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A cast iron skillet is one of the most useful pans you can have in your kitchen. They’re unmatched for getting a good, flavorful sear on a steaks and chops, but they can be used to make cheesy dips, whole roast chickens, and the ooey gooey desserts of your wildest dreams.

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Our universe is constantly doing amazing things. It’s worth looking up whenever we’re lucky enough to catch a glimpse. Here are twelve skywatching events to mark on your calendar this year.

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If you ever need to use your fire extinguisher, you probably want it to work. The powder in some extinguishers can settle and harden at the bottom, making them unusable. To prevent this, conduct some quick maintenance every six months or so.

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TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — Police in Alabama say a man’s 2-year-old daughter was found wandering along a roadway hours after he was arrested on a public intoxication charge.

Local media report that 25-year-old Freelin Joe Burnett has now been charged with child abuse.

Burnett was arrested around 11 p.m. Tuesday. Police Lt. Teena Richardson tells local news outlets Burnett was intoxicated and didn’t tell officers his daughter was in his vehicle several blocks away. Police found the girl looking for her father around 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Tuscaloosa police say Burnett’s bond was set at $30,000. It wasn’t immediately clear if he had a lawyer who could comment on the charges.

The police department’s juvenile division took over the investigation and was able to find the girl’s mother.

The post Toddler found walking alone hours after father’s arrest appeared first on WTOP.

GREEN, Ohio (AP) — The mother and grandmother of a teen who died from a suspected heroin overdose were charged in his death after authorities said they think the mom and her son had used the drug together.

Syringes, illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia were found in the hotel room where Andrew Frye, 16, was found dead in a chair Wednesday night, authorities said Friday.

Preliminary tests show Frye had heroin and possibly the prescription painkiller fentanyl in his system, according to a medical examiner. The teen had a history of heroin and drug abuse, the examiner’s report said.

Investigators said they believe Frye, his mother and her friend used heroin together at the hotel in the Akron suburb of Green. Authorities were investigating whether his grandmother bought the drugs.

The teen’s mother, Heather Frye, and her mother, Brenda Frye, were charged with involuntary manslaughter and tampering with evidence. Court records don’t list attorneys for the women, who are from Akron. There were no telephone listings for them.

Court records show both have a history of drug-related charges.

The mother’s friend was charged with tampering with evidence and drug possession. A man who lived with the grandmother was charged with heroin possession.

Summit County Sheriff Steve Barry said the teen was dead well before authorities arrived at the hotel, and those who were with him had tried to hide needles and drugs.

“The evidence in this case turns my stomach,” Barry said.

The sheriff said all four of those charged played a role in obtaining and providing the heroin to Frye before his death.

The post Mom, grandma charged in teen’s suspected drug death at hotel appeared first on WTOP.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX resumed station deliveries for NASA on Friday, and in a double triumph, successfully landed its booster rocket on an ocean platform for the first time.

The unmanned Falcon rocket soared into a clear afternoon sky, carrying a full load of supplies for the International Space Station as well as a futuristic pop-up room.

After sending the Dragon capsule on its way, the first-stage booster peeled away. Instead of dropping into the Atlantic like leftover junk, the 15-story booster steered to an upright touchdown on the barge, withstanding 50 mph gusts. Engines slowed its descent, supporting legs popped out and the final touchdown appeared neat and clean.

“The rocket landed instead of putting a hole in the ship — or tipping over — so we’re really excited about that,” SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk told reporters at the Florida launch site.

His employees gathered outside the company’s glassed-in mission control in Hawthorne, California, cheered wildly, jumped up and down, and chanted, “USA, USA, USA!” when the booster touched down. President Barack Obama later chimed in via Twitter, praising SpaceX as an innovator.

Bigelow Aerospace, the Nevada company behind the equally innovative inflatable compartment bound for the space station, offered congratulations for the “beautiful launch and barge landing.”

Although SpaceX managed to land a spent booster rocket on the ground at Cape Canaveral in December, touchdowns at sea had proven elusive, with several attempts over the past year ending in explosions on the barge.

Musk’s goal is to make rockets as reusable as airplanes and as cost-effective, too. He hopes to reuse this particular booster in June on another orbital flight, following 10 test firings on the pad.

SpaceX stands to save tens of millions of dollars per flight, Musk said, by recycling the boosters. He’s looking forward to the day when booster landings become boring: “So when it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, another landing, OK, no news there.’ That’s actually when it will be successful.”

Sea touchdowns are actually quite tricky, Musk said, since the targets are relatively small — about the size of a football field — and bobbing in the waves. The boosters will need to land at sea, versus the shore, when they are traveling too fast and using too much fuel to get their spacecraft into super-high orbits — or out of Earth’s orbit altogether.

Blue Origin, run by another high-tech billionaire, Jeff Bezos, successfully has landed his rockets in West Texas in recent months, but those flights were suborbital and therefore not flying nearly as fast or high as the SpaceX Falcon.

This marks SpaceX’s first shipment for the space station in a year. Its last delivery attempt in June ended in flames after just two minutes, doomed by a snapped strut in the oxygen tank of the upper stage. The company resumed Falcon launches late last year with satellites.

