Current Events in January 2014

You can buy just about anything you want, legal or otherwise, on the sidewalks of New York. Of course, you take your chances when you do so. The guy on the corner selling Prada bags may swear the bags are the real thing but most street-smart shoppers know better.

But once you set foot in a store, there's a certain expectation that the merchandise will be what it's said to be.

One place where that allegedly wasn't true was the Mendi Gift Shop, at 251a Canal Street in Manhattan. New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman on Friday announced the arrests of Chen Zhibin, 49, and Yun Wei Huang, 47, charged with selling counterfeit copies of designer handbags and watches.

High-end designer goods

Schneiderman says the two -- who are husband and wife -- displayed counterfeit high-end designer goods at discount prices. These goods displayed the registered trademarks of well-known brands such as Hermes, Rolex, Michael Kors, Celine, Chanel, Ray Ban, Prada, Coach, Hublot, Tory Burch, Gucci, Oakley and more.

But, said Schneiderman, none of the items were authentic and were not manufactured by the legitimate manufacturers. Instead, they were substantially similar copies bearing the registered trademarks of these manufacturers, but of very low quality.

“Counterfeiting is a serious crime that robs legitimate, well-known businesses of customers and costs taxpayers billions of dollars in revenue each year,” said Schneiderman. “Counterfeiters like these deserve to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and taken off the streets.”

Besides allegedly selling counterfeit goods, Schneiderman said Zhibin and Huang underreported both their corporate income and their personal income to avoid paying sales taxes and income taxes to New York State. While reporting combined earnings of only $30,000 annually, Zhibin and Huang own two residences in College Point, as well as three vehicles – a BMW X5, a BMW 550, and a Honda Civic.

"The trafficking and sale of counterfeit goods is a criminal activity that victimizes honest New Yorkers," said New York State Commissioner of Taxation and Finance Thomas H. Mattox. "Contraband traffickers and sellers are now on notice that the New York State Tax Department will work with all levels of law enforcement to end these crimes and bring the criminals to justice."

The two are each facing one count of Criminal Tax Fraud in the Fourth Degree, a Class E Felony, and one count of Trademark Counterfeiting in the First Degree, a Class C Felony. 

If convicted, the defendants face up to 25 years in state prison.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued a new safety standard for bedside cribs, devices that are similar to bassinets attached to an adult bed. They're used in cramped quarters and by parents who want to keep their sleeping infant as close as possible.

The bedside sleepers are intended for infants up to approximately five months of age or when a child begins to push up on his or her hands and knees.

But although they're increasingly popular, the CPSC says there've been 26 documented safety incidents with the sleepers since 2001. The incidents included four fatalities, which were associated with fabric-sided openings on the products.

Most of the incidents grew either from a manufacturing defect or potential design flaw, the CPSC said.

The new safety standards are based on a standard developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials, with minor changes.
The bedside sleepers will be tested with the same safety standards used for bassinets, which were updated in October 2013.

Any fair-skinned person hears it all the time from their dermatologist and family physician: too much sunlight can cause skin cancer. But now British dermatologists say that while that's true, too little sunlight isn't good either.

In fact, exposing the skin to sunlight may help to reduce blood pressure and thus cut the risk of heart attack and stroke, according to the study published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

The research, carried out at the Universities of Southampton and Edinburgh, found that sunlight alters levels of nitric oxide in the skin and blood, reducing blood pressure.

"Nitric oxide, along with its breakdown products, known to be abundant in skin, is involved in the regulation of blood pressure. When exposed to sunlight, small amounts of nitric oxide are transferred from the skin to the circulation, lowering blood vessel tone; as blood pressure drops, so does the risk of heart attack and stroke," said Martin Feelisch, Professor of Experimental Medicine and Integrative Biology at the University of Southampton.

Good and bad effects

While limiting sunlight exposure is important to prevent skin cancer, the authors of the study, including Dr. Richard Weller of the University of Edinburgh, suggest that minimizing exposure may be disadvantageous by increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Cardiovascular disease, often associated with high blood pressure, accounts for 30 per cent of deaths globally each year. Blood pressure and cardiovascular disease are known to vary according to season and latitude, with higher levels observed in winter and in countries further from the equator, where ultraviolet radiation from the sun is lower.

During the study, the skin of 24 healthy individuals was exposed to ultraviolet (UVA) light from tanning lamps for two sessions of 20 minutes each. In one session, the volunteers were exposed to both the UVA rays and the heat of the lamps. In another, the UV rays were blocked so that only the heat of the lamps affected the skin.

Dilates blood vessels

The results suggest that UVA exposure dilates blood vessels, significantly lowers blood pressure, and alters nitric oxide metabolite levels in the circulation, without changing vitamin D levels. Further experiments indicate that pre-formed stores of nitric oxide in the upper skin layers are involved in mediating these effects. The data are consistent with the seasonal variation of blood pressure and cardiovascular risk at temperate latitudes.

