequently passed on to researchers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which — in response to concern over MCR-1 — now looks at all E. coli samples that meet certain red-flag criteria for antibiotic resistance.

The E. coli cultured from this patient’s urine sample — genetically linked to a strain first found in the UK in 2008 — was found to be carrying the MCR-1 gene, plus an additional 14 different antibiotic resistance genes.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of mcr-1 in the USA,” reads the report, which notes that the patient had not done any traveling in the five months leading up to providing the sample.

The researchers at Walter Reed have now tested 21 E. coli samples. All the others have tested negative for MCR-1 and are sensitive to treatment with colistin. But as they note, this testing program has only been up and running at Walter Reed for three weeks, so “it remains unclear what the
true prevalence of mcr-1 is in the population… Continued surveillance to determine the true frequency for this gene in the USA is critical.”

In a statement to the Washington Post, CDC Director Tom Frieden says that the discovery of MCR-1 in a human patient “basically shows us that the end of the road isn’t very far away for antibiotics — that we may be in a situation where we have patients in our intensive-care units, or patients getting urinary tract infections for which we do not have antibiotics.”

Frieden says this is already a problem for some strains of tuberculosis: “I’ve cared for patients for whom there are no drugs left. It is a feeling of such horror and helplessness.”

When the U.S. Veterans Administration declares that someone is dead and stops their benefits, 99.83% of the time, that person really is dead. For the thousands of people that’s happened to in the last few years who weren’t dead, though, it’s awfully inconvenient to have the sprawling bureaucracy that they depend on for income and medical care declare that they were.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a total of 4,201 veterans have been erroneously declared dead in the last five years. The agency cross-checks with the Social Security Administration, which maintains the Death Master File. The list is cross-checked with Social Security, but sometimes this causes even more problems instead of solving them.

For example, one 69-year-old veteran had his benefits end twice. The VA had him noted as dead, resurrected him, and then someone killed him again. He discovered that the problem was an error by the VA: his middle initial was noted as G instead of C on a document, and a man with the same name and middle initial G was the one who died.

He took the incident in stride, but pointed out that this could be devastating to people in a precarious financial position. “It could be one day you’ve got a house, and the next you don’t,” he observed.

In a statement to the WSJ, a VA spokesperson said:

“Although these types of cases represent a small number of beneficiaries in comparison to the millions of transactions completed each year in our administration of benefits, we sincerely regret the inconvenience caused by such errors and work to restore benefits as quickly as possible after any such error is brought to our attention.”

A safeguard that the VA has put in place since last year is a system that should be called “Not Quite Dead Yet Letters.” When someone has been reported dead, the agency sends a letter to verify. If they receive a response from the veteran, well, he or she isn’t dead.

Thousands of Living Vets Declared Dead and Lost Benefits in Past Five Years [Wall Street Journal]

Here’s a case where no one really wins. Not the woman whose truck was stolen and had to go out-of-pocket to replace it, and certainly not the guy who bought the truck but had to surrender it after learning it had been stolen five years earlier… and all because someone at the police department filled in the wrong box on some paperwork.

NBC Los Angeles has the bizarre saga of the Bakersfield-area woman, who reported her truck stolen back in 2011, when it was still relatively new.

Filing that police report should have prevented the vehicle from being resold, but whoever wrote up the paperwork put the truck’s title number in the field where they should have entered its VIN.

The mistake was identified by the state’s system and kicked back to the police department, but never fixed.

It was only because the original owner got curious, several years later, about whether or not her truck had ever turned up that the truth was eventually revealed.

She contacted the police department, only to learn about the paperwork mix-up.

“The words out of her mouth were just shocking,” she tells NBC. “The vehicle had never been reported stolen.”

If the paperwork had been filed correctly, this whole ordeal would never have happened. Days after the owner had tried to report the stolen truck, another woman — one with a history of car theft — was pulled over by police, but when they ran the VIN on the truck, it didn’t set off any alarm bells.

The stolen truck was eventually impounded and subsequently sold at an auto auction, and then again in 2013 to a man who paid $8,000 for it.

The owner, having learned of all this, followed the paper trail and looked up the address of the new owner. Plugging his info into Google Maps, she saw her truck right there in the Street View photo in front of his house.

Determined to get her car back, she headed over to this house with her old keys. Using her old keychain remote, she was still unable to unlock the truck. That’s when she notified authorities in that city that she’d be getting her stolen truck back.