The Dragon and its 7,000 pounds of freight — including the attention-grabbing payload — should reach the space station Sunday.

Bigelow Aerospace’s expandable compartment will swell to the size of a small bedroom, once inflated next month. It’s a testbed for orbiting rental property that the Nevada company hopes to launch in four years, and also for moon and Mars habitats.

Traffic has been heavy lately at the 260-mile-high complex. NASA’s other commercial shipper, Orbital ATK, made a delivery at the end of March, then Russia just last weekend. SpaceX’s Dragon will join three cargo carriers and two crew capsules already parked there.

Besides a bevy of biological experiments — including 20 mice for a muscle study, and cabbage and lettuce plants for research as well as crew consumption — the Dragon capsule holds the pioneering pod.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, will be attached to the space station in about a week, but won’t be inflated until the end of May.

BEAM is a 21st-century reincarnation of NASA’s TransHab, which never got beyond blueprints and ground mock-ups in the 1990s. Hotel entrepreneur Robert Bigelow bought rights to TransHab, then persuaded NASA to host BEAM at the space station.

Empty except for sensors, the experimental BEAM is Bigelow’s first soft-sided space structure meant for people. Astronauts will enter periodically during the two years it’s at the station.

Bigelow hopes to have two station-size inflatables ready to launch around 2020 for commercial use, potentially followed by inflatable moon bases. NASA, meanwhile, envisions using inflatable habitats during 2030s Mars expeditions.

On the eve of the launch, Bigelow said the mission promises to “change the entire dynamic for human habitation.”

As does the booster landing for the future of spaceflight, Musk said.

“It’s another step toward the stars. In order for us to really open up access to space, we’ve got to achieve full and rapid reusability,” he said.

Musk said it will take a few years to make the landing process smooth and efficient, and failures likely will occur, “but I think it’s proven that it can work.”

___

Online:

SpaceX: http://www.spacex.com/

Bigelow Aerospace: http://bigelowaerospace.com/

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

The post SpaceX launches futuristic pop-up room, lands rocket at sea appeared first on WTOP.

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — The former Navy SEAL who says he fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden was arrested Friday on a drunken driving charge after police found him asleep in a car parked at a convenience store in his Montana hometown.

Customers at the store in Butte called police to report a sleeping man behind the wheel of the running car around 2:30 a.m., Butte-Silver Bow County Undersheriff George Skuletich said. The officer who responded woke the man up, identified him as Robert O’Neill and noticed odd behavior.

“He was confused. His actions were consistent with somebody who might be under the influence of something,” Skuletich said.

O’Neill denied drinking, gave different stories about where he had been and at one point told the officers he had taken prescription medication to help him sleep, Skuletich said.

O’Neill failed a field sobriety test and would not perform others. The officers brought him to jail, where he refused a test to determine his blood alcohol level. At that point, he was charged with driving under the influence, which is a misdemeanor, Skuletich said.

Jail records show O’Neill was released at 4:26 a.m. after posting a $685 bond. It is his first arrest.

O’Neill denied that he was intoxicated and thanked police for their professionalism and courtesy.

“The facts are that I took a prescribed sleep aid to help with long-standing severe insomnia,” he said in a statement released Friday through a public relations firm. “While the timing was bad and I highly regret this decision, I am innocent of the charge and have entered a plea of not guilty.

“I am confident I will soon be cleared of this matter,” he said.

O’Neill began publicly discussing his role in the 2011 bin Laden raid two years ago. He told The Associated Press in a 2014 interview that the American public had a right to know more details about the killing of the al-Qaida leader.

Pentagon officials previously said it is not clear whose shots killed bin Laden.

O’Neill has made numerous speeches across the country since 2014.

O’Neill, who joined the Navy in 1995, participated in the 2009 rescue of the captain of a merchant ship taken hostage by Somali pirates, a mission that was the subject of the Tom Hanks movie “Captain Phillips.”

He also helped rescue the survivor of a four-man team attacked in 2005 while tracking a Taliban leader in Afghanistan, which was featured in the 2013 film “Lone Survivor.”

The post Ex-Navy SEAL who says he killed bin Laden charged with DUI appeared first on WTOP.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Wichita police say a 2-year-old boy who had an octopus stuck in his throat is out of the hospital, and prosecutors are mulling whether charges are merited.

Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office spokesman Dan Dillon says police presented their case to prosecutors Friday. He says the case is “under consideration,” though it’s unclear how quickly prosecutors might decide the matter.

Police say the boy was taken to the hospital Tuesday night after the child’s 21-year-old mother returned home from work and found her boyfriend performing CPR on her son.

Police say doctors found and removed the dead octopus, which had a head about 2 inches in diameter, from the boy’s throat.

Police said the octopus was likely to be used for sushi.

The post Police: Boy found with octopus in throat now out of hospital appeared first on WTOP.

Auburn Mann, Correspondent

WASHINGTON — The National Zoo continues to receive large crowds in response to the newest member of its marquee exhibit: Bei Bei, the giant panda cub.

