pileofcrapola

Given their odd shapes and the fact that dust collects on both the inside and outside, lampshades can be awkward to clean. Make the chore a little easier with a lint roller.

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You're going to spill stuff on your carpet, most likely on the day after you've had it cleaned. If you find yourself without any stain remover or if you just prefer to make your own, this DIY carpet cleaner has you covered.

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How often how you found yourself wanting to bake, but having no baking powder on hand? Or perhaps you found an old tin stuffed in the back of the pantry that you're not sure wasn't already there when you moved in. Well, good news impromptu bakers! You can make your own.

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Why make a pouch out of paracord for your survival tin? Well, it does give you a nice way to protect it and to clip it to your belt or bag. But the most important reason is that it when you unravel it, you've got a nice, healthy length of paracord to add to your survival supplies.

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Dear Lifehacker,
I'm getting ready to do some home remodeling. While my options for hardware finishes and cabinet styles are seemingly infinite, my budget is not. Where should I spend more and where should I cut back to get the biggest bang for my remodeling buck?

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For years, I've hated cooking. I've hated the time it took to make something worth eating. The research it took to find a recipe I wanted. I hated the hours of laboring over a stove that ended with a poorly salted, awful meal. Recently, I figured out how to outsource my least favorite parts, and now, cooking is a breeze.

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The dirty little not-so-secret of smartphones is that you'll never get the full amount of memory marked on the case. Operating systems take up space! But different phones leave you with different amounts of storage. Here, from Which?, are the most and least generous.

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Identity theft has topped the list of consumer complaints filed with the FTC for 13 consecutive years and there's no evidence that this year it won't make the list for the 14th. Just how many victims of identity theft are there each year? While we don't yet have the figures for 2013, a Javeline report puts the numbers from 2012 at 12.6 million.

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Years ago, when the primary nutrition philosophy was that high-fat foods made you fat and low-fat diets made you thin, whole milk got a bit of a bad rap. Instead, we were told to drink 2% or skim instead. As with most things, the truth is more complicated, and high-fat milk likely deserves a place in your fridge.

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It’s probably not a good idea to use your debit card at the gas pump. Not because we have anything against debit cards, but because we’ve learned of yet another group of criminals who planted invisible card skimmers in pay-at-the-pump machines at gas stations in the southern United States.

Sure, the Target breach makes boring old hardware hacks like this look boring and unsophisticated by comparison. Just add this to the rapidly growing list of ways that crooks can stick invisible hands into your wallet, draining your bank account.

The skimmer shown above came from a ring of 13 skimsters who have been charged with draining $2 million from the accounts of cardholders all over the South.

Bluetooth skimmers aren’t always an inside job. They’re typically installed in a stealth operation, right in the sight store employees. One person pretends to pump gas while others distract the cashier. The skimmer silently and invisibly collects card data and PINs, and the thieves can collect data without even pulling up to the pump again.

How can you protect yourself? Well, in this case, our tips about checking for mini-cameras and poorly secured PIN pads and card slots won’t do any good. The best protection is only to limit your losses: don’t use a card linked to your main bank account at gas stations.

Gang Rigged Pumps With Bluetooth Skimmers [Krebs on Security]

While for most consumers an attempt to pay with fake money probably amounts to joking “Ha ha, you don’t accept old Blockbuster cards as payment, do you? (wink!)” there are others out there who’ll go to great lengths to pull a fast one on retailers with counterfeit bills. That being said, having Moe Money’s signature on your $100 bills isn’t going to convince anyone that thing is anything but a fakety fake fake.

The 19-year-old suspect was charged with uttering a forged instrument, forgery of instrument and obtaining property by false pretense, reports MyFox8.com, and one count of inducing giggles by using the name Moe Money in the first place.

Police accuse her of trying to buy a gift card at a local Walgreens with a counterfeit $100, which led to her arrest. Cops later found $12,882 in fake money after her arrest, but it’s unclear if she’d ever successfully spent any more of the Moe Money money before.

Side note: Even if Moe Money was believable as a real guy, giving him the job title under his signature of “Proprietor of the Commonwealth” instead of say, Secretary of the Treasury or something is a giant tipoff too. Because while maybe not everyone knows who Secretary of the Treasury or the Treasurer of the United States are in any given year — “Current events, so tough,” whatever you tell yourself — the Proprietor of the Commonwealth is straight fiction and is not signing any money. Sorry, Moe.