"These results are significant to the ongoing debate about potential health benefits of sunlight and the role of Vitamin D in this process. It may be an opportune time to reassess the risks and benefits of sunlight for human health and to take a fresh look at current public health advice," Professor Feelisch said. "Avoiding excess sunlight exposure is critical to prevent skin cancer, but not being exposed to it at all, out of fear or as a result of a certain lifestyle, could increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Perhaps with the exception of bone health, the effects of oral vitamin D supplementation have been disappointing.

"We believe that nitric oxide from the skin is an important, so far overlooked contributor to cardiovascular health. In future studies we intend to test whether the effects hold true in a more chronic setting and identify new nutritional strategies targeted at maximizing the skin's ability to store nitric oxide and deliver it to the circulation more efficiently."

A British study finds that eating high levels of flavonoids found in berries, tea and chocolate could offer protection from type 2 diabetes. Findings published today in the Journal of Nutrition reveal that high intakes of these dietary compounds are associated with lower insulin resistance and better blood glucose regulation.

A study of almost 2,000 people by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and King's College London also found that these food groups lower inflammation which, when chronic, is associated with diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

"Our research looked at the benefits of eating certain sub-groups of flavanoids," said Prof. Aedin Cassidy from UEA's Norwich Medical School led the research. "We focused on flavones, which are found in herbs and vegetables such as parsley, thyme, and celery, and anthocyanins, found in berries, red grapes, wine and other red or blue-coloured fruits and vegetables."

"This is one of the first large-scale human studies to look at how these powerful bioactive compounds might reduce the risk of diabetes," Cassidy said. "Laboratory studies have shown these types of foods might modulate blood glucose regulation – affecting the risk of type 2 diabetes. But until now little has been know about how habitual intakes might affect insulin resistance, blood glucose regulation and inflammation in humans."

2,000 women studied

Researchers studied almost 2,000 healthy women volunteers who had completed a food questionnaire designed to estimate total dietary flavonoid intake as well as intakes from six flavonoid subclasses. Blood samples were analyzed for evidence of both glucose regulation and inflammation. Insulin resistance, a hallmark of type 2 diabetes, was assessed using an equation that considered both fasting insulin and glucose levels.

"We found that those who consumed plenty of anthocyanins and flavones had lower insulin resistance. High insulin resistance is associated with Type 2 diabetes, so what we are seeing is that people who eat foods rich in these two compounds – such as berries, herbs, red grapes, wine– are less likely to develop the disease.

"We also found that those who ate the most anthocyanins were least likely to suffer chronic inflammation – which is associated with many of today's most pressing health concerns including diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

"And those who consumed the most flavone compounds had improved levels of a protein (adiponectin) which helps regulate a number of metabolic processes including glucose levels.

"What we don't yet know is exactly how much of these compounds are necessary to potentially reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes," she added.

General Motors is recalling 300,000 2014 model year Chevrolet Silverados and GMC Sierras equipped with 4.3L or 5.3L engines.

When the vehicle is idling in cold temperatures, the exhaust components can overheat. The overheated exhaust components may melt nearby plastic parts and may result in an engine fire.

General Motors will notify owners, and dealers will reprogram the engine control module, free of charge. The recall began on January 16, 2014.

Owners may contact Chevrolet at 1-800-222-1020 and GMC at 1-800-462-8782. General Motors' number for this recall is 14008.

Fidelity Mortgage Corporation and its former owner and current president, Mark Figert, have been hit with an $81,076 penalty for funneling illegal kickbacks to a bank in exchange for real estate referrals.

“Kickbacks harm consumers by hampering fair market competition and by unnecessarily increasing the costs of getting a mortgage,” said Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Richard Cordray. The bureau, he added, “will continue to take action against schemes that steer consumers to lenders through unscrupulous and illegal business practices.”

Kickbacks in disguise

The St. Louis-based non-depository mortgage lender is accused of entering into an agreement with a bank in which the bank referred potential borrowers to Fidelity in exchange for kickbacks. The kickbacks were disguised as inflated lease payments for renting office space within the bank. The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) prohibits giving and receiving kickbacks for referrals of settlement-service business involving federally-related mortgages.

When companies pay kickbacks in exchange for referrals, it can hurt competition and inflate real estate settlement costs for consumers, while creating an uneven playing field that puts law-abiding businesses at a disadvantage.

Under the terms of the consent order, Fidelity and Figert are required to pay back all of the company’s proceeds from the unlawfully referred business -- a total of $27,076 that will be deposited in the United States Treasury. Additionally, the CFPB is ordering Fidelity and Figert to pay a $54,000 civil penalty.

Truitt Brothers Inc. of East Bernstadt, Ky., is recalling approximately 1.77 million pounds of shelf-stable pasta and ground beef products because of misbranding and an undeclared allergen.

The products are formulated with hydrolyzed soy protein and dried soy sauce, known allergens that are not declared on some labels.