The zoo has seen more than 346,000 visitors since the January unveiling of the surviving twin of mother Mei Xiang and father Tian Tian, according to the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park.

Eighty percent of the National Zoo’s 2.3 million annual visitors visit the David M. Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat, which is the centerpiece of the park’s Asia Trail.

There are slightly more than 1,600 pandas remaining in the world, with almost a quarter of them residing in zoos and preservation facilities, according to the Smithsonian. The animals are native to the mountain ranges of Central China. However, due to continued deforestation and other human industrial activities, the species is endangered.

Even among zoos, giant pandas are a rarity. The National Zoo is one of only four in the United States to feature the species. This scarcity only contributes to the pandas allure.

“The fact that we are one of the only zoos in the country to offer giant pandas definitely helps with our popularity,” said zoo spokesman Devon Murphy.

A group of eighth-graders from Seaside and Los Arboles Middle Schools in Monterey County, Calif., were part of a sea of tourists recently. The students made the trip across the country especially to see Bei Bei and the other giant pandas.

“I looked forward to seeing the pandas, that was the most exciting part,” said eighth-grader Oakley Pelton.

“It was so cute and cuddly, I wanted to take it home,” said her classmate, Amaya Valenzuela, whose arms were wrapped around a stuffed panda souvenir she purchased at the nearby gift shop.

The irresistible appeal of pandas has a scientific explanation, according to Dr. Simon Rego, director of psychology training at Montefiore Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

It’s all about evolution, he said.

“The leading theory suggests that we tend to find most appealing the animals that have characteristics — a large head and eyes, small nose and mouth, protruding cheeks and forehead, etcetera — that are similar to our own infants,” Rego said.

“We are biologically programmed to respond to with a nurturing reaction. This automatic reaction is hypothesized to be so powerful that it can be activated by other species with similar traits.”

Those who can’t make it to the National Zoo, can follow the activities of Bei Bei and his family through the zoo’s webcam, which provides live stream footage of the animals.

“The National Zoo is conducting a behavioral study on panda development for the first few months of Bei Bei’s development,” Murphy explained.

There are two cameras in the habitat, with one always on Bei Bei and Mei Xiang.

“We want to monitor how much time they spend together and away from each other, how close they get, how and when they communicate,” Murphy said.

Bei Bei, whose name means “precious treasure” in Mandarin, was named by both First Ladies Michelle Obama and Peng Liyuan of China last September when China’s first family came for a state visit.

The presence of giant pandas in Washington is rooted in international diplomacy.

Originally given to the United States as a goodwill gesture from China during the restoration of relations between the two nations in the early 1970s, the current family of giant pandas remain here on long-term loan.

After negotiations, the lease on Tian Tian and Mei Xiang recently was extended until 2020. Any of the pair’s offspring are required to be sent to China upon reaching age four.

Bei Bei is scheduled to be sent to China in 2019 to join his older siblings, Bao Bao (who is scheduled for relocation from Washington when she turns four years old in 2017) and Tai Shan, who currently resides at the Dujiangyan Panda Base.

The post Bei Bei plays, the crowds keep coming to National Zoo appeared first on WTOP.

WASHINGTON — Temple Douglas grew up in the fields of Luckett, Virginia, where the ticks that cause Lyme disease lie in wait in the tall grass.

Her mother and brother struggled with the disease and before she was out of her teens, Douglas — an aspiring scientist — was fighting back.

She was a high school student on a summer internship at George Mason University when she learned researchers there were working on a new form of nanotechnology that they hoped could be used to detect early signs of cancer. Douglas suggested they use it to create a new test for Lyme.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Douglas said. “But I had an idea and I thought I would ask.”

Alessandra Luchini — one of the developers of the new nanotechnology — became her mentor, instructing the teenager in the intricacies of the lab. The summer internship took on a life of its own, with Douglas becoming a fixture in the laboratory in late afternoons and evenings. She would travel to Mason after her classes at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, Virginia.

“She performed experiments, she wrote the paper, she answered the questions of the scientific reviewers,” Luchini said, noting that Douglas stayed involved with the project while getting her undergraduate degree at Princeton University.

Those were the years of painstaking trials on the new urine test for Lyme, which researchers say enables doctors to detect the disease easily and effectively in its earliest stages.

“This is our centerpiece,” said Lance Liotta, co-director of Mason’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine.

It works this way: tiny nanoparticles developed by the George Mason scientists trap and measure  markers for the disease found in very low concentrations in body fluids. The nanoparticles find the tiniest traces missed by most diagnostic tests.

Liotta said that in the case of Lyme disease, “the overall goal is to measure pieces of the Lyme bacteria that are shed into the urine.”

Right now, samples are sent for analysis to Ceres Nanoscience, a private company based in Reston, Virginia, that is partnering with the GMU scientists.

The National Institutes of Health funded most of the research that led to the now-patented nanotechnology, and the state of Virginia is helping  to pay for the development of a commercially available version of the Lyme test that can be performed right in a doctor’s office or at home,  much like the pregnancy tests currently on the market.