UNCG student arrested for counterfeit currency [MyFox8.com]

If you were wondering, Easter is April 20 this year. Christmas, of course, was December 25. At Big Lots, the period of mid-to-late January is a time of peaceful coexistence of holidays. It is a time when we celebrate both the birth and resurrection of Jesus. It is a time when the Easter stuff hits the shelves, even though the Christmas stuff hasn’t all sold yet.

“They had 3+ aisles still left of Christmas items on clearance that it seems no one wanted to buy,” writes reader Lynn, who found this display at a Big lots in the Southwest. “Not only was the Christmas stuff invading on Easter turf but there was St. Patrick’s Day stuff right around the corner. Wacky!”

What, no Valentine’s Day on the same shelf?

Though the FDA rejected the bid to relabel high-fructose corn syrup as “corn sugar” in 2012, the legal battle over ads about the sweetener is still ongoing. Newly uncovered e-mails from executives at huge agri-business firms reveal that not everyone was on board with all the messaging in the pro-HFCS ads.

NBC News reports that a handful of doubt-tinged correspondence has turned up among the hundreds of thousands of pages of court documents involved in the courtroom wars between the Corn Refiners Association and a group of sugar companies that opposed the “corn sugar” campaign.

One 2010 e-mail from an Archer Daniels-Midland spokesperson expresses concern over the use of the term “natural” in the advertising.

“I think we’re unnecessarily asking for trouble by using the ‘natural’ language,” wrote the rep. “I don’t think we really gain much in the mind of the audience or customers and I think it provides a point to ridicule the ads and the industry comes off as being disingenuous.”

He points to TV news pundits who had already raised the question of how HFCS, which uses a chemical process to convert regular corn syrup, could be considered a “natural” ingredient. The rep says that just because ADM and others believe that the sweetener is natural “doesn’t mean we have to say it.”

A 2009 e-mail from CRA president Audrae Erickson said that while she expects the food and beverage industry “would want to defend this highly versatile ingredient that is highly prized and widely used,” the Corn Refiners’ “sponsorship of this campaign (should) remain confidential.”

A lawyer representing corn syrup companies explains these e-mails to NBC, saying they “clearly show… the corn refiners engaged in a rigorous internal discussion about the public relations aspects of what HFCS is called, while never wavering in their core belief that high fructose corn syrup is both natural and nutritionally equivalent to sugar.”

Before the FDA rejected the bid to rename HFCS as corn sugar — in part because that label is already used for dextrose monohydrate — the sugar companies had already filed suit against the CRA, alleging false advertising. The CRA later countersued, claiming the sugar companies were maliciously trying to defame the CRA and HFCS.

Whatever you think of the sugar vs. HFCS debate, you have to admit the “corn sugar” ads were hilariously folksy and continue to be good fodder for a chuckle:

Thanks to Simon for the tip!

In Oct. 2013, new rules from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau kicked in that provided new disclosures and protections for people making international money transfers. While the CFPB has the ability to check in with the nation’s largest banks and credit unions to make sure they are complying with these new rules, it doesn’t yet have that authority for non-bank companies that offer this service.

So today the CFPB proposed a rule that would allow the Bureau to supervise non-bank money transfer operations that make more than 1 million international money transfers annually. The Bureau figures this would put the country’s 25 largest non-bank money transfer providers within its supervisory scope.

The Remittance Rule, part of the sweeping Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, expanded the scope of the Electronic Fund Transfer Act to add new protections to international money transfers.

These protections include disclosures about exchange rates, fees, and taxes, the right to cancel a transfer within 30 minutes, information about when the transferred money will be available on the other end, and a 90-day limit on dispute resolutions.

“The CFPB’s Remittance Rule provides strong consumer protections like better disclosures and the correction of errors,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray in a statement. “Today’s proposed rule would help us provide oversight across the entire market so consumers get the protections they deserve.”

Though the CFPB’s is proposing that it has the right to supervise the largest non-bank transfer providers, the Remittance Rule applies to most companies that make at least 100 transfers each year.

We’ve always known the supermarket is a veritable jungle, set with snares and traps designed to lure even the most observant shopper into buying whatever that heavenly smelling thing is, or lulling us into a contented stupor so we linger longer in the aisles. And now thanks to the combined effort of experts, analysts and grocery store employees, we know even more. Prepare yourselves.

Reader’s Digest went all out with its 50 Supermarket Tricks You Still Fall For. Some of those aren’t so much tricks as valuable insight the average shopper can use to better navigate those daunting aisles. We’ve culled 18 of our favorites capable of cracking your brain open to a new way of viewing the supermarket jungle. Get cracking!