There are no reports of adverse reactions due to consumption of these products.

The products subject to recall include:

• 3.3-pound cases containing six, 9-ounce microwaveable containers of “Kraft Velveeta Cheesy Skillets SINGLES – ULTIMATE CHEESEBURGER MAC” [a macaroni & cheese product] with a Used By/Sell By date code of “02 MARCH 2014 – 23 OCT 2014.” Identifying case codes are: 00210000432900, 00210000432910, 00210000432925, 00210000464000 and 00210000465100.

The products were produced between May 6, 2013 and Jan. 16, 2014 and shipped to Kraft Foods distribution centers and retail locations nationwide.

No other Velveeta or Kraft products are affected by this recall.

Consumers with questions about the recall should contact the Kraft Foods Consumer Relations Center at 1-800-396-5512.

Gusto Packing of Montgomery, Ill., is recalling approximately 67,113 pounds of sliced, spiral ham products.

The hams may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes.

There have been no reports of illnesses associated with consumption of these products.

The hams were shipped to wholesalers for further distribution in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, while some were exported to Canada. The following products are subject to recall:

• 45.5-lb. cases, with six individual sized hams each labeled “Centrella Signature, Hardwood Hickory Smoked, Spiral Sliced Ham with Natural Juices” with the case code “71292603304,” packaged on Nov. 29, 2013, having a Use or Freeze by date of “02/06/14.”
• 45.8-lb. cases, with six individual sized hams each labeled “AMISH VALLEY, Fully Cooked, Hickory Smoked Spiral Sliced Ham” with the case code “71292645104,” packaged on Nov. 29, 2013, having a Use or Freeze by date of “02/06/14.”
• 45.8-lb. cases, with six individual sized hams each labeled “AMISH VALLEY, Fully Cooked, Hickory Smoked Spiral Sliced Ham” with the case code “71292645104,” packaged on Nov. 30, 2013, having a Use or Freeze by date of “02/06/14.”
• 31.6-lb. cases, with four individual sized hams each labeled “Ripple Creek Farms, Fully Cooked, Ready To Eat, Hickory Smoked, Spiral Sliced Ham” with the case code “71292603312,” packaged on Nov. 30, 2013, having a Best Before date of “2014 FE 13.”

Packaging labels bear the establishment number “EST. 2516” inside the USDA mark of inspection.

Consumers with questions regarding the recall can contact the Gusto Packing customer service hotline toll free at 877-984-8786.  

Midwest Wholesale is recalling the following products and Lot numbers:

Boost Ultra

• 12 pill bottle, Lot#B70130, Exp 03/15
• 3 pill bottle, Lot#B70130, Exp 3/2015
• 1 pill pack, Lot#06012011, Exp 6/2014

XZone Gold

• 1 pill pack, Lot#130710GL, Exp 7/31/18

Sexy Monkey

• 1 pill pack, Exp 12/31/14

Triple MiracleZen Platinum

• 1 pill pack, Lot# OAWF1027, Exp 1/31/15 and Lot# OAWF1003, Exp 1/31/15

Magic for Men

• 12 pill bottle, Lot# GP808, Exp 10/16
• 1 pill pack, Lot#BN030613, Exp 2/6/15

"New" Extenze

• 30 pill box, Lot# 0512058, Exp 05/16

New XZen Platinum

• 1 pill pack, Lot#130520PL, Exp 5/31/17

These products are labeled and intended to be used as dietary supplements for sexual enhancement. The products are packaged in 1-capsule blister packs, 3-pill bottles, 6-pill bottles, 12-pill bottles and 30-tablet boxes. They were distributed to 20 selected retail locations in several states by Midwest Wholesale from August 1, 2013, to October 22, 2013.

Analysis by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found these products to contain undeclared Sildenafil and/or Tadalafil, the active ingredients in FDA-approved prescription drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction (ED). These undeclared ingredients may interact with nitrates found in some prescription drugs, such as nitroglycerin, and may lower blood pressure to dangerous levels. Men with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or heart disease often take nitrates.

Consumers should stop using this product immediately and throw it away.

Midwest Wholesale is notifying its retailers and customers by telephone and recall letter and is arranging for return of all recalled products. Consumers and retailers who have these recalled products should stop consumption or further distribution and return them to place of purchase or directly to Midwest Wholesale, 617 N Althea Ave, Nixa, MO 65714.

Consumers are requested to have their order number or proof of purchase.

Consumers with questions can contact Midwest Wholesale by phone (888-514-7110), Monday-Friday, 09:00am-5:00pm, Central Time.  

Rancho Feeding Corporation of Petaluma, Calif., is recalling approximately 41,683 pounds of various meat products because they were produced without the benefit of full federal inspection, making them unfit for human food.

There have been no reports of illness due to consumption of these products.