Luchini says it is as simple as mixing a solution with a body fluid sample. And she emphasizes that Lyme is only the beginning.

“This concept is applicable to any disease as long as we identify the causative agent,” Luchini said.

The George Mason researchers are already testing it on malaria, Ebola and tuberculosis — all illnesses where early identification and treatment is invaluable. Zika may be added to the list.

The GMU lab has also entered into a partnership with infectious disease specialists from Johns Hopkins University and together they are exploring the potential for portable testing in the developing world, where access to medical care is limited.

As for Temple Douglas, she is now a PHD candidate in biomedical engineering at Virginia Tech.  She has switched her focus from Lyme disease to research on cancer cells, but one thing has not changed.

Ask her to spell out her lifetime goal and she doesn’t miss a beat: “I want my research to help people,” she said.

The post A new test for Lyme disease comes from an unlikely source: a summer intern appeared first on WTOP.

OLDTOWN, Md. (AP) — The Maryland State Fire Marshal’s Office says 30 cats died and two people suffered minor injuries from a fire at a private animal rescue in the western Maryland community of Oldtown.

The agency said in a statement that the fire at the Ark of Hope Rescue was reported shortly before 1:30 a.m. Friday.

The statement says two women were treated at a hospital in Cumberland and released. The fire marshal’s office says one woman had a lacerated forearm and the other suffered minor smoke inhalation.

The statement says losses are estimated at $200,000 and that the cause of the blaze is under investigation.

Owner Dianne Care tells the Cumberland Times-News her husband released all the dogs in the building during the fire and none of them died.

The post 30 cats killed, 2 people hurt in animal rescue fire appeared first on WTOP.

BURKEVILLE, Va. (AP) — As he walked into the Virginia sun after spending 33 years in prison for crimes authorities now say he didn’t commit, the fact that his parents weren’t there to see him become a free man weighed heavily on Keith Allen Harward’s mind.

“That’s the worst part of this,” said Harward, who choked back tears as he spoke about his parents, who both died while he was wrongfully imprisoned. “I’ll never get that back.”

Harward was released from the Nottoway Correctional Center on Friday after the Virginia Supreme Court agreed that DNA evidence proves he’s innocent of the 1982 killing of Jesse Perron and the rape of his wife in Newport News.

Harward was a sailor on the USS Carl Vinson, which was stationed at the shipyard close to the victims’ home at the time of the crime. A security guard identified Harward as the man he saw entering the shipyard wearing a bloody uniform, but the woman never identified him as her attacker. The prosecution’s case relied heavily on the testimony of two experts who testified that his teeth matched bite marks on the woman’s leg. No other physical evidence linked Harward to the crime.

The Innocence Project got involved in Harward’s case about two years ago and pushed for DNA tests, which failed to identify Harward’s genetic profile in sperm left at the crime scene. The DNA matched that of one of Harward’s former shipmate’s, Jerry L. Crotty, who died in an Ohio prison in June 2006, where he was serving a sentence for abduction.

The reliability of bite-mark evidence has come under increased scrutiny in recent years.

An Associated Press investigation in 2013 found that at least 24 men convicted or charged with murder or rape based on bite marks found on victims have been exonerated in the U.S. since 2000. The Associated Press story was based on decades of court records, archives, news reports and filings by the Innocence Project.

“We’ve learned nothing if we continue to use this evidence even though we know it has no basis in science,” said Dana Delger, an attorney with the Innocence Project.

Harward initially faced the death penalty, but a loophole in the law caused his capital murder conviction to be overturned in 1985, said Olga Akselrod, another Innocence Project attorney.

“The fact that this case involved an innocent man who faced the death penalty should terrify everyone, not just in the state of Virginia but also in the 31 other states that still have the death penalty,” Akselrod said.

Harward said he’s heading to his home state of North Carolina with family, who acknowledged that it will take him some time to get used to his new world.

“Keith is stepping out of a time capsule into a different world. We’re going to try to help him all we can,” said his brother, Charles Harward.

Harward said he’s looking forward to having some fried oysters as soon as he can. Beyond that, he’s not so sure. He just excited to be free to do whatever he wants.

“Go out and hug a tree, sit in a park. Whatever I want to do. Because I can.”

___

Follow Alanna Durkin Richer on Twitter at twitter.com/aedurkinricher. Her work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/journalist/alanna-durkin-richer

The post Exonerated man released from Virginia prison after 33 years appeared first on WTOP.

While we take all forms of food theft very seriously, when someone commits a cheese-related crime, we get very annoyed. We’re none too pleased right now with the jerk who pilfered almost $2,000 worth of provolone from a Colorado eatery, a jerk whose crime is depriving potential customers of the enjoyment of eating cheese.

Police are looking for the provolone poacher who swiped the cheese — which the restaurant uses to make pizza — the overnight Tuesday, reports The Pueblo Chieftain.

According to police, the cheese thievery went down sometime on Tuesday night when the suspect broke into the restaurant, damaging doors in the process. A manager said the thief also broke through padlocks on a restaurant freezer to get to the cheese. Again, I can’t condone such actions, but that is some serious dedication to dairy.

