Name of Product: DesignWare Sport Balls
Units: About 90,000 packages in the United States and 1,900 in Canada
Importer: American Greetings Corp., of Cleveland, Ohio
Hazard: The surface coating on the basketball contains excessive levels of lead, in violation of the federal lead paint standard.
Incidents/Injuries: None reported
Description: This recall involves DesignWare Sport Balls party favors. The package contains four mini sport balls: a basketball, a football, a baseball and a soccer ball. The model number is SPBL 1821 and is printed on the packaging.
Sold at: Various retailers in the U.S. and Canada from August 2004 through April 2009 for about $3.50.
Manufactured in: China
Remedy: Consumers should immediately take the recalled sport balls away from children and contact American Greetings to receive a coupon for a replacement product.
Consumer Contact: For additional information, contact American Greetings at (800) 777-4891 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET Monday through Friday, or visit the firm�s Web site at www.ag.com
Of the 20,000 bee species that have been identified, beekeepers in Europe and North America keep only one (Apis mellifera). In recent years, some beekeepers have seen a mysterious 70 percent decline in their bee populations. Because bees pollinate fruits and flowers, making them indispensable for sustainable and profitable agriculture, the death of western honeybees—known as Colony Collapse Disorder—has led to a prolonged hand wringing.
Some say the scale of the collapse has been overstated. A study in the May issue of Current Biology, for example, reports a global rise in domesticated bee populations. Don’t get too hopeful, though. Combined with native bee losses, the increase in managed honeybees might not be enough to keep pace with the growing number of food crops requiring pollinators. The disappearance of bees has been called a “looming pollination crisis.” And a “coming agricultural crisis” and a “a crisis on top of a crisis.”
The beepocalypse has also brought some awareness to bee-related news, from beejacking and honey laundering to the range of theories about its root cause. Possible explanations for CCD include cell phone transmissions, disease, drought, stress, toxins, pesticides, malnutrition, and, most recently, a parasite. The collapse has also contributed to an already budding interest in backyard beekeeping. Home meadmaking might be next.
Mead is a fermented, alcoholic honey wine (it’s not officially a wine, though—federal regulators call mead an “agricultural product”). Some compare the taste of bad meads to urine or petrol. To me, the better meads often resemble Pinot grigio with a sweet honey flavor and an aftertaste that’s slightly medicinal, like aspirin.
Because late season goldenrod honey tastes different from an early season blueberry honey, a particular mead’s characteristics are tied to where and when it was produced: like wine, it has terroir. And unlike beer (which, unless you live in the Pacific Northwest, tends to involve a lot of imported hops), mead can be made anywhere there’s honey. Anywhere. One city beekeeper I talked with said hawthorns, crab apples, and other flowering trees planted in cities tended to give urban bees plenty of pollen to forage.
In regions where wine grapes don’t grow well, mead is one of the few alcoholic drinks that can be made with terroir. Tilar Mazzeo, a wine scholar and author of The Widow Clicquot, told me that mead may have been the only wine Europeans made in Maine—at least at the time when the Vikings arrived.
But it’s mostly this association with the Vikings that’s defined mead so far—and limited its appeal. Bees show up in cave paintings, Virgil’s Georgics, and as potent symbols of industry and thrift in American literature, but much of the contemporary writing about mead tends to start and stop with medievalists, the rowdy Norseman Beowulf, or Lord of the Rings-style swilling of hogheads. It doesn’t help that the authoritative how-to book on the subject has the words “compleat meadmaker” in the title. As Nicholas Day put it in an article on Slate, “currency with the Society for Creative Anachronism is not exactly a signifier of great commercial promise.”
Still, the Scandinavian and medieval associations belie its wider cultural significance. Ethiopian restaurants often serve tej, a honey wine made with the gesho plant. Slow Food has recognized Polish meads. Dogfish Head brewery added honey to an Egyptian-style ale. Two East Coast kombucha makers recently turned to mead and, where I live, a couple of young guys have started brewing up dry meads. An estimated 70 meaderies exist in the United States. 
Not all of them make mead worth drinking (the Mazer Cup lists a few that are). Nor do all of them harp on the drink’s storied past, further relegating mead to the realm of mere historical novelty.