The following products are subject to recall:

• “Beef Carcasses”
• 50-lb. boxes of “Beef Feet”
• 20-lb. boxes of “Beef Oxtail”
• 50-lb. boxes of “Beef Hearts”
• 60 and 30-lb. boxes of “Beef Liver”
• 30-lb. boxes of “Beef Cheeks”
• 60-lb. boxes of “Beef Tripe”
• 30-lb. boxes of “Beef Tongue”

Beef carcasses and boxes bear the establishment number "EST. 527" inside the USDA mark of inspection. Each box bears the case code number “ON9O4.” The products were produced Jan. 8, 2014, and shipped to distribution centers and retail establishments in California.

Consumers with questions about the recall can contact the plant’s Quality Control manager, Scott Parks, at (707) 762-6651.

The long-simmering controversy over the risk of fast-spreading fires in older Jeep SUVs is officially history, although safety advocates and personal injury lawyers aren't likely to go away quietly.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Thursday formally closed its long-running investigation into fire risks in 2.7 million 1994-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees and 2002-2007 Jeep Libertys, and accepted the company's proposed fix -- a trailer hitch intended to provide additional protection for the gas tank, which is mounted between the rear axle and the bumper -- for 1.6 million of the vehicles.

Safety advocates say the location of the fuel tank creates a greater risk of fire in rear-end collisions and question whether the trailer hitch is an adequate fix. They say at least 270 people have died in such fires. Chrysler and NHTSA dispute that and cite a number in the 50s.

"It is tragic that NHTSA approved Chrysler’s sham trailer hitch recall for Jeeps that explode in rear impacts," said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. "NHTSA Administrator David Strickland will be remembered as the Administrator who took a job with one of Chrysler’s law firms rather than save more children like Cassidy Jarmon from burning to deaths in Jeeps with trailer hitches. 

"In strong contrast former NHTSA Administrator Joan Claybrook is remembered for saving lives by standing up to Ford and demanding crash tests and an improved remedy when Ford tried to foist off an inadequate remedy for the Pinto which exploded in rear impacts just like the Jeep.”

Ditlow cited a photo of the trailer hitch-equipped Jeep in which Cassidy Jarmon, 4, died when her family's Grand Cherokee was rear-ended.

"I'm so sad," said Jenelle Embrey, a Virginia woman who organized a petition campaign seeking a recall of the Jeeps after she was rear-ended by a Jeep Grand Cherokee, which in turn was rear-ended by another vehicle and burst into flames, killing two occupants. She gathered nearly 128,000 signatures and arranged a meeting with NHTSA officials to press for a recall but won no commitments.

The NHTSA inquiries began in 2009 when Ditlow filed a 69-page complaint with the agency, arguing that the 1993-04 Grand Cherokee has a fatal crash fire occurrence rate that is about four times higher than SUVs made by other companies, an assertion Chrysler disputes.

NHTSA last spring asked Chrysler -- Jeep's parent company -- to recall the SUVs and, in an almost unprecedented response, Chrysler refused, saying the vehicles had a safety record roughly comparable to other SUVs.

Airport meeting

A few weeks later, after a secret meeting between then-Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, NHTSA Administrator David Strickland and top Chrysler executives at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, Chrysler informally agreed to the trailer-hitch fix.

A short time later, LaHood stepped down and now is a co-chair of a non-profit organization seeking more tax funds to support transportation infrastructure. Critics at the time blasted the secret meeting, saying that NHTSA is supposed to be a science-based agency that arrives at decisions through study and testing, not backroom deals.

They insisted that NHTSA should not accept Chrysler's plan without crash testing to determine whether it is adequate. 

"We call on NHTSA to do crash tests of Chrysler's proposed remedy, just as it did with Ford's proposed remedy for the Pinto in 1978, to determine that the modified Jeeps meet the present Safety Standard just as the Pinto's had to the meet the new Safety Standard in 1978," said Ditlow in a June 2013 statement. "If the modified Jeeps do not pass, we call on NHTSA to require Chrysler to develop a more effective remedy just as NHTSA did with the Pinto when it failed the first round of tests."

It won't be known whether NHTSA actually conducted any crash tests until formal reports are released over the next few months.

Ditlow noted that the Pinto -- which also had a gas tank mounted behind the rear axle -- was required by NHTSA to be brought up to current safety standards, not the standards that were in effect at the time the cars were built. In the Jeep case, Chrysler is arguing that it should only have to meet standards that were in effect when the Jeeps were built. 

In 2011, consumer crusader Ralph Nader, who ignited the crusade that ended in the 1978 Pinto recall, called on Chrysler to recall the Jeeps, calling them "a modern day Pinto for soccer moms with a fuel tank located dangerously behind the rear axle in the crush zone of an impact."

A call sealed the deal

Chrysler's agreement to go ahead with the trailer hitch fix and NHTSA's agreement to close the investigation also appear to be the result of an extracurricular conversation, according to The New York Times. The newspaper reported in today's editions that outgoing NHTSA head Strickland talked by telephone with Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne last Monday and sealed the deal.