Police gave the current owner the bad news and the rightful owner was able to get into her truck and drive off… in a vehicle that now has more than 100,000 miles on it.

The man who bought the vehicle in 2013 says he had absolutely no idea the truck had been stolen. He’s also out all the money he spent to pay for the truck.

“My insurance company denied me because they’re saying if it’s a legal seizure then I’m out,” he tells NBC. “This all boils down to a paperwork error and that seems that seems to me like a pretty big mistake.”

The truck’s owner, who hasn’t decided whether she’ll sue the police department, says she’s more upset with the cops than she is with the person who originally stole her truck.

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/portableplayer/?cmsID=380906721&videoID=IC6YfZszZTpx&origin=nbclosangeles.com&sec=investigations&subsec=&width=600&height=360

Gawker Media — former parent company to Consumerist and former employer of two current staffers — is considering the option of selling itself off as it continues to fight an expensive legal battle against Hulk Hogan.

The New York Post first reported, then Gawker confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that the media company has hired an outside banker to review its options.

For those who have avoided coverage of the Gawker/Hogan lawsuit, the wrestler and reality TV star has sued the media company for violating his privacy in Oct. 2012 when Gawker’s namesake site posted a snippet of a 2006 sex video featuring Hogan and the then-wife of his friend Todd “Bubba the Love Sponge” Clem.

In March 2016, a Florida jury found in favor of Hogan and ultimately awarded him a total of $140 million in damages. Gawker has filed an appeal in the case.

Earlier this year, as the lawsuit gained momentum, Gawker’s founder Nick Denton brought in his first outside investor, Columbus Nova Technology Partners, which paid $100 million for a minority stake in the company. At the time, the business was valued at around $250 million, but following the outcome of the trial, where an $83 million figure was put on Gawker, that value has dropped.

According to the Post, there are already offers in the $50 million to $70 million range. It’s not clear if that price is for the entire company or for a significant ownership stake.

It was recently revealed that Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel is helping to fund Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. In 2007, the site wrote about Thiel’s sexuality, and some have classified his support of Hogan as an attempt at revenge, though Thiel says it’s more about “specific deterrence.”

In a statement to the Journal, Gawker says that it’s had bankers engaged “for quite some time given the need for contingency planning around Facebook board member Peter Thiel’s revenge campaign.”

As governments and traditionally low-wage jobs raise their minimum wage or starting pay for employees, McDonald’s will be forced to pay higher wages to employees. That might cause the company to use more automation, perhaps replacing employees with robots, right? At today’s shareholders’ meeting, CEO Steve Easterbrook assured employees that robots will not be taking over. Probably.

McDonald’s, of course, runs on a franchise model, and doesn’t actually own or operate most of its restaurants. Yet some of the company’s innovations, like the Create Your Taste burger-ordering kiosk, would replace humans, but people would still cook the burgers and even bring diners their fancier food at their tables.

“Ultimately we’re in the service business,” Easterbrook said. “We will always have an important human element.” Easterbrook says that the company would prefer to shift humans to jobs in the dining room or interacting with customers.

Higher pay for fast-food workers was a major topic of discussion during the meeting because the nationwide Fight for $15 movement, backed by the Service Employees International Union, organized a massive protest outside of McDonald’s headquarters in the Chicago suburbs.

The group bussed in workers from across the country, and seeks a higher minimum wage, the right to unionize, and better working conditions for low-wage workers in a variety of service jobs. For the third year in a row, the company’s headquarters shut down during the day of the annual meeting due to the presence of protesters.

McDonald’s CEO says $15 hourly wage, robots won’t kill jobs [Reuters]

It must feel awful to still be paying for your pet’s health plan after the pet has died. Yet there’s a difference between pet health insurance and the wellness plans that some vets market. While both are designed to help pet owners spread the cost of medical care throughout the year, wellness plans are for a fixed period of time, whether the pet is actually alive during that whole time or not.

A woman brought her complaint about still having to pay for a wellness plan after her 21-year-old cat died to the consumer team at CBS Sacramento. This is a common problem, and one that’s been around for a while: in fact, we wrote about the exact same problem eight years ago, also with a cat.

In this case, the plan was at a Banfield hospital, the chain of vet offices in Petsmart stores. Wellness plans include a set of services according to how much you want to pay per month and your pet’s age and health needs.

