Is love all around us, or is it just in the front aisles between the displays of "Wreck-It Ralph" DVDs and discounted Lee Riders?

For a lucky 15 states in this lovelorn union of ours, the best hope for bringing a little romance into their citizens' lives lies just beyond the customer service counter of the local Wal-Mart (WMT). CNNMoney notes that, according to a study of "missed connections" posts on Craigslist conducted by Psychology Today magazine, Wal-Mart was the most popular place to find love in the U.S. overall.

It's not that there's any romance to rolled-back prices or an aphrodisiac effect to the last-minute splurge items situated in front of the registers. It's just that, in certain states, Wal-Mart is the population's best chance at a universal, communal experience.

 

The $85 billion in federal spending cuts triggered by the sequester will hit low-income Americans dependent on government assistance especially hard, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive-leaning think tank.

According to organization, about 3.8 million long-term unemployed workers with federally funded benefits will see about an 11% cut in those weekly benefits. The Women, Infants and Children nutrition program will have to turn away as many as 600,000 to 775,000 women and children by the end of the year. More than 100,000 people will lose housing aid.

"There is no way to cut $85 billion in a single year, mainly from discretionary programs -- which include most defense spending as well as medical research, education, help for low-income families, food and water safety, law enforcement, and so on -- and not see real impact," writes Sharon Parrott, on the think tank's blog. 

Why did The New York Times suddenly discontinue its Green blog?

Late last Friday, the paper announced it was closing down the blog, which was created "to track environmental and energy news and to foster lively discussion of developments in both areas."

The push-back was immediate, especially from Times readers. "Nine sports blogs and no room for the environment?" said Bill Bunch of Austin, Texas, in the paper's comments section. "At NYT? In this world? You've got to be kidding."

"It's clear who the bean counters at NYT answer to," wrote someone in Kansas City. "They have decided to ignore the biggest story of the century."

 

Comcast's (CMCSA) NBC has denied a report in The Hollywood Reporter that next season could be Jay Leno's last as host of "The Tonight Show" and that he would probably be replaced by comedian Jimmy Fallon.

"We are categorically denying the the reports on a plan for a late-night transition," writes Rebecca Marks, NBC's executive vice president for entertainment publicity, in an email to MSN Money.

Leno, who first took over "The Tonight Show" after Johnny Carson's retirement in 1992, and everyone else at NBC has good reason to be nervous. As my colleague Aimee Picchi recently noted, the network came in fifth in the recent sweeps period, when broadcasters showcase their best programs in the hopes of attracting the biggest audience. Even Spanish-language network Univision did better. 

The adversarial relationship between large, established beer brewers and their small, "craft" counterparts is as much about the ideology behind the beer as it is about what's in the bottle or cans.

It's broadly palatable light lager versus more complex styles, it's embraced familiarity versus constant experimentation, it's sprawling distribution networks versus word of mouth, it's a global marketplace versus local markets.

Then again, sometimes it's just about simple business.

Those broader conflicting concepts tend to inflate just about any squabble between large and small brewers into David-and-Goliath narratives. When small Tennessee brewer Calfkiller got into a tussle with Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) over old kegs that Calfkiller says A-B wanted back, Calfkiller took to its Facebook page and tapped out a lengthy screed about how its tiny operation was being bullied by the big, bad brewer.

 

If you're sitting in an airport security line reading this while waiting even longer for a flight to take off, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has given you full permission to blame the sequester for your delay.

Thanks to the across-the-board budget cuts that the government has shown no will to prevent, Napolitano says airports like Chicago's O'Hare and Los Angeles International are already experiencing backups that will only get worse. Reuters reports that the Transportation Security Administration and Customs and Border Protection agencies, which are both part of Napolitano's Homeland Security Department, are requiring employees to take unpaid furlough days and forgo overtime just to make ends meet.

Napolitano says she expects delays will only worsen as the week progresses.

 

A widening horse meat scandal in Europe has made consumers leery of everything from beef bolognese sauce to Taco Bell meat. Frozen hamburger sales in the U.K. have plunged and retailers across the continent are testing meat samples for horse DNA.

But amid all the drama, some French chefs have begun legitimately adding horse meat to the menu.

"More and more, we see that people want to keep an open mind about eating horse -- which is as it should be," the president of France's national livestock and meat association told the BBC.

The new gastro-trend at Paris restaurants is horse meat, the BBC reports. Chefs are experimenting with everything from raw meat (horse tartare) to horse steaks, horse carpaccio and horse hamburgers. 

As Democratic leaders push for wealthy families to pay higher taxes as part of a budget deal comes some startling news: The rich are actually paying federal tax bills approaching 30-year highs. 

The average tax payment for a high-income family has rarely been higher, according to data going back to 1979, when the Congressional Budget Office started tracking the information. The report comes from the Associated Press, which cites projections from the liberal-leaning Tax Policy Center.

Families in the top 20% will pay an average of 27.2% of their incomes in federal tax this year, according to the research organization, which is a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, both considered to be liberal-leaning groups.