For those who do want a taste of ancient Rome, one final note. Pliny the Elder has a recipe for hydromel, a weak mead made of three parts water to one part honey, which should be left outside for 40 days after the rising of the Dog Star (according to Bee Wilson). Hydromel caused drunkenness. It was also said to cure small-mindedness. So if you raise a glass of honey wine, think of Pliny’s recipe, the combination of chain mail and the beekeeper’s veil, and mead’s cloyingly sweet taste of place. After all, bees just might need the attention.
If you are seeking some fine mead here in Columbus I can direct you to Brothers Drake meadery. I can attest that it is some of the finest Mead on the planet.
Hi everyone, I'm Traitor Joe. Welcome to my one-stop-shop for ocean destruction. Join me for a quick trip through my website.
Can you see through the green haze I have used to mask the truth about my seafood purchases? You see, I have a bad habit of greenwashing. Instead of telling you how I am destroying the oceans, I bend the truth and tell you that I do everything "green" and look out for the well being of the Earth. But, if you dig a little deeper (and I hope you won't) you will see that I have a treasure chest (or freezer case) full of red list seafood. Oops. How did that get in my store?
For more go to this link.
And the bigger that so-called shadow inventory, the further off the housing recovery might be.
'The Tip Of The Iceberg'
By the official count, about 3.5 million homes are on the market right now. Given the rate of home sales, that's roughly twice the normal supply.
But "that could just be the tip of the iceberg," says Stan Humphries, chief economist for the real estate Web site Zillow.
It's not what is already for sale that worries economists like him; it's the number of homes that might hit the market in the months to come.
"The portion of the iceberg below the waterline is inventory that's waiting to come into the market at some point," Humphries says. "And as it bleeds into the market over time, it continues to put downward pressure on prices."
Shadow inventory comes in several forms. It includes homes in or close to foreclosure but not yet put up for sale — a number that's increasing. It also includes homes that owners want to sell but are waiting to put on the market until it improves.
In a recent survey, Zillow found that nearly a third of homeowners would have considered putting their homes up for sale if the market were better. Nationally, that would mean between 11 million and 30 million homes that aren't listed but are waiting on the sidelines.
Stuck With Unwanted Homes
The would-be sellers include people like Jennifer Dalzell. She and her husband bought a five-bedroom row house just four years ago in the shadow of the nation's capital. Her husband is in the military, so they move around a lot.
Dalzell says she's watched the appraised value of their home plummet along with their retirement savings and mutual funds. Her husband will be moving to his new gig in Africa without the family, in part because they don't want to sell at what she believes is the bottom of the market.
"Because we can wait, we'll wait until we feel that we can get a better price for the house," Dalzell says. "I think the market will come back. It feels like there's money out there, and people are just sort of waiting. And I guess we're contributing to that waiting game."
There are no records that quantify how many people like Dalzell there are. In fact, sizing up the shadow inventory is tough.
"Unfortunately, our data are very delayed, and we really don't have a sense of exactly where we are," Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said at the National Association of Realtors conference in May.
The key question, Greenspan said, is quantifying how many single-family dwellings are available for sale.
Number Of Foreclosed Homes Unclear
But it's not clear how many more homes will be heading into foreclosure. If prices keep falling, that number is bound to grow.
Government data released Tuesday showed the number of homes going through the foreclosure process jumped 22 percent during the first quarter. The number of homeowners who are seriously delinquent on their mortgages is also up. Delinquencies are growing the fastest among borrowers who had good credit scores.
And that's only part of the challenge. As banks take possession of more foreclosed homes, not all of those are listed — sometimes because they are holding back inventory so they don't flood the market.
"I do know that banks are holding onto inventory, and what they're doing is they're metering them out at an appropriate level to what the market will bear," says Pat Lashinsky, chief executive of online brokerage site ZipRealty.
He says this strategy has paid off for banks — even if it also pushes a full housing recovery further out.
"By not flooding the market, they were getting better pricing on the homes that they owned," Lashinsky says. "And instead of people coming in and offering less than what the prices were, they were ending up in multiple-offer situations and getting more for the homes."
Lashinsky adds that a large shadow inventory is not all bad because it creates a kind of buffer. Having so many people hold back prevents a free-fall in home prices. And when the economy recovers, he says, there will be plenty of homes to buy."