1. Shopping carts are getting bigger so you’ll put more in them: “We doubled their size as a test, and customers bought 19% more,” explained Martin Lindstrom, marketing consultant and author of Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy.

2. You probably only know the price of four items: Your brain can only hold so much. So while you know the approximate price of milk, bread, banana and eggs, 95% of shoppers have no clue what other things cost. The clueless shopper then doesn’t know if you’re getting a good deal on whatever you buy outside those four things, so it might be good to study up.

3. More than half of shoppers decide not to buy stuff in the checkout line: That’s why supermarkets have started making checkout lanes narrower with less space to off-load those items. If you can’t dump it, you might be more likely to buy it. Dump early, folks. Dump early.

4. Wear headphones and listen to upbeat music while you shop: Many stores plant earworms by way of slow music, slower than the average heartbeat. That lulls you into spending more time at the store, which then leads to spending about 29% more, Lindstrom says.

5. Because grocery stores can’t compete with Walmart on price, they’re classing things up to bring you in: To compete with the low prices elsewhere, many stores are bringing in butchers who are skilled with the knife and produce managers who are pros on fruits and vegetables, along with dietitians who give seminars on healthy eating habits, according to Jeff Weidauer, a former supermarket executive and vice president of marketing for Vestcom, a retail services company.

6. That myth about milk being in the back of the store so you have to walk aisle to get to it? Not quite the real reason: It’s even simpler than tempting you with stuff on the way in, explains Weidauer. “Milk needs to be refrigerated right away; the trucks unload in the back, so the fridges are there so that we can fill the cases as quickly and easily as possible.”

7. If you need a cake, don’t buy it the day you need it: “We’ll have to give you one from the display case, and those cakes have often been sitting out for a while. If you order in advance, we’ll make the cake for you that day or the night before, and it will be a lot fresher.” — a former cake decorator and bakery worker at a grocery store near Birmingham, Alabama.

8. Sure, that mist on your fruits and vegetables looks nice: But really it can make them rot faster, Lindstrom says. Also make sure you shake off your leafy greens before you get to the checkout — the mist can add to an item’s weight.

9. Ask and ye shall receive: “The butcher will tenderize meat for you, the baker will slice a loaf of bread, and the florist will usually give you free greenery to go with your loose flowers,” says Teri Gault, grocery savings expert and CEO of thegrocerygame.com. “At some stores owned by Kroger, the seafood department worker will even coat your fish in flour or Cajun seasoning and fry it up for free.”

10. If something is about to expire the next day, ask about getting a discount early: If you see something in the bakery or meat department that’s probably going to get marked down tomorrow, say “Hey, this is expiring tomorrow. Are you going to mark it down?” Sometimes they’ll do it for you right then. They’ll have to sell it later anyway, so you’re helping them out, says Gault.

11. We’re all fools for the ten-for$10 promotion: “We’ll take an 89-cent can of tuna and mark it ‘ten for $10,’ 
and instead of buying six cans for 89 cents, people will buy ten for $10,” explains Weidauer. Who else feels like a sucker?

12. Just because you saw it in your grocery store circular doesn’t mean it’s necessarily on sale: Some of those products are just advertised so you’ll buy them. Make sure there’s an actual sale on an item before you set your heart on buying it.

13. There’s a reason that bread is in a brown paper bag: The faster the bread goes stale, the sooner you’ll be back at the store to buy more, a former worker says. Put loaves in airtight plastic bags as soon as you get home.

14. Avoid the herd mentality: Shop when the store isn’t as crowded or you could be in danger of buying more so you can be part of the group. Mondays and Tuesdays are the best — skip weekends if you can.

15. USDA quality grade means more than the cut’s name: Angus? So what — that’s no guarantee it’ll be a good steak, says Kari Underly, former grocery store meat cutter and author of The Art of Beef Cutting: A Meat Professional’s Guide to Butchering and Merchandising. “Prime is the best, then choice (usually the highest grade available in grocery stores), followed by select, and finally standard.”

16. You aren’t that apple’s first customer: Shoppers are constantly picking up produce, dropping it, and putting it back, explains another former grocery worker, so beware. “I’ve seen kids take a bite and put the item back. It took me a long time to start eating fresh fruits and vegetables again after working in a store,” she says.

17. The carts never get cleaned: Babies will do their business on carts, chicken juice will leak and who knows if anyone cleaned up after that? If you’re worried about germs, give carts a quick swipe with sanitizing wipes.

For 33 other tips and tricks, check out the Reader’s Digest complete roundup in the source link below.

