After more than 35 years of debate, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is finally taking a look at whether the antibacterial soaps that millions of Americans use daily are effective and safe. The agency proposed a rule Monday to require the makers of antibacterial soaps and body washes to... Read more →

Tom Sightings at Sightings Over Sixty is the host for this week’s Best of Boomer Blogs #338. This edition of the boomer blog roundup takes on the topic of some of the things we want out of life. It addresses the issue of where we are going to live when... Read more →

It was surprising to read an article in The New York Times on bargaining that said Best Buy essentially invited consumers to bargain when it announced that it would match the prices of any competitor this holiday season if customers showed proof of the lower price. I recently bought a... Read more →

IKEA is recalling 23 million children’s wall-mounted lamps worldwide. A 16-month-old child in a crib died after getting entangled in the lamp’s cord. In a separate incident, a 15-month-old child in a crib became entangled in the lamp’s cord and nearly strangled. In both cases, which occurred in Europe, the... Read more →

Over on the blog Time Goes By, Ronni Bennett writes about the importance of helping elders in the winter. The topic is on Bennett's mind because her 92-year-old grandmother froze to death many years ago in her home. She wrote about her grandmother's death four years ago in the article,... Read more →

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman wants to know why Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, United States Cellular Corporation, and Sprint decided to prohibit Samsung from pre-loading a “kill switch” feature on smartphones. The feature would allow smartphone users to disable their stolen phones remotely and make them inoperable when they... Read more →

Photo: H20 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a long-pending, voluntary plan on Wednesday to help phase out the use of antibiotics in animals that aren’t sick. Antibiotics are used in the feed or drinking water of cattle, poultry, and hogs for purposes such as using less food to... Read more →

Most Americans were greatly affected by the Great Recession. As consumers, they’d like to see that the excesses that led to the financial meltdown won’t happen again. Although it’s been five years since the recession, federal agencies are now fining banks for actions leading up to the financial crisis and... Read more →

It was reassuring when I sat in my dentist’s office to read a brochure that said I could make payments interest free if I ever had a big dentist bill through a special credit card described in the brochure. However, deferred-interest credit cards, such the one I was reading about,... Read more →

A group of banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citibank, is being fined $2.3 billion for the manipulation of key interest rates, the European Commission announced last week. The banks are being accused of manipulating European and Japanese interest rates for years, which affect billions of dollars in contracts globally, from... Read more →