While a Banfield representative told CBS Sacramento that customers sign an agreement explaining these terms when they sign up for a year of the wellness plan, they still helped this customer, waiving the fees for the rest of the year. She said that she plans to get standard pet insurance for the new kitten she has adopted.

Call Kurtis: Why Am I Still Paying For My Dead Cat’s Wellness Plan? [CBS Sacramento]

Along with sketchy mechanics, speed limits and faulty O2 sensors, tree sap is your car’s worst nightmare. Once it has marred your otherwise pristine paint job, the stuff just won’t come off. The good news is that there’s actually an easy way to remove the plant excrement.

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First it was juice bars, now this: a new pot-friendly gym in San Francisco will allow members to get high on the premises.

Starting this fall, a new gym called Power Plant Fitness will offer marijuana to workout fans. This won’t be a place to “get high and screw around,” however: cofounder of the gym and founder of the 420 Games — basically the stoner Olympics — Jim McAlpine wrote on the company’s site recently.

“We are focused on the athletic side, not the cannabis side,” he explains.

The gym wants to show that pot users aren’t all lazy stereotypes who sit around eating Cheetos half the day and wiping of Cheetos dust the rest of the day.

McAlpine tells Tech Insider that gym members will take a “cannabis performance assessment” with the staff to pinpoint the “most optimal ways to consume.”

Edibles and vaping will be allowed on-site to start, with plans for an outdoor smoking deck in the future.

“We will be helping our members figure out how is best for them to ingest their cannabis,” McAlpine tells Tech Insider.

However, if the gym wants to actually sell marijuana products on the premises, it’ll have to register as a dispensary lounge, under California law [PDF].

A gym where people can get high onsite is opening in San Francisco [Tech Insider]

If you think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being alarmist by urging primary care physicians to stop prescribing so many opioid painkillers, or that the fact that 10% of doctors are writing more than 50% of the prescriptions for opioids is not a concrete indicator of a problem, then perhaps this map of overdose deaths in the U.S. will help to drive the point home.

Or rather, it’s two maps, put together by The Guardian using CDC data on overdose death rates in 1999 and 2014.

The fact is that drug overdoses now outnumber car crashes in terms of fatalities in the U.S., with 80 people dying every day just from opioid overdose. Yet two decades ago, drug deaths weren’t even on the radar for most Americans.

As you can see from the 1999 map, overdose deaths were rare in much of the country, with the exception of some high mortality rates in parts of Appalachia, the Southwest, and Northern California. Though even then, you could see the potential for explosion in OD deaths in the Pacific Northwest, New England, Florida, Oklahoma, and the Midwest.

At the time, drugs like OxyContin were new to the market and promising long-acting relief for sufferers of chronic pain. That made the drug more attractive to people who injured themselves doing work that puts a high demand on one’s body — mining, farming, manufacturing.

As recent reports have shown, OxyContin did not always live up to its promise to provide 12-hour pain relief, meaning some patients had to take the drug more frequently than prescribed.

People also realized that they could get around the extended-release aspect of these drugs by simply pulverizing the pills and ingesting all the contents at once. This resulted in a better high from the drug, but also increased the risk of dependency and overdose.

Fast-forward to 2014, and the map looks significantly darker, as the problem areas from 1999 have only gotten worse and spilled out to cover larger regions, and it’s now more rare to have a low overdose death rate:

Florida, which had some low-level areas of overdose deaths in 1999, became known on a national level as a place where scoring pain pills was easier than it should be. Major drug store chains were caught turning a blind eye to fake or questionable prescriptions.

In 2013, Walgreens paid $80 million to settle an investigation into its practices in the state, which included actively encouraging pharmacies to sell more opioid painkillers, resulting in stores selling several times the national average of drugs like oxycodone.

CVS, which was later hit with a $22 million for similar violations in Florida, was also caught filling bogus prescriptions in Rhode Island, one of the areas hit particularly hard by the increase in overdose deaths in New England.

As the Guardian notes, this region of the country had largely been in line with the national increase in overdose deaths until recent years, when states like New Hampshire and Massachusetts saw spikes from fatalities related to the powerful painkiller fentanyl.

Speaking of fentanyl, that drug is one of the concerns about the current efforts to further restrict access to prescription painkillers.