50 Supermarket Tricks You Still Fall For [Reader's Digest]

The big news in candy land is that JellyBelly has a new beer-flavored jelly bean. Which sure, is news, but only because we can’t believe it took this long. Because we Americans, when we like something, like cheese or bacon or beer? We just love bending it to our will and turning it into new foods. So beer candy? Yep, about time.

The company says it took some thinking to settle on which exact kind of beer to build a flavor on, finally deciding on a Hefeweizen-inspired ale flavor for its Draft Beer Jelly Belly jelly beans.

The new flavor as unleashed at the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco this week and ISM in Cologne, Germany.

So why the wait, Jelly Belly or any other company that would decide to take on beer and candy? The company says they didn’t want to mess anything up for the rest of us.

“This took about three years to perfect,” says Ambrose Lee, research and development manager for Jelly Belly Candy Company. “The recipe includes top secret ingredients, but I can tell you it contains no alcohol.”

Instead, the “effervescent and crisp flavor is packed in a golden jelly bean with an iridescent finish.” So it tastes like beer, with a mildly bready aroma and a flavor profile that might remind you of beer, but it’s safe for anyone of any age to eat.

“Anyone who enjoys a good, cold beer will enjoy Draft Beer Jelly Belly beans for the simple fact that it tastes just as you’d imagine,” says Rob Swaigen, vice president of marketing for Jelly Belly Candy Company.

Except for the cold and liquidy and actual beer part, but hey, that’s what beer is for.

As recently as last summer, Pepsi was called out for continuing to use a controversial caramel coloring — one that is labeled a possible carcinogen and whose use is regulated in California — in spite of calls for an end to its use. New tests from our coworkers at Consumer Reports confirm that Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and Pepsi One all contain significantly high levels of the ingredient.

The coloring agent has the mouthful name of 4-methylimidazole but is also known by 4-MEI. Under California law, beverages containing more than 29 micrograms of 4-MEI must come with a warning label.

CR tested various sodas, purchased in both California and New York, over two periods of time.

The first round of testing was done between April and September of 2013. During that time period, the California Pepsi drinks all showed high levels of 4-MEI with both Diet Pepsi and Pepsi One showing levels above the 29 microgram threshold.

For the New York Pepsi drinks tested during the April-September period, the 4-MEI levels were much, much higher. Tests on Pepsi in NY found 174.4 micrograms of the chemical. Diet Pepsi test turned up 182.7 micrograms, while Pepsi One had the highest level — 195.3 micrograms.

Testing again in December showed that the California Pepsi drinks were still hovering around the 29 microgram line. In that test, Diet Pepsi was below the threshold, but now regular Pepsi had surpassed it.

When CR tested the New York versions of these drinks again in December 2013, both Pepsi and Diet Pepsi had notably lower levels of 4-MEI, about in line with what had been found in California. However, the Pepsi One test still showed a significant level of 4-MEI — 160.8 micrograms.

Given that Pepsi can’t seem to consistently get its products under the 29 microgram line, Consumer Reports has asked the California Attorney General’s office to investigate to determine if the company is in violation of state law.

Pepsi’s explanation for the high levels of 4-MEI is typical corporate nonsense. From the CR article:

After we informed PepsiCo of our test results, the company issued a statement that said that Proposition 65 is based on per day exposure and not exposure per can. It also cited government consumption data that shows that the average amount of diet soda consumed by people who drink it is 100 milliliters per day, or less than a third of a 12-ounce can. For that reason, they believe that Pepsi One does not require cancer-risk warning labels—even if the amount of 4-MEI in a single can exceeds 29 micrograms.

Who in the world is only drinking 100 milliliters of diet soda a day? Most diet cola drinkers I know have recycling bins full of empties and consume the stuff compulsively.

In a statement to the L.A. Times, the company expressed some concern but was defensive, making a vague accusation about CR’s testing.

“We are extremely concerned about Consumer Reports’ allegation that one of our products exceeds the Prop. 65 standard and requires a warning label,” said Pepsi. “We believe their conclusion is factually incorrect and reflects a serious misunderstanding of Prop. 65’s requirements.”

Comparing Pepsi 4-MEI levels to its competitors, most of the other tested beverages were well below the 29 microgram threshold, regardless of location. For example, only around 4 micrograms of 4-MEI was found in Coke purchased on both coasts. Likewise, Coke Zero and Diet Coke turned up even lower levels and showed no real difference between samples from California or New York.