Strickland is leaving NHTSA to join the Washington lobbying and law firm Venable LLP, which public records show has billed Chrysler $1.1 million for lobbying activities over the last five years. Strickland is joining the firm's Regulatory and Legislative practices group as a partner.

As part of the Strickland-Marchionne deal, Chrysler reportedly agreed to install the trailer hitches if NHTSA would agree to stop describing the vehicles as defective -- a description that puts Chrysler at a disadvantage in court cases brought by victims of rear-end-related fires and their survivors.

Both sides are now congratulating themselves on the settlement.

"Chrysler Group commends the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for the diligence demonstrated over the course of this investigation," Chrysler said in a statement. "We share NHTSA's commitment to safety."

"Throughout this process, the agency has been in close communication with Chrysler and has no reservations at this time with their announced actions to move forward," NHTSA said in a prepared statement. "Consumers should have their vehicles serviced promptly once they receive final notification from Chrysler. NHTSA will continue to monitor consumer outreach as the recall process continues."

The foreclosure wave has subsided a bit but homeowners are still losing their homes. The rate of foreclosure is still much higher than it was in 2007, not because of subprime mortgages so much as a weak economy with fewer jobs.

While there may be some legal avenues consumers can take to forestall the loss of their homes, it is important to know that not every solution someone offers is going to make the slightest difference. You can spend thousands of dollars up front and still lose your home.

Many states have clamped down on fraudulent foreclosure rescue professionals who claimed to be able to negotiate with the lender for leniency. A relatively new wrinkle to foreclosure rescue is the forensic audit – or securitization audit.

Upfront fee

If you pay an upfront fee of several hundred dollars, so-called forensic loan auditors will review your mortgage loan documents to determine whether your lender complied with state and federal mortgage lending laws. These auditors say you can use their report to avoid foreclosure, accelerate the loan modification process, reduce your loan principal, or even cancel your loan.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), it almost never happens that way. The FTC says there is no evidence that loan audits will help you get a loan modification or any other kind of relief, even if they’re conducted by a licensed, legitimate and trained auditor, mortgage professional or lawyer.

Not always admissible

Sometimes these audits – assuming they find a serious breach – are not even admissible in a court of law. Attorney Gregory Bryl, who practices in Florida and Virginia, says most of the securitization audits he has reviewed fall into that category.

“They contain a mere opinion of a layman without personal knowledge as to what happened with a particular mortgage note after closing,” he said.

It is true that federal law allows you to sue your lender based on errors in your loan documents. But that means hiring a lawyer and even if you sue and win, your lender is not required to modify your loan simply to make your payments more affordable.

If you were able to find enough errors and mistakes to cancel your loan, stop and think about what that means. It doesn't mean you walk away with your home free and clear. It means the loan you originally negotiated with your lender is cancelled, requiring you to pay off the balance right away. Unless you can quickly refinance your loan – and if you're in foreclosure you probably can't – you're going to lose your home.

Spotting a scam

To spot a forensic audit scam look out for anyone who guarantees they can stop the foreclosure process. There are no guarantees in this arena.

Be leery of anyone who tells you not to contact your lender, lawyer or housing counselor. If they say their services require an upfront fee, hang up the phone or close the door.

What to do

What should you do if you find yourself facing possible foreclosure? The FTC's housing experts say that when you’re behind on your mortgage payments, maintaining communication with your lender is the most important thing you can do.

That means you should contact your lender or servicer immediately if you’re having trouble paying your mortgage or you have received a foreclosure notice. You may be able to negotiate a new repayment schedule, although it is by no means a certainty.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development maintains a hotline for free personalized advice at 1-888-995-HOPE, available around the clock. Free online help is available at www.hopenow.com and www.makinghomesaffordable.com.

Most would-be scammers try to profit from people's sense of greed: “Hi! I'm the Crown Prince of Nigeria, I want to smuggle $100 million worth of oil money out of my country, and I'll split the proceeds with you if you help me. Also, I'm requesting assistance from total strangers over the Internet because, despite my being royalty with a hundred million bucks, I'm not acquainted with any rich-financier types.”

Sleazy, yes, but even worse are the scammers who prey on people's sense of compassion, or concern for their family members. That's the root of the so-called “Grandma scam,” where hackers manage to get hold of a [usually elderly] person's contact information – whether by breaking into someone else's email address book or cell phone number list, or scanning Facebook and other social media to mine personal data.

The scammers then contact the would-be victim, usually with a realistic-sounding phone call or email, telling some terrible tale of woe: “Grandma, I'm in desperate trouble and need money to get out of it. Maybe I'm in jail, or stranded in a small town with a broken-down car and no money to repair it, or even stuck in a foreign country after a thief stole my wallet and passport....”