All told, the thief boosted 19 cases of provolone cheese worth about $1,900. Cheese was the only item taken.

This isn’t the first time the restaurant’s provolone has been targeted recently, the manager says — it’s the third or fourth time in the last month and a half.

So far, 30 cases of cheese worth around $3,000 has been stolen. The manager believes one thief is responsible for all the recent thefts, and that he or she is trying to sell off the stolen products.

The manager says he and other restaurant folks think it’s the actions of a single suspect. But this time, the suspect was caught on security cameras the inn recently installed. Officials are now hoping the video images will help police track down the person responsible.

“It’s strange to us. This has never happened to us,” the manager says. “We’ve had some things in the past but never food items, you know? We’ve never had to worry about that and we’ve never had that problem. This guy has started looking at us and monitoring us.”

Provolone poacher hits Pueblo eatery [The Pueblo Chieftain]

The public fight Apple and the FBI recently had over one particular phone may have resolved itself, but the national discussion over encryption is just warming up. Now there’s a bipartisan effort to make a decision wandering through Congress… but the politics of it say that this particular bill is going to go nowhere fast.

Reuters reports today that there’s a draft bill in the Senate seeking to make tech companies more answerable to law enforcement, but adds that the White House — approval from which is needed step in making bills into law — is not exactly all in on the effort.

Senators Richard Burr (NC) and Dianne Feinstein (CA) are expected to introduce a bill regarding phone encryption as soon as this week, according to Reuters. The draft text will give judges authority to order tech companies to help law enforcement when asked to — basically, it would be a newer piece of law to fall back on than the All Writs Act of 1789, which is the one that usually sees use for this sort of thing.

However, sources tell Reuters that the bill “does not spell out what companies might have to do or the circumstances under which they could be ordered to help,” and therefore really doesn’t necessarily change the underlying discussions at play, both in the tech world and in government. Nor does the bill specify penalties for failing to comply.

Encryption and device security have become a bit of an unexpected rallying call this year. With the election looming seven months away, lawmakers from both parties have been eager to carve out stances claiming they want to protect both national security and also individual privacy. Senator Ron Wyden delivered a rousing speech last week extolling the virtues of encryption and vowing to shut down any bill that proposed to screw with it.

Although President Obama implied last month that he felt law enforcement agencies need a way to access potentially encrypted information, the current administration, now in its last year, appears poised to kick the issue to whoever starts sitting in the big chair next January. Reuters, when asking for comment on the current bill, received only a reiteration of last month’s press statement from the White House that the administration is “skeptical” of Congress’s ability to resolve the encryption debate.

Exclusive: White House declines to support encryption legislation – sources [Reuters]

What a difference a few days makes: after exceeding the record for preorders of a vehicle by bringing in 276,000 reservations in just three days, requests for Tesla’s $35,000 Model 3 electric car don’t appear to be slowing down. The carmaker says it’s now sold more than 325,000 vehicles in the week since it began taking orders for the less expensive model. That works out to be about $14 billion worth of electric cars that won’t actually be ready until sometime next year. [The Associated Press]

 

There are times when we feel like throwing caloric caution to the wind and just chowing down on whatever we darn please. But if the evidence is staring you right in the face, with cold hard facts about how much exercise it will take to burn off that food or beverage, would you change your eating habits?

According to a survey by the Royal Society for Public Health, a UK charity dedicated to health and wellness education, 53% of respondents said that seeing the amount of physical activity they’d have to do to make up for eating or drinking something would encourage them to “positively change their behavior” by eating smaller portions, picking healthier foods and exercising more, an article in BMJ, a British medical journal, says.

The article is trying to make the case that cluing consumers in to the “activity equivalent” involved in consuming their favorite things is the ideal way to promote healthy choices, and thus, address the growing obesity problem, notes MarketWatch.

As they are, labels are too confusing, the article’s author’s say.

“The public is used to being told to avoid particular drinks and to cut down on specific foods,” the article says. “By contrast, activity labeling encourages people to start something, rather than calling for them to stop.”

Putting activity equivalent info on labels wouldn’t just be about maintaining a healthy weight, the article adds.

“The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has described regular physical activity as a ‘miracle cure’ because it boosts self esteem, mood, sleep quality, and energy levels and reduces the risk of stress, depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease,” the authors note.

Would you change what you eat if you knew how much work it’d take to burn it off later? Weigh in with our poll below.

Take Our Poll
Food should be labelled with the exercise needed to expend its calories [BMJ]
Would you eat better if calorie labels made you feel guilty? [MarketWatch]

Generally, you don’t visit your doctor and then buy the medicine that she prescribes right from her office. Contact lenses are different: you generally order those directly from your doctor’s office, and you often order glasses from the same place too. Yet you don’t actually have to: you have the right to actually buy your glasses or contacts anywhere that you want, whether it’s for a better price or because you really like Warby Parker frames.

The Federal Trade Commission dictates that your doctor has to give you a copy of your prescription to take home, even if you’ve ordered your lenses or glasses already, and even if you don’t ask for one. Having a copy of your own prescription is handy even if you have no plans to go elsewhere for glasses or contacts.

