With its massive floor plan and crowds of bargain hunters, shopping at Ikea can make you hungry enough to eat a horse, but the furniture giant was probably hoping that would remain a figure of speech for its famed Swedish meatballs.

Ikea's meatballs -- served in its cafeterias and sold frozen for customers to take home -- have been pulled into Europe's widening horse meat scandal. Authorities in the Czech Republic said they found horse meat in frozen meatballs labeled as beef and pork, and which had been sold in 13 countries across Europe, reports The Associated Press.

More than 1,600 pounds of Kottbullar meatballs were halted from reaching Ikea's store shelves.

 

As Congress grapples with new efforts at immigration reform and the best way to deal with the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., the very controversial idea of a national identification card has once again come to the fore.

The Wall Street Journal reports a bipartisan group of senators is exploring the possibility of requiring anyone working in the U.S. to carry a "high-tech identity card that could use fingerprints or other personal markers to prove a person's legal eligibility to work."

The Journal says while the lawmakers aren't calling for a so-called “biometric" ID card and are open to other options, several have supported the concept in the past.

 

Are you ready for the sequester? This latest post-fiscal cliff, political game of chicken over the federal budget could go into effect on March 1, unless some sort of congressional compromise is reached.

As Caitlin Dickson at the Daily Beast puts it, the sequester "is the trade-off for the tax hikes the cliff deal avoided: a collection of across-the-board budget cuts adding up to about $1.2 trillion dollars over 10 years. It’s a manufactured political crisis, basically, and everyone shares some blame for it."

If the sequester happens -- and that's still a pretty large "if" -- about half of those cuts will come from the U.S. military. The Pentagon could find its budget slashed by $500 billion, which would not only have direct and a relatively immediate impact on the war in Afghanistan but also on defense industry contractors and, of course, jobs directly and indirectly linked to the Department of Defense.

 

Obesity isn't just a serious health issue for more than a third of Americans. It weighs us down financially as well.

An annual $190 billion is spent on obesity-related medical costs, according to a Reuters report, citing data from the Mayo Clinic. In fact, an overweight person is expected to have about $1,850 more in yearly medical costs than someone of healthy weight.

There are even obesity-associated costs to the overall economy. The report says job absenteeism among the obese is higher, airlines need an extra $5 billion in jet fuel to fly heavy passengers compared to 1960 weight data, and we spend an additional $4 billion annually on extra gas for heavy passengers and drivers.

Along with calls for better diets, more exercise and additional research into weight-loss drugs, a lot of hope has been invested over the past two decades in bariatric surgery as a treatment for obesity.

 

Before you order tuna sushi, you might want to think about this fact: 44% of all sushi venues, grocery stores and restaurants have mislabeled their seafood in recent years, according to a recent report from Oceana.

In fact, that tuna might just be escolar, a fish that's sometimes called the "Ex-Lax fish" because it causes severe gastrointestinal distress in some people. (And bad news for sushi lovers in New York, Washington, Chicago and Austin, Texas: The study found that every sushi venue it tested in those cities mislabeled fish.)

The worst victims of mislabeling were fish sold as either snapper or tuna, with 87% and 59% of the samples misidentified, the report notes. The study was conducted from 2010 to 2012.

 

If you're 35 years old or younger, chances are you learned one really tough lesson during the recession: Keep debt to a minimum.

A Pew Research Center study released Thursday and titled "Young Adults After the Recession" found that not only did young people stop racking up credit card debt during the economic downturn, but they stopped taking on just about any debt at all while helping America drive less and, until just recently, buy fewer homes.

That's not always such a great thing for the economy, which likes it when young people buy stuff and boost the GDP, but it's wonderful for young people whose median debt dropped 29% from $21,912 to $15,473 between 2007 and 2010.

That's phenomenal compared to the burden being dragged around by older Americans.

 

Seth MacFarlane is funny, talented and really rich, with a reported net worth of about $100 million. But is the "Family Guy" creator the right choice to host this weekend's Academy Awards?

Writing Friday in Advertising Age, Brad Adgate of Horizon Media makes a compelling case that the marriage between MacFarlane and Oscar may not be a match made in heaven.

For one thing, MacFarlane's television shows -- including "Family Guy," "American Dad" and "The Cleveland Show" -- attract mostly male audiences with a median age of 32. The Oscar telecast is so skewed toward women some have called it "The Super Bowl for women."
 
"Ted", MacFarlane's film about a teddy bear with a potty mouth, grossed -- and "gross" is a good way to describe this hysterical movie -- $535 million globally. 

New York's Upper West Side may be where hungry tourists stop in at H&H Bagels for breakfast, Barney Greengrass for lox and whitefish and Zabar's to nosh on some cheese or salad. But it's also where Martin Luther King Jr. and Columbia University students voiced opposition to the Vietnam War and where Riverside Church handed out tents to Occupy Wall Street protesters.

It's the home of Lincoln Center, the Museum of Natural History, Barnard and Juilliard.

It's just not the kind of place where Whole Foods (WFM) can put up an illustration of President Barack Obama touting the grocer's chicken special and expect folks to shrug it off as anything but racist. Yet the Whole Foods on 97th Street and Columbus Avenue put up just such a caricature earlier this week before receiving a flood of complaints.