Alexander Walley, a physician and director of addiction consultation services at Boston Medical Center, tells the Guardian that “what we’re seeing now is that even as you reduce access to prescription opioids, you’re seeing an explosion of heroin use and heroin overdoses – and then there’s also now this ultra-potent substance [fentanyl] sold as heroin.”

And it’s not just fenantyl-spiked heroin that’s a problem. Addicts who can’t get their hands on prescription drugs through pharmacies are turning to drug dealers, who sometimes sell knock-offs containing drugs even more dangerous than the sought-after painkillers.

Health officials in several California counties recently warned against counterfeit versions of the painkiller Norco that have been spiked with fentanyl, resulting in dozens of people turning up in the hospital after overdosing in just a few weeks.

Diarrhea is a common problem for our canine companions. Many cases of diarrhea are not serious and will resolve given the correct home care. By taking the right action you can help straightforward, uncomplicated episodes of diarrhea settle down without a trip to the vet clinic. Still, sometimes the problem is serious enough to require a trip to the vet.

EditSteps

EditTreating Your Dog’s Diarrhea Through Diet

1. Put the dog on a 12 to 24-hour fast. The presence of food in the gut causes contractions of the bowel wall to push food along. But if the dog has diarrhea, these contractions can be over-enthusiastic and push food through too quickly in the form of diarrhea. The answer is to withhold food for 12 - 24 hours to let the over-sensitized bowel wall calm down and act normally.
   
2. Provide fresh drinking water.^[1] During this period of fasting, let the dog have access to clean, fresh drinking water. Monitor the water bowl to make sure it is going down (ie he is drinking). If he is drinking well, then the risk of dehydration is drastically reduced.
   
3. Ease your dog off his fast with bland food. After the fasting period, do NOT put the dog straight back onto his regular diet. Instead, offer him food that is gentle on his stomach and easy to digest.
   
   • An ideal bland diet avoids fatty foods and rich, red meat.
   • Offer your dog chicken — the actual meat, not than a chicken-flavored food. Don’t give your dog chicken skin, only meat.
   • Combine the chicken with boiled white rice, pasta, or mashed potatoes.
   • Avoid milk and dairy products, as many dogs have a lactose intolerance which could trigger diarrhea. This means no butter in the mashed potatoes.
   • Bland food produces a low volume (and pale) stool, so don't expect your dog's feces to look totally normal. What you are looking for is a stool that can be picked up as a sign he is on the mend.
4. Try a prescription diet from the vet. If you know that your dog doesn’t respond well to the bland, home-prepared meal, ask your veterinarian for prescription dog food for healing stomachs. Diets such as Hills ID and Purina EN are proven to speed up the recovery time from diarrhea.
   
5. Ration his portion sizes.^[2] Smaller meals give the bowel less stimulation to go into spasm. When your dog ends his fast, feed him the same amount of food in a day as his normal diet. However, divide it into four smaller portions and spread the meals throughout the day. This will prevent his diarrhea from returning.
   
6. Transition your dog slowly back to a regular diet. Once your dog’s diarrhea has safely passed, you can begin easing him back into a normal diet. Don’t switch him straight back onto his normal food, as the bowel needs time to heal. Stick to the bland diet for two days to make sure the diarrhea has passed. Then take a further 2 days to transition him back onto normal food using the following method:
   
   • Mix ⅔ bland food with ⅓ normal diet.
   • The next day, change to ⅓ bland diet and ⅔ normal food.
   • On the third day, it's okay to put him back onto a normal diet.
7. Administer probiotics. Probiotics are bacteria helpful to digestion that speed up recovery from diarrhea. Useful bacteria can be lost during the violent expulsions of diarrhea. It then takes time for the population to build back up again and digestion to reach full efficiency. A supplement of probiotics boosts the bacterial population. Generally, probiotics are mixed into the dog’s food once a day, for 5 days.
   
   • The natural bacteria in a dog’s bowel differ from those in human’s. Don’t give human probiotics to dogs.
   • A variety of canine probiotics are available without prescription from your veterinarian, pharmacist, or major pet stores.
8. Do not give your dog medications for human diarrhea. Mild diarrhea should respond to the above steps. Giving your dog a drug that reduces bowel movement may hide a serious problem until it is too late. If the original symptoms do not settle after 2 -3 days with the methods mentioned above, chances are your dog has a problem which needs veterinary attention.^[3]
   

EditDeciding If Your Dog Needs a Vet Visit

1. Determine if he’s eaten anything dangerous. Diarrhea is usually caused by a dog eating something he shouldn't. In most cases, he’ll get better whenever his body eliminates whatever he ate.
   