This is called, naturally, the “Contact Lens Rule,” and comes from the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act, a 2003 law.

Contact lens retailer 1-800 Contacts is in a unique position to know about violations: yes, they have a vested interest in making sure that consumers get copies of our prescriptions so we can order directly, but they also have the task of confirming prescriptions sent to them from across the country.

1-800 Contacts recently announced that they submitted 28,000 reports of violations to the Federal Trade Commission, which included optometrists refusing to verify their patients’ prescriptions to prevent them from going elsewhere for their contact lenses. If retail eye clinics and doctors’ offices offer competitive pricing, that doesn’t hurt consumers, but it’s an issue if they don’t.

Prescription Glasses and Contact Lenses [FTC]

A Pennsylvania man, known for helping to usher in the payday loan movement, has been charged with racketeering for his alleged part in a scheme that bilked more than $688 million from consumers and defrauded 1,400 others from a million-dollar settlement. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Thursday announced that Charles Hallinan had been charged with two counts of conspiracy to violate the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) relating to his payday lending operation.

According to the recently unsealed indictment [PDF], Hallinan, Delaware lawyer Wheeler Neff, and Randall Ginger, a Canadian citizen who was a hereditary chief of the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation in British Columbia, took part in a scheme that generated more than $688 million from consumers from 2008 to 2013.

Hallinan owned, operated, financed, and/or worked for more than a dozen businesses, including Easy Cash, My Payday Advance, and Instant Cash USA, between 1997 and 2013 that issued and collected debt from small, short-term payday loans.

The companies allegedly charged customers about $30 for every $100 they borrowed. These charges put the annual interest rates on the loans at more than 700%.

The indictment alleges that Hallinan and Neff conspired to evade laws that deem such loans as usurious by, among other things, paying thousands of dollars each month to three Native American tribes to pretend that they were the actual payday lenders and claim that “tribal sovereign immunity” shielded their conduct from state laws and regulations.

The two men are also accused of assisting another payday lender, Adrian Rubin — who has been charged elsewhere — to evade state anti-usury laws by entering into sham contracts designed to give the false impression that a Native American tribe was the true lender.

Hallinan also allegedly worked with Ginger to defraud nearly 1,400 people into abandoning a lawsuit against one of Hallinan’s operations valued at more than $10 million.

In 2010, a class action lawsuit was filed in Indiana against Apex 1 Processing, a payday lending company that Hallinan ran out of offices in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

According to the indictment, Hallinan offered to pay Ginger $10,000 every month to pretend that he owned Apex 1 and that Apex 1 had no assets, so the plaintiffs would settle their lawsuit for pennies on the dollar. Neff allegedly facilitated that scheme.

The case against Hallinan, Neff, and Ginger is part of a larger crackdown by the FBI and regulators on abusive lending practices.

If convicted of all charges, Hallinan faces a possible 12 years in prison, while Neff and Ginger both face at least eight years in prison.

In law enforcement, they call this scam the “Business Email Compromise.” We refer to it as the “Boss Scam” or “CEO Scam.” What happens is that someone contacts a person inside a business, pretending to be the chief executive officer or other boss-like person. They ask for one of two things: a wire transfer, or personal information about the employees under the real boss’s charge. Both scams are still going strong, and a new FBI report says that the scammers have taken at least $2.3 billion since 2013.

So far, the scam has been reported in 79 countries and all 50 U.S. states. Since tracking began in October 2013, from this scam alone, 17,642 victims report losses of $2.3 billion, for an average of $130,370 per incident. This is all relative, of course: some individual companies have lost millions.

Compromising employee income tax data doesn’t immediately cost anything, unless the employer offers identity theft protection as an apology.

While good spam filters are useful in keeping this kind of scam out of your company’s mailboxes, remember that a successful e-mail scam uses social engineering to get into your pockets. The e-mail address itself could look authentic: perhaps the message comes from bossmeg@c0nsumerist.com or bossmeg@consumer1st.com, a fake domain name that the scammer has registered.

FBI: $2.3 Billion Lost to CEO Email Scams [Krebs on Security]
FBI Warns of Dramatic Increase in Business E-Mail Scams [FBI]

Although some retailers have stopped selling pesticides that are thought to be harmful to bees, amid concerns over the declining population of honeymakers, Maryland will become the first state to have a legal measure barring the products.

The Pollinator Protection Act [PDF] gained final approval in the state’s General Assembly on Thursday, reports the Baltimore Sun, after the House and Senate had previously approved versions of the bill. It’s now with Governor Larry Hogan, and will become law if he signs it.

Consumers won’t be allowed to buy any pesticides that contain neonicotinoids — also known as neonic pesticides — starting in 2018, if the bill becomes law. However, farmers, veterinarians, and certified pesticide applicators will still be allowed to use those pesticides.

Environmental groups have been pushing the bill, with the help of beekeepers, who often showed up at the State House wearing all-white beekeeping attire. Advocates of these kinds of measures say that there’s evidence that neonicotinoids are helping kill off bees, which are very important because of their job pollinating plants.