Equal opportunity scammers

Despite the name “Grandma scam,” these would-be scammers don't limit themselves to grandparents. Indeed, this week we were the attempted targets of what we'll dub the “Real estate agent with whom you have an extremely slight acquaintance scam,” even though we know that label doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Here is an email our editor received, allegedly from “Brandi,” a real estate agent who lives and works in New Jersey:

I know this may sound odd but it all happened very fast. I made a trip to Italy and I misplaced my luggage containing my passport and credit cards. I've contacted my bank and the embassy, the embassy is willing to assist me but my funds are depleted to pay for a new passport fees and other miscellaneous expenses.

I don't have access to my account over and My bank said it would take 5 working days to access funds from my account. Please can you lend me some funds? I'll pay back, as soon as I return home.

I await your response,

A tenuous link

We confirmed that our editor never actually tried buying a house from Brandi or her colleagues, though the two of them are connected on LinkedIn. Presumably the scammer got our editor's email by hacking into Brandi's account. 

Brandi is hardly the only Realtor who's had this problem; a few months ago we personally got a similar-sounding email, allegedly from a rental agent we'd met 18 months before, when we'd moved to a new area and needed a place to live. Though we hadn't had any contact with that agent for over a year and a half, our email address was presumably still in her contact list when a would-be scammer hacked into it.

Maybe you've been rolling your eyes the whole time you've read this. “Who actually falls for these scams?” you wonder. “Who believes a wealthy prince must beg help from total strangers, or a realty agent in a jam would forget about family and friends, and seek a loan from a would-be client she'd last met two years ago?”

But if you have such thoughts, you're not in the scammers' target demographic. In the summer of 2012, Microsoft commissioned a study (available in .pdf form) titled “Why do Nigerian scammers say they are from Nigeria?”

Not too smart

The conclusion was that the scammers deliberately make their emails look and sound as scammy as possible, to weed out anybody who's too smart to fall for it. After all: the scammer doesn't want to waste time stringing along a potential “mark” likely to wise up and back out at the last minute.

This is why there also exist websites like 419hell.com (motto: “It's good to be a jerk — to those who deserve it”), dedicated to stories of people who decided to scam the scammers by stringing them along.

Confession: We've tried doing this ourselves — responding to scam emails and pretending to fall for them — yet we never could get anybody to respond to us more than twice. So for this story, we didn't even try contacting Brandi's money-seeking doppelganger (though we did contact the real Brandi, to warn her about the hacker in her email).

Our editor reports that while working on this story, he got a call from a friendly fellow who said he understood our editor was "interested in making extra money by working from home."

"Nope, got too much money already. I'm trying to get rid of some of it," our editor replied, thinking this would stir the soul of any reputable scammer. Instead, the caller gasped and hung up, apparently not being smart enough to come up with a quick response -- proving that sometimes it's the scammer that's not so quick-witted.

Consumer groups – the Center for Responsible Lending in particular – have been hammering big banks for getting into the payday loan business. The banks don't call them payday loans but CRL and other groups do, saying they work the same way – small short-term loans at sky-high interest rates.

Now Regions Bank is getting out of the business of making these types of loans. The bank has announced that it is phasing out its Ready Advance product.

Ready Advance loans are small dollar loans made to Regions' customers, allowing them to take an advance against their next direct deposit. The fee for the loan varies, but is in the neighborhood of $1 for every $10 borrowed. If you borrowed $100, the cost would be $10. It doesn't sound like much but when you consider it is payment for the use of $100 for just two weeks, the annual interest rate (APR) is in the triple digits – on par with your neighborhood payday lender.

January 22 cut-off

Regions said it will no longer make Ready Advance loans after January 22. Instead the bank has introduced new products it hopes will take the place of its discontinued loan. It will now offer what it calls the Regions Savings Secured Loan, which is secured against a savings account. Regions describes its new product as “a low fixed interest rate personal installment loan” that can be used to borrow as little as $250.

Regions said it is also developing other credit alternatives this year, including an expanded, unsecured line of credit product that will meet the needs of many of the same customers who used Ready Advance.

"It's clear that consumers have a need for small-dollar loans, and we believe banks have a responsibility to meet that need," said John Owen, head of Business Groups for Regions Bank. "To that end, we have introduced a new savings secured loan product and we are developing other credit products in 2014 that will appeal to a broad group of current and potentially new Regions customers to assist them in meeting their financial needs."

Greeted as good news

“Data have consistently shown that payday loans made by banks, like those made by payday stores, lead to a cycle of repeat loans, making a borrower’s financial situation worse instead of better,” the group said in a statement. “In recent months, both federal and state regulators have increased scrutiny around all types of payday lending, whether by banks, storefronts or online. Guidance from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is addressing payday loans made by the institutions under their supervision. Regions is regulated by the Federal Reserve, but appears to be responding to broader market and regulatory trends.”

Calls out another bank

CRL said it would like other banks to follow Regions' example. It said Fifth Third Bank continues to offer a product it calls a payday loan and stepped up the pressure on that institution to end the practice.