   • However, if you find out your dog’s consumed something toxic, like rat poison or household cleaning products, then take him to the vet immediately.
2. Take his temperature. Simple diarrhea is rarely accompanied by a fever. If your dog’s running a fever, he’s probably suffering from an infection of some sort. To take your dog’s temperature, have a friend restrain him by sliding an arm under his stomach and pulling the dog’s hindquarters against his/her chest. The friend should place their other hand firmly under the dog’s chin. Gently restrain the dog and speak in soothing tones if it begins to wriggle. Place a muzzle on the dog if you’re worried he’ll bite during the procedure.
   
   • Lubricate the thermometer, then, lifting the tail up, insert it gently into the dog’s anus. On a female dog, make sure you’re not inserting it into the vulva, which is found just below the anus.
   • Do not force the thermometer in, as you can injure your dog.
   • Wait for the thermometer to beep, letting you know it’s finished taking its reading.
   • A normal temperature is 100.5 to 102.5 F.
   • Any temperature of 103.5 F or higher is considered feverish.^[4]
3. Take note if diarrhea is combined with vomiting.^[5] Vomiting and diarrhea is a dangerous combination because the dog is losing fluid at both ends. This puts him at risk of dehydration. This is especially worrying if the dog is unable to drink and hold fluids down. In such a case, seek urgent veterinary attention.
   
4. Check for dehydration.^[6] Diarrhea is basically feces that contain a large amount of fluid. If the dog passes a lot of diarrhea and doesn't replace that fluid, he will become dehydrated. Dehydration reduces the blood supply to organs such as the liver or kidneys, which can potentially cause damage.
   
   • To test for dehydration, lift the dog's scruff away from the shoulder blades and then let it go.
   • Fully hydrated skin pings right back into position.
   • The skin of a dehydrated dog is less elastic, and may take a couple of seconds or longer to fall back into place.
5. Inspect the diarrhea for blood.^[7] If you find blood in the diarrhea, it may be because of inflammation or hemorrhage. While inflammation is uncomfortable, hemorrhage is potentially life-threatening. You won't be able to tell the difference at home so don't take any risks. Seek veterinary attention as soon as you see blood in your dog’s stool.
   
6. Monitor your dog for weakness, lethargy, or collapse.^[8] A dog with mild diarrhea is always bright and alert. If your dog is bright eyed and bouncy, but has diarrhea, monitor him carefully for the development of the signs above. Its okay to try controlling the problem yourself.
   
   • However, if your dog lacks energy, is listless and unable to settle, or worse - collapses, then seek professional help.

EditVideo

EditTips

• When you go to the vet, bring a fresh stool sample and have them do a fecal float and a fecal smear.
• Some dogs do not react well to canned dog food. Consider feeding your dog a premium dry food, or a mixture of canned and dry.

EditWarnings

• Mucous in diarrhea indicates an irritated bowel. Parasites, raw pork hearts and medical conditions can cause mucous in the stool.
• Don't give your dog new foods that they have never eaten while you are still treating the diarrhea.
• If you're switching your dog's food, do it gradually or your dog might get sick or have more diarrhea.
• Watery diarrhea in puppies is life threatening if not treated immediately by a veterinarian.
• Green-tinged diarrhea in puppies may indicate coccidiosis. See your vet immediately.

EditRelated wikiHows

• Keep Your Dog's Breath Fresh
• Tell if You Are Dehydrated
• Determine if a Dog Is Dehydrated
• Treat Diarrhea and Constipation in Dogs and Cats

EditSources and Citations

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Sears Holding has a great idea: instead of relying on sales of washers, dryers, and tools, it’s going to work on a way to make more money from its trusty brands like Kenmore, Craftsman, and DieHard. As for exactly how it’s going to do that, Sears isn’t saying.

Sears announced on Thursday that it’s exploring unspecified alternatives for those brands, as well its Sears Home Services. By alternatives, it seems it Sears might be thinking of making those brands available outside of Sears and Kmart stores.

The news came on the heels of another bad quarter for both Sears and Kmart, notes the Chicago Tribune.

“Our iconic KCD brands are beloved by the American consumer and we believe that we can realize significant growth by further expanding the presence of these brands outside of Sears and Kmart,” the company said in its earnings release. “By evaluating potential partnerships or other transactions that could expand distribution of our brands and service offerings, we can position both businesses to achieve greater success.”