Tests on A&W Root Beer came in just below the 29 microgram level, but showed no difference in 4-MEI levels between California and New York samples.

If you really hunger for 4-MEI, Malta Goya showed through-the-roof levels of the chemical in all samples, regardless of location. The most recent tests found 316.1 micrograms of the chemical in California and 307.5 in New York.

Consumers may be thinking about ditching cable TV service in favor of online entertainment offerings, and many have already replaced home phone service with a wireless device, but one cord most of us can’t realistically cut is the power line. That’s why Comcast is looking into taking over customers’ electric bills.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission confirmed yesterday that Comcast is talking to a third-party power supplier about a deal that would allow the nation’s largest cable company to sell electric service to its subscribers.

While the PPUC did not name the third-party company, a spokesperson for Princeton-based NRG — which owns Reliant Energy and Energy Plus — told the Inquirer that the company has been working with Comcast “on a new initiative.”

The news of this new, non-telecom venture from Comcast comes at the same time as the cable company announces the end of a highly controversial tie-up between Comcast and Verizon.

It all began back in 2011, when Comcast, Time Warner Cable and other cable providers gave up on their dreams of becoming wireless providers and sold off oodles of wireless spectrum to Verizon for a couple billion dollars.

Part of that deal included a marketing and development partnership that was supposed to get Verizon phones in the hands of Comcast customers while also working together on new technology. Some worried that such an arrangement would lead to Verizon slowing down its expansion of its Comcast-competing FiOS network.

In terms of product development, not much came out of the Comcast/Verizon arrangement; the Inquirer reports the sole fruit born from this pairing was a bit of tech that involved streaming video to TVs.

The companies say they will continue to market each other’s products, which does little to quell concerns that Verizon is prioritizing wireless sales over building out the FiOS network.

The upshot of last week’s federal appeals court ruling that tossed out the core of the FCC’s net neutrality rule is that Internet Service Providers can now impede access to competing or data-hogging websites by downgrading or blocking these content providers. Netflix, the country’s single largest devourer of bandwidth, had been relatively quiet on this ruling, until yesterday, when it shared its view of the future of net neutrality with investors.

In its quarterly earnings report [PDF], Netflix dedicates an entire section to the issue of net neutrality (see p. 6 of the report).

“In principle, a domestic ISP now can legally impede the video streams that members request from Netflix, degrading the experience we jointly provide. The motivation could be to get Netflix to pay fees to stop this degradation,” explains the company. “Were this draconian scenario to unfold with some ISP, we would vigorously protest and encourage our members to demand the open Internet they are paying their ISP to deliver.”

That said, the company believes that this potential for consumer blowback and how it would likely “galvanize government action” to reinstate net neutrality, is enough for ISPs to “avoid this consumer-unfriendly path of discrimination.”

Interestingly enough, Netflix does specifically call on legislators or the FCC to right the errors of those who originally crafted net neutrality but failed to see the obvious ways in which it would fail a legal challenge.

“In the long-term, we think Netflix and consumers are best served by strong network neutrality across all networks, including wireless,” explains the company. “To the degree that ISPs adhere to a meaningful voluntary code of conduct, less regulation is warranted.”

Netflix does end this section of the report with a caveat that it’s not ruling out the possibility that government intervention might be required: “To the degree that some aggressive ISPs start impeding specific data flows, more regulation would clearly be needed.”

[via The Verge]

Big news in recall-land today: 1.25 million pacifier clips from Playtex recalled because they can crack, transforming them into a choking hazard. What other dangers might lie in our dressers, closets, pantries, garages, and refrigerators? Let’s find out.

Babies & Kids
Midwest-CBK Animal-shaped Baby Rattles
Under Armour Infant Sports Jersey Kits – snaps may detach and scratch baby
Zoom Car Seat Stroller Adapter – adapter clips may not clip properly
Playtex Hip Hammock Infant Carriers – buckles may crack or break
Browning Youth Buckmark Junior Hoodie Sweatshirts – drawstrings; strangulation hazard
Yoki Girl’s Faux Leather Jacket (Burlington Coat Factory) – drawstrings; strangulation hazard
IQ Girls’ Hooded Pink Leopard Jackets (Burlington Coat Factory) – drawstrings; strangulation hazard
IKEA Children’s Wall-Mounted Lamps – strangulation hazard

Toys
Doodlebutt Growing Toys – may be mistaken for candy and ingested
Tornado brand home playground tube slides – port holes may break and scratch children