Maryland would become the first state to have such a law on the books. Portland, OR has banned pesticides containing neonicotinoids, while home improvement chain Lowe’s promised to stop selling those products to consumers in 2015, and other retailers including BJ’s Wholesale Club and Home Depot stopped sale on the pesticides in 2014. Ace and TruValue Hardware are now considering taking similar action.

“We hope it also motivates other states — and the federal government — to reduce the use of toxic neonic pesticides,” Ruth Berlin, executive director of the Maryland Pesticide Education Network said in a statement. “Our future food supply is at stake.”

Comcast giveth (by accident) and Comcast taketh away (via form letter with no pertinent information). The cable giant is telling some Florida customers that they will soon be losing channels they weren’t supposed to get, but isn’t telling them which ones.

The company explains to TCpalm.com that a routine review of subscribers in the Treasure Coast region of the state, Comcast noticed that customers were getting channels that weren’t supposed to be included in their subscriptions.

And so Comcast recently began blasting out letters to affected subscribers to let them know that they won’t be enjoying as many programming options going forward.

Problem is, the letters make no mention of which channels customers will soon be saying goodbye to.

A rep for Comcast tells TCpalm.com that this is because the removed channels are specific to each subscriber, but the company decided to just send out an infuriatingly vague form letter instead of figuring out how to mail out customer-specific notices.

And so, affected Comcasters in the area — specifically in the counties of Indian River, Martin, and St. Lucie — will find out on April 11 which channels they will now have to pay extra to get.

In all its beneficence, Comcast says it will not charge subscribers for the channels they were not supposed to get.

Earlier this year, Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY) said he would try to get federal regulators to come up with limits for airline seat size and spacing. But yesterday, his fellow senators shot down that effort.

Schumer’s legislation — introduced as an amendment to the bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration — would have required the FAA to set a minimum standard seat size for commercial airlines. The goal, said the senator, was to establish a hard line that the airlines could not cross in their effort to squeeze more passengers on to planes.

Existing seat sizes and spacing would remain in place, but any future changes would have to remain above whatever minimum the FAA set.

Airlines would have also been required to post information about their seat sizes so that travelers could use this information to help make their choice of carrier.

“Over the last few decades, between the size of the seat and the distance between the seats, the flying public has lost half a foot of their space,” said Schumer before yesterday’s vote. “You would think that by cramming in more and more passengers on each flight, the airlines could lower their prices. Instead, several major airlines went in the other direction: They started charging for the
extra inches and legroom that were once considered standard. So it practically costs you an arm and a leg just to have space for your arms and legs.”

In the end, the Senate voted 54-42 against adopting this amendment to the FAA reauthorization. Voting was primarily along party lines, with one Republican (Susan Collins of Maine) voting in favor of the amendment, and three Democrats (Tom Carper of Delaware, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, and Jon Tester of Montana) voting against.

Jonesing for a Slurpee and still need to pay your taxes? You can kill two birds with one stone with the Internal Revenue Service’s new payment option: taxpayers can fork over what they owe in cash at one of the participating 7,000 7-Eleven locations in the country.

Though the partnership with 7-Eleven might seem odd at first, for those who don’t have a bank account or credit card, this provides an option for them to pay their taxes with cash.

“We continue to look for new ways to provide services for our taxpayers. Taxpayers have many options to pay their tax bills by direct debit, a check or a credit card, but this provides a new way for people who can only pay their taxes in cash without having to travel to an IRS Taxpayer Assistance Center,” said IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.

If you’re interested in paying at 7-Eleven, you should make sure you get started on the process well before the filing deadline of April 18, as it’s a three-step process that can take some time.

Here’s how it works:

• Visit the IRS.gov payments page, and select the cash option under “other ways you can pay,” and follow the instructions.
• Taxpayers will then receive an email from OfficialPayments.com, an IRS partner, confirming their information.
• Once the IRS verifies that information, another IRS partner company called PayNearMe sends the taxpayer an email with a link to the payment code and instructions.
• You can then either print the payment code provided or send it to your smart phone, along with a list of the closet 7-Eleven stores.
• 7-Eleven will provide a receipt after accepting the cash, with the payment usually posting to the taxpayer’s account within two business days.

There is a $1,000 payment limit per day and a $3.99 fee per payment.

You know how literally just yesterday we shared a report about the mostly-hidden, crazy-monopolistic, vastly important special access market, and all the money it costs everyone? Well, the FCC is really truly on it, the commission announced today.

A blog post from FCC chairman Tom Wheeler sets out plainly what studies and anecdotal reports — and the FCC’s own ten-year-long investigation — have shown: it is seriously time to update the way this business market is handled.

To that end, Wheeler’s office has circulated an NPRM among the other commissioners and their staffs this week aiming to tackle those special access services, with a plan to actually bring them into the 21st century.

MORE: No, Seriously, What The Heck Is ‘Special Access’?