Again, it’s not clear what exactly Sears is thinking, but the company could license the products out let other retailers sell them, or it could sell the brands off completely.

Sears has brought on financial advisors to help it explore all its options.

The move comes after Sears announced earlier this month that it would be opening smaller-format stores that focus solely on its appliance offerings.

Sears considers options for Kenmore, Craftsman and DieHard brands [Chicago Tribune]

If you have an Amazon Fire, BlackBerry, or Windows phone and use PayPal’s app frequently, you might need to find another way to complete purchases from your smartphone: PayPal will discontinue its mobile apps for these phones on June 30. 

PayPal announced Wednesday that it plans to reduce the number of mobile operating systems supported by its app.

To that end, users of Amazon Fire, BlackBerry, and Windows phones will no longer be able to access the payment system through its app, but can continue to access PayPal via the Web.

Additionally, Windows phone owners using Outlook.com can still use the PayPal add-in to send money directly from their inbox, while BlackBerry users can also continue to use the BBM app to send peer-to-peer payments via PayPal.

“It was a difficult decision to no longer support the PayPal app on these mobile platforms,” Joanna Lambert, PayPal’s VP of consumer product, said in the company’s blog. “But we believe it’s the right thing to ensure we are investing our resources in creating the very best experiences for our customers.”

“We remain committed to partnering with mobile device providers, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our customers,” she continued.

PayPal also took time in its announcement to remind users of Android and iOS operated phone to upgrade to the newest version of its app between June 3 and June 30.

“The walls have ears” used to be a metaphorical expression. These days, as the era of the Internet of Things dawns and marches on apace, it’s becoming a little more literal every day. And while that’s all well and good for the adults who buy and install a device in their home, it might not be quite so legal for the house to listen to their kids.

As The Guardian reports today, privacy advocates are starting to become concerned about the legal implications of devices that record and store childrens’ voice data without their parents’ permission.

Around the turn of the last century, people started to future out that this whole internet thing was only going to get bigger and more pervasive, and that childrens’ privacy needed protection. Enter the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA), which was signed in 1998 and became effective in 2000.

The rule, in short, limits what personal data can be collected about users under age 13 and what it can be used for. That’s why you see so many sites that do collect personal data requiring users to be 13 or older: that way, they can wash their hands of the compliance problem.

But that rule was put in place in an era where “collecting personal data” meant “asking someone to go to a website and fill in a form.” Nearly two decades later, data collection is neither so limited nor so clear-cut.

You no longer have to intentionally hand data over to someone. Instead, we have a whole world of devices — from TVs to gaming consoles to phones to cars to “smart home” tools — that are in some way always listening to everything we do. And while it’s one thing for an adult to sign up for that, it’s legally different for a kid.

That’s particularly true with tools like Apple’s Siri, Amazon Echo and Google Home, the Guardian explains.

Marketing for all those devices explicitly includes families with young children, and shows the children talking to and interacting with the AI voices. And that’s where the trouble begins, according to activists. Khalilah Barnes, of EPIC, told the Guardian, ““When your advertising markets this product to children, and parents with children, that would absolutely trigger COPPA.”

Barnes added, “Recording children in the privacy of the home is genuinely creepy, and this warrants additional investigation by the FTC and states.”

Apple, Amazon, and Google all told the Guardian that they are in compliance with COPPA standards — but voice recordings, which those platforms can collect and learn from, are among the data protected by the rule. COPPA requires affirmative, explicit, verifiable consent from parents in order to collect that data from children, but none of the devices have any mechanism in place for collecting that acknowledgement from parents.

It’s a little different with devices like Microsoft’s Xbox One or Kinect platforms, which don’t allow children 12 or under to connect accounts. If you’ve got an Amazon Echo or a Google Home sitting on your coffee table, the whole point is that it can hear what anyone in the room says and respond as needed.

And that’s basically what Barnes noted, pointing out to the Guardian that even parental consent, under the current standard, may not be that useful in a world of permanently connected devices.

“Parents cannot reasonably review all the information that these ‘always on’ devices are collecting from children,” she said, which any parent who has heard the chaos of their child at play can probably agree with.

Virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Echo break US child privacy law, experts say [Guardian]

While some toy companies are giving up on long-held preconceptions about gender-specific products, LEGO has gone the other way. Shedding its gender-neutral past, the company now makes toys specifically targeted at either girls or boys. These products have no shortage of critics, but LEGO says it has good reasons for the separate product lines.

A new report from The Atlantic looks behind the curtain at LEGO and examines why the company has created the products currently on shelves: it’s a mix between customer feedback, research, and focus groups on how children play with toys.

The company’s current gender-specific line, dubbed LEGO Friends, debuted in 2012 to criticism — even being nominated for “Worst Toy Of The Year” — but has since become one of the toy maker’s most popular lines.

Many have criticized the line as being LEGO’s attempt at telling girls how to play and what they should like. But the company maintains it’s just making toys that girls want.

1. An Untapped Market: In 2008, LEGO looked at global data about who was buying their toys. It turns out, that roughly 90% of LEGO sets sold were bought for boys, meaning that nearly half the kid population wasn’t using their products.

“Seeing that the play pattern was really skewing so heavily toward boys, we wanted to understand why,” company spokesperson Michael McNally said. “We embarked on four years of global research with 4,500 girls and their moms. Some of the things we heard were really surprising and challenging in ways that weren’t really comfortable for us as a brand.”

2. Getting To The Bottom Of It: After finding that its toys were mostly sold to boys, the company set out to find out why that was.

Over four years, LEGO conducted global research with 4,500 girls and their moms. The company found some surprising and challenging themes in the way their toys were perceived, McNally tells The Atlantic.

LEGO tells The Atlantic that children in its focus groups consistently had distinct ideas about how to interact with the same toys they encountered, and that expectations seemed to be drawn along gender lines in focus group after focus group, even when those children were very young.

3. Boys & Girls May Use Same Toys, But Play Differently: The most important aspect LEGO says it found was that children play with the same toys very differently.

In one project, the company asked separate groups of boys and girls to build a LEGO castle. While both groups worked together to build the castle, they took different approaches to play afterward.

For example, the boys immediately grabbed the figures, the houses, and the catapults and started having a battle, McNally recalled, noting that the boys used the castle as a backdrop for their play.

On the other hand, the girls were more focused on the castle itself.

“They all looked around inside the castle and they said, ‘Well, there’s nothing inside,’” McNally said. “This idea of interior versus exterior in the orientation of how they would then play with what they built was really interesting. If you think about most of the LEGO models that people consider to be meant for boys, there’s not a whole lot going on in there. But [the girls had] this idea of, ‘There’s nothing inside to do.’”

Overall, the groups of children both expressed interest in the building aspect, but the following interaction showed girls overwhelmingly wanted to build environments and more details in their toys.

4. Selling Toys Kids Want: In the end, LEGO says the research has shaped its newer lines, including Friends, and those products are simply the company’s attempt to engage more children, no matter their gender.

“I think there’s been a lot of momentum around this idea that everything should be gender neutral,” McNally said. “That’s not what we’re striving for. We don’t see anything wrong with the natural ways that children are choosing to play. We try being gender inclusive.”

5. Criticism No Matter What: While the LEGOS Friends line has been a hit with children, increasing the company’s total sales since its debut, the line hasn’t been without problems.

The Atlantic reports that while many children have embraced the toys for their details and environments, the products have created a catch-22 for parents.

One parent told the New York Times that she was glad her child enjoyed the toys, but was afraid they also sent the wrong message, noting that her daughter had recently asked her if she had an oval face.

That notion was planted in the girl after reading a Friends insert in the LEGO Club Magazine, which included beauty advice from one of the LEGO Friends characters about which haircuts are most flattering.

“My little girl, the shape of her face, and whether her haircut is flattering are none of Lego’s concern. It wasn’t even her concern until a toy magazine told her to start worrying about it,” the mother wrote.

The company later said it would take customer complaints into consideration when putting together future Friends inserts.

LEGO has also addressed concerns that many of its toys, which are arguably gender-neutral, lack female figurines. In one particularly public case, the company was scorned over discontinuing its minifig female scientist set. It later relaunched the product, but it remains to be seen if that’s a permanent addition.

How to Play Like a Girl [The Atlantic]

What’s “evaporated cane juice”? It’s a sweetener produced from the liquid that comes out of sugar cane when you cut or shred it. However, the Food and Drug Administration notes that it’s also a term that food producers use in ingredients list to avoid using the word “sugar.” The FDA has had enough of this, and issued guidance telling food marketers that they need to just call ECJ what it is: sugar.