Home & Kitchen
Bosch GV4 Fire Alarm Control Panels – alarms may not activate
RSI (Home Depot) Bathroom Medicine Cabinets – Mirror may fall out
Kenmore oscillating fan heaters – Heaters may overheat or catch fire
Norwood Furniture Science Tables – legs may split
Walmart Card Table and Chair Sets – risk of sudden collapse and possible finger amputation
Yankee Candle Pine Berry Ring – candle holder is flammable
Libbey Bristol Valley Cocktail Glasses with Sheer Rim
Wahl Total Care, Aerosol Cleaner, Lubricant & Coolant – may ignite on contact with electric clippers
Seasonal Specialties Pre-lit Christmas Trees (Menards) – fire and burn hazard
Hobby Lobby Accent Chairs – front legs may collapse
Shaw Industries Aristocrat II Carpet (Home Depot) – does not meet federal flammability standards

Sports & Outdoors
Trident Pool Gate Latches – Magnet may come loose, not latch gate
SRAM Hydraulic Road Rim Brakes and Hydraulic Road Disc Brakes for bicycles – brakes may fail, which is very bad
Olympic Decline free weight bench – frame may collapse forward
Evolution Mountain Bike Suspension Forks – may cause wheel to detach
Trek model year 2013 Madone bicycles – front brake may fail
efco brand Gas Trimmers – muffler may break; fire hazard
Honda 21” lawnmowers – Blade may continue spinning after engine is stopped

Clothing
Red Wing Shoes Steel Toe Work Boots – steel may not protect toes sufficiently

Electronics
HP Chromebook 11 chargers – fire hazard
Coby Electronics 32″ TVs – fire hazard

Earlier today, we told you how all but one of the subcompact cars (aka mini cars) tested by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety received failing marks in the important small overlap crash test, and the Honda Fit earned the lowest scores of the entire group. As a result, our co-workers at Consumer Reports have decided they can no longer recommend this particular vehicle.

The Fit had been recommended by CR initially based on non-crash testing that found the vehicle had “easy cabin access and very good visibility,” with responsive steering and agile handling. It also has great gas mileage (33 mpg for manual transmissions; 30 mpg for automatic).

The Fit received “Good” ratings from the IIHS in the four other tests of crashworthiness — Moderate Overlap, Side, Roof Strength, Head Restraints & Seats — but Consumer Reports had to pull its recommendation after the announcement that the Fit’s small overlap test received an overall “poor” grade from IIHS.

In that test, which measures the damage done by crashing only the front corner of a vehicle into a barrier, there was structural intrusion into the driver’s space, and the crash test dummy’s head barely contacted the frontal airbag before sliding off and hitting the instrument panel.

The Chevy Spark was the only mini car to receive the IIHS Top Safety Pick award for 2013, but CR says it could not recommend the electric vehicle because its overall Road Test score from the magazine was only a 36 out of 100.

In October, Consumer Reports pulled its recommendations for three Toyota vehicles — the Camry, Prius V, and RAV4 — and the Audi A4 after they all performed poorly in the IIHS small overlap test.

Many of the vehicles that failed the small overlap test were designed before IIHS began this particular test in 2012. It’s hoped that future models of these cars will take this test into account so that there are not so many failures in coming years.

Prince William County crime report Washington Post Prince William County. These were among incidents reported by Prince William County police. For information, call 703-792-7245. LONDON, ENGLAND - JANUARY 21: Preventive conservation co-ordinator at Historic Royal Palaces ... and more »

Pr. William adopt a pet: Foxy (SAR 46) is a female shepherd mix looking for a ... Washington Post 4Foxy (SAR 46) is a 10-year-old shepherd mix with lovely eyes found living on her own as a stray in Manassas. The Prince William County Animal Shelter, 14807 Bristow Rd., Manassas, makes animals available for adoption by residents of Manassas and ...

- "Drink the water."

- It's a mishap that will cement itself in London transit lore.

- Much has transpired since Nadya Suleman became "Octomom" by giving birth to eight premature but otherwise healthy children on Jan. 26, 2009. She's gone from medical marvel -- hers are the only known full set of octuplets to live past their first week -- to national punch line for her various money-generating efforts

- A decade after landing on Mars, the rover Opportunity is still chugging along.

- The man who prosecutors say fired the shot that killed Washington Redskins star Sean Taylor during a botched 2007 burglary was sentenced Thursday to more than 57 years in state prison.

makeover improve kids' health, too?

- Prosecutors have netted a string of guilty pleas among the suspects in an interstate drug trafficking case that's highlighted the criminal underside of an oil boom sweeping the Northern Plains.