Meanwhile, Regions says it is developing a transition plan for current Ready Advance customers, and that qualified current customers with an active Ready Advance line of credit will have access to future advances until this transition plan is completed.  

Saying that having diabetes is "like having a part-time job," Google researchers are working on a "smart" contact lens that could sample the glucose level in tears as often as once every second.

That would relieve diabetics of the nagging task of measuring their blood glucose level, a process that involves pricking their finger several times per day.

The company's secretive Google[X] lab is using a wireless chip and miniature glucose sensor embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material to measure the glucose levels in tears.

Noting that diabetes affects one in every 19 people on the planet, Google researchers Brian Otis and Babak Parviz said they're hoping to make it easier for people with diabetes to keep their blood sugar levels under control.

LED lights

They're investigating the potential for the device to serve as an early warning for the wearer, by integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds.

"Many people ... say managing their diabetes is like having a part-time job. Glucose levels change frequently with normal activity like exercising or eating or even sweating," the two said in a blog posting. "Sudden spikes or precipitous drops are dangerous and not uncommon, requiring round-the-clock monitoring. Although some people wear glucose monitors with a glucose sensor embedded under their skin, all people with diabetes must still prick their finger and test drops of blood throughout the day. It’s disruptive, and it’s painful. And, as a result, many people with diabetes check their blood glucose less often than they should."

Uncontrolled blood sugar can lead to dangerous complications, including damages to the eyes, kidneys and heart. 

"We hope this could someday lead to a new way for people with diabetes to manage their disease," Otis and Parviz said, adding that they were in early discussions with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"We’ve always said that we’d seek out projects that seem a bit speculative or strange, and at a time when the International Diabetes Federation (PDF) is declaring that the world is 'losing the battle' against diabetes, we thought this project was worth a shot," they said.

If you visit the rented townhouse where I live, and walk through the hallway leading to various bedroom doors, you'll see a small cloth dishmat lying in an apparently random location in the middle of the wall-to-wall beige carpeting.

But it's not random; that dishmat marks the spot where, if anything heavier than a mouse steps on it, the floor makes an annoyingly loud creaking noise guaranteed to awaken anybody sleeping in the nearby bedroom (and, in open-window weather, is even audible to the next-door neighbors living on the opposite side of the firewall).

I say this to remind you that any dwelling larger than a kid's plastic playhouse comes with its own soundtrack that gets steadily louder as the house grows older. Even when nobody's moving around and no water's flowing through faucets, there's still the sounds of foundations settling, boards or doors expanding in hot weather or contracting in cold – or, I suppose, you could blame all the ruckus on ghosts.

Gregory and Sandi Leeson are leaving toward the “ghost” theory to explain the sounds of their 113-year-old Victorian house in Dunmore, Penn. As Philly.com reports:

Between the mysteriously banging doors, the odd noises coming from the basement, and the persistent feeling that someone is standing behind them, homeowners Gregory and Sandi Leeson are thoroughly creeped out by their 113-year-old Victorian.

So when they put the house in northeastern Pennsylvania up for sale last month, they advertised it as "slightly haunted."

Then things got REALLY weird.

Unsurprisingly, their haunted real-estate listing resulted in plenty of calls from ghost-hunters and curiosity-seekers (as opposed to calls from actual potential buyers).

To be fair, though, Gregory Leeson was surely being tongue-in-cheek when he wrote a Zillow listing describing the house as “"Slightly haunted. Nothing serious, though"; alleged symptoms of haunting include seeing an “occasionally ghastly visage” in a mirror — which could be a ghost reference, but could also be a bit of self-deprecating humor.

A cynic might think the Leesons' “haunted” real-estate listing a deliberate attempt to drum up interest in an otherwise uninspiring home for sale, a theory strengthened by noting that Philly.com reports “If [the house] doesn't sell, Leeson said they might consider renting it out - by the night - to folks looking for spooky thrills.”

Yet it's equally possible that the Leesons were prudently protecting themselves from future lawsuits — specifically, from irate buyers who might sue them on the grounds that, “This house is haunted! Why didn't the sellers disclose that?”

Spooky but true

No joke. There have been actual American legal cases where home sellers were successfully sued for not disclosing a house's allegedly paranormal infestation — and I'm not talking about some old Colonial-era witch-hunt laws, either.

In 1991, the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division ruled in Stambovsky v. Ackley that defendant Helen Ackley, who not only believed in ghosts but thought poltergeists might be infesting her home in the city of Nyack, should have disclosed this to Jeffrey Stambovsky when the latter bought her house.

And in 2009, a tourist from Taiwan tried suing the Venetian casino on the grounds that “feng shui sabotage” was responsible for his gambling losses.