The product sold as “evaporated cane juice” is something that you can find on the shelf alongside regular white sugar crystals. To make the product, manufacturers take the liquid derived from sugar cane, filter and clarify it, centrifuge off the molasses, and crystallize the remaining fluid. The sugar that comes in your average 5-pound (or 4-pound) bag or packet is melted and re-crystallized multiple times.

Sweeteners of all kinds will be harder to hide when new nutrition labels that spell out added sugar in a product hit store shelves, but the core questions in the evaporated cane juice is this: is calling the sweetener “evaporated cane juice” deliberately misleading? Is there an actual difference between evaporated cane juice and standard sugar, or does the name simply describe a process for making sugar?

The FDA’s guidance is now out, and it says that food companies should just call the stuff sugar.

“FDA’s view is that such sweeteners should not be declared on food labels as ‘evaporated cane juice’ because that term does not accurately describe the basic nature of the food and its characterizing properties,” the agency explained in its guidance.

While evaporated cane juice might be a slightly different color and texture from standard refined sugar, when tested, it’s still 98-99% sugar. It is okay, the FDA says, to describe the ingredient with a word that doesn’t try to hide the product’s nature. “Cane sugar” is one that they suggest.

‘Evaporated cane juice’ should be declared as ‘sugar,’ says FDA; get ready for the lawsuits, say attorneys [Food Navigator]
Guidance for Industry: Ingredients Declared as Evaporated Cane Juice [FDA]

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In just the last few weeks, card skimmers — devices that illegally scan customers’ credit cards –have been found at two different Walmart stores. The skimmers in these cases were so convincing that they may have been in place for weeks for being discovered.

The first report came out of Fredericksburg, VA, in early May, where police say the skimmers may have been installed as far back as March. The skimmers were discovered after at least 37 account holders of a local credit union were hit by large, unexpected withdrawals from ATMs.

More recently, police in Fort Wright, KY, say a skimmer was in place at a local Walmart for a week before it was identified. No word yet on how many customers were victimized by this scheme.

Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reports that the skimmers used in these instances are made to overlay the existing payment terminals so that they not only go undetected, but also collect both the information from the swiped card and any data entered on the PIN pad.

A skimmer of this quality will cost the wannabe ID thief at least $200, but that’s nothing compared to the amount of money that could be drained from victims’ accounts in a short period of time.

Similarly convincing skimmers were used last year at Safeway stores in Colorado and California. Those skimmers were made to be undetectable to customers swiping their cards as they pay for their groceries.

Walmart recently began requiring customers with chip-enabled cards, which are more secure for in-store purchases, to dip their cards into the chip-reader instead of swiping them. The skimmers in these cases included slots so that chip-card customers could use the device without the overlay being detected. However, since some banks still haven’t replaced all their credit and debit cards with chip-enabled versions, skimmers are able to prey on customers who swipe their older magnetic stripe cards.

Earlier this year, reports indicated that retailers were in possession of chip card readers, but hadn’t installed them yet, even though most retailers now face increased liability for credit and debit card fraud if they fail to update their systems.

Meanwhile, skimming attacks were on the rise, especially at ATMs, many of which still use old magnetic swipe technology.

The Walmart incidents highlight the need for banks, credit unions, and other credit card issuers to hurry up and distribute chip-enabled cards. Criminals will inevitably figure out ways to beat these cards, but we now at least have the opportunity to put an end to old-fashioned card skimming.

BEDFORD, Va. (AP) — Officials have identified a body found in a barrel at a Virginia home as the suspect’s grandmother.

WSET-TV reports (http://bit.ly/1TBu0vv) the medical examiner’s office positively identified the body as Betty Wozniak.

Wozniak is the grandmother of 47-year-old Robert Wozniak, who was arrested April 30 after the home’s owner reported finding a barrel containing human remains.

Bedford County deputies at the time believed the remains were those of Betty Wozniak.

Search warrant affidavits obtained by The News & Advance (http://bit.ly/1q0tCOr ) revealed Robert Wozniak told authorities the remains were those of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks he was collecting since finding her dead months ago.

He faces several charges including disposing of a body with malicious intent to avoid detection.

Robert Wozniak is scheduled to appear in court June 15.

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Information from: WSET-TV, http://www.wset.com/

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