For starters, “special access” itself is gone. The term in use is now “business data services,” which is a lot more accurate to what the issue at play actually is. And perhaps most importantly, the term — like the plan the FCC will introduce around it — is technology-neutral. That means that both the limitations and also the protections built into what comes next will be designed to apply equally to copper wires, fiber networks, cable networks, wireless services, and whatever the next new! improved! technology to come down the road may be.

“If we want to maximize the benefits of business data services for U.S. consumers and businesses, we need a fresh start,” Wheeler writes. “The marketplace is changing. Cable companies are entering the market, and Internet Protocol (IP)-based technologies can now deliver services traditionally satisfied by legacy, circuit-based products. Yet, competition remains uneven, with competitive carriers reaching less than 45 percent of locations where there is demand.”

And when telecom competition is busted, well, the FCC is there. Or at least tries to be.

The general goals Wheeler says his proposal asks for input on are:

• Competition: how can the FCC figure out which markets are competitive already, and then do something about the ones that aren’t?
• Tech neutrality: rules can’t be different for copper and for cable when they serve the same purpose to subscribers.
• The future: seriously, copper wire is so last century. Incentivize upgrades.

This particular document is a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, or NPRM. That’s the one that says, “hey! We want to make a rule about [X], so here are the questions we are going to consider and the data we are going to use in so doing, so please submit public comments on these questions.” In the FCC’s process, that comes months (or years) before a Rule or Order, which is the final step that actually creates and adopts a regulation or law.

That said, Wheeler does write that he hopes “the Commission move forward to adopt a final Order in 2016,” which puts a pretty tight timeline — conveniently, before any looming change in presidential administration — on the proceeding.

The commission will variously stake their claims, announce their support, and/or air their grievances about the proposal at the April open meeting, at the end of the month.

If you’ve got a grandfathered Netflix Standard plan that has you paying just $7.99 per month for HD streaming, here’s your reminder that you’ll either be paying $9.99 come May for the same quality and the ability to watch content on two screens at a time, or will be stuck in standard definition on only one secreen. You’re not alone — an estimated 17 million customers in the U.S. will be affected by the change, and many of them aren’t aware of it.

Netflix first raised the price of its standard streaming plan — the middle tier between Basic and Premium — for new members by $1 in May 2014.

At that time, Netflix told customers that they’d be releasing members from price grandfathering for the Standard plan in two years, and reminded investors of the coming change in January of 2016.

Netflix confirmed to Consumerist that later this month, UK members will be the first to be “ungrandfathered,” followed by members in other areas next month.

“Beginning in May, the price update is rolling out elsewhere based on member billing periods,” Netflix said in an emailed statement to Consumerist. “Impacted members will be clearly notified by email and within the service, so that they have time to decide which plan/price point works best for them.”

It’s a good thing those customers will be reminded: Business Insider, citing analysts at UBS that estimate the change will affect about 37% of US subscribers, or 17 million people, notes a recent JPMorgan survey that says around 80% of those that will be affected by the plan didn’t know the price hike was coming.

If you are a newer member affected by the price increase last October, however, you’ll be able to hold onto the price for your plan until October of this year, Netflix says, following a one-year price holding period.

Here’s how the prices will break down for everyone, eventually:

If you’ve been stocking up on Forever stamps since the last price hike at the beginning of 2014, we have some bad news: those the price of first-class stamps will fall by 2¢ down to 47¢ this weekend. That might perhaps causing slight annoyance for consumers, but will hurt the U.S. Postal Service financially. The price cut, you see, wasn’t their idea.

The price cut came from the government entity that regulates the postal service, the logically named Postal Regulatory Commission. The original price hike for letters back in 2014 was actually a surcharge enacted to help the postal service’s cash flow, and the PRC ordered that the postal service roll back that surcharge.

The Postmaster General estimates that the price cuts for domestic and international letters will cost the USPS $2 billion per year.

Here are the changes that people who buy stamps can expect:

Stamps for letters weighing one ounce or less now cost 49¢, and will cost 47¢ as of Sunday.
Additional ounces for letters now cost 22¢, and will cost 21¢.
International letters now cost $1.20, and will cost $1.15.
Postcards now cost 35¢, and will cost 34¢.

Commercial rates will also decrease, but your postage meter or online service should calculate that for you if you’re shipping in bulk.

​Why the USPS Forever stamps aren’t living up to their name [CBS News] (Warning: auto-play video at that link)

Patch.com

Craigslist Scam, Stolen Car, Home Break-In: Crime Reports Patch.com MANASSAS, VA — Authorities are warning residents about scams on the online buying-selling site Craigslist after an area resident was victimized in a car purchase. According to Manassas City Police, the 21-year-old was attempting to buy a car from the ...

Media Matters for America (blog)

NRA Fakes CDC Statistic To Attack Cosmopolitan For Calling Attention To Women And Gun Violence Media Matters for America (blog) A commentary video from the National Rifle Association (NRA) falsely claimed that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found there were up to 3.3 million defensive gun uses each year in the United States. But the CDC has never released a study with ...

A popular surround sound system, filter-free Dyson vacuums, and a discounted AV receiver kick off Friday’s best deals.

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