Given that “feng shui home consultant” is an actual people-make-money-at-it job these days, you have to figure it's only a matter of time before some disgruntled mortgage-holder with buyer's remorse tries suing on the grounds of bad feng shui, too. So maybe home-sellers should disclose any quasi-mystic ghostly concerns they have, alongside more tangible disclosures like “The hot water heater needs replacement” or “sometimes the bathtub leaks.”

It's been 50 years since the Surgeon General's report on smoking led millions of Americans to quit or never take up the habit. But even fewer Americans are smoking today, the risk of dying for those who die smoke is higher than ever, said Acting Surgeon General Boris Lushniak, M.D., M.P.H.

“Smokers today have a greater risk of developing lung cancer than they did when the first Surgeon General’s report was released in 1964, even though they smoke fewer cigarettes,” said Acting Surgeon General Boris Lushniak, M.D., M.P.H. “How cigarettes are made and the chemicals they contain have changed over the years, and some of those changes may be a factor in higher lung cancer risks. Of all forms of tobacco, cigarettes are the most deadly – and cause medical and financial burdens for millions of Americans.”

The report also says that about 5.6 million American children alive today – or one out of every 13 children under age 18 – will die prematurely from smoking-related diseases unless current smoking rates drop.

20 million dead

Over the last 50 years, more than 20 million Americans have died from smoking. The new report concludes that cigarette smoking kills nearly half a million Americans a year, with an additional 16 million suffering from smoking-related conditions. It puts the price tag of smoking in this country at more than $289 billion a year in direct medical care and other economic costs.

Today’s report comes a half century after the historic 1964 Surgeon General’s report, which concluded that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. Since that time, smoking has been identified as a cause of serious diseases of nearly all the body’s organs.

Today, scientists add diabetes, colorectal and liver cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, erectile dysfunction, age-related macular degeneration, and other conditions to the list of diseases that cigarette smoking causes. In addition, the report concludes that secondhand smoke exposure is now known to cause strokes in nonsmokers.

Twenty years ago male smokers were about twice as likely as female smokers to die early from smoking-related disease. The new report finds that women are now dying at rates as high as men from many of these diseases, including lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and heart disease. In fact, death from COPD is now greater in women than in men.

Although youth smoking rates declined by half between 1997 and 2011, each day another 3,200 children under age 18 smoke their first cigarette, and another 2,100 youth and young adults become daily smokers. Every adult who dies prematurely from smoking is replaced by two youth and young adult smokers.

The report concludes that the tobacco industry started and sustained this epidemic using aggressive marketing strategies to deliberately mislead the public about the harms of smoking. The evidence in the report emphasizes the need to accelerate and sustain successful tobacco control efforts that have been underway for decades.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today authorized the marketing of a new test that can detect chromosomal variations in newborns that are associated with intellectual disability and development delay.

Based on a blood samples, the Affymetrix CytoScan Dx Assay can analyze the entire genome at one time and detect large and small chromosomal changes.

“The Affymetrix CytoScan Dx Assay will likely speed the diagnosis of the underlying cause of developmental  disabilities for some children already known to have developmental problems," said Annemarie Stroustrup, MD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Newborn Medicine at the Kravis Children’s Hospital at Mount Sinai. "A faster diagnosis can mean earlier access to targeted treatments and earlier identification of co-existing medical problems, as well as a more accurate prognosis of future abilities."

Stroustrup said it's important to note that this test should be used for children with identified developmental disabilities – not for screening of healthy newborns. 

"This is not a blood test for predicting how a child will do from a neurodevelopmental standpoint.  This is a diagnostic test that adds to our genetic testing repertoire for use in children with recognized developmental delay," she said. 

2-3% 

According to the National Institutes of Health and the American Academy of Pediatrics, two to three percent of children in the United States have some form of intellectual disability. Many intellectual and developmental disabilities, such as Down syndrome and DiGeorge syndrome, are associated with chromosomal variations.

“This new tool may help in the identification of possible causes of a child’s developmental delay or intellectual disability, allowing health care providers and parents to intervene with appropriate care and support for the child,” said Alberto Gutierrez, Ph.D., director of the Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “The FDA’s review of the test provides clinical laboratories with information about the expected performance of the device and the quality of the results.”

The FDA reviewed the Affymetrix CytoScan Dx Assay through its de novo classification process, a regulatory pathway for some novel low-moderate-risk medical devices.

In its testing, the FDA found that the CytoScan Dx Assay could analyze a patient’s entire genome and adequately detect chromosome variations in regions of the genome associated with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Additionally, the agency’s review included a study that compared the performance of the CytoScan Dx Assay to tests that are commonly used for detecting chromosomal variations associated with a developmental delay or intellectual disability. A comparison of test results from 960 blood specimens showed the CytoScan Dx had improved ability over commonly used tests.

The agency said, however, that the device should not be used for stand-alone diagnostic purposes, pre-implantation or prenatal testing or screening, population screening, or for the detection of, or screening for acquired or genetic aberrations occurring after birth, such as cancer.