News from Around America

Oil spill prevention requirements will no longer apply to spilled milk. Gasoline pumps wouldn’t need devices for trapping vapor pollutants, and there would be fewer bureaucratic hurdles for doctors who want to dispense medical advice to a distant patient.

These were among hundreds of existing regulations that the ObamA administration said Thursday it wants to revamp or eliminate in A government-wide effort to ease burdens on businesses. Overall, the drive would save hundreds of millions of dollars annually for companies, governments and individuals and eliminate millions of hours of paperwork while maintaining health and safety protections for Americans, White House officials said.

The big highlight of the holiday-shortened week will be Friday’s jobs report for May.

Forecasters expect the S&P Case-Shiller home price index to show A continued decline in housing valuations in March, with an 0.2 percent decline in 20 major metro areas expected. That would represent a 3.5 percent decline over the past year.

The Institute for Supply Management is scheduled to release its index of manufacturing activity which is expected to show continued decceleration of output at the nation’s factories. The index is forecast to fall to 58 in May, from 60.4 in April. Numbers above 50 indicate expansion, so the lower number would indicate a slower pace of expansion in the industrial sector.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) says he’s the latest congressional victim of a Twitter hacking, BigGovernment.com reported early Saturday.

An indecent photo was sent from his account on the social networking site on Friday night. The photo, which shows a man from the waist down wearing bulging gray underwear, was sent to a woman who is a journalism student in the Seattle area. She quickly deleted her Twitter and Facebook accounts after the incident.

According to the New York Daily News, the woman, Gennette Nicole Cordova, released a statement Sunday that said: “The account that these tweets were sent from was familiar to me; this person had harassed me many times after the Congressman followed me on Twitter a month or so ago. Since I had dealt with this person and his cohorts before I assumed that the tweet and the picture were their latest attempts at defaming the Congressman and harassing his supporters.”

RICHMOND — Virginia officials estimate the price tag for drawing new legislative boundaries as part of the state’s redistricting is $10 million and say the bulk of the cost will be borne by localities.

Cash-strapped counties and cities are scrambling to find millions of dollars to pay for new equipment, poll-worker training and voter education in time for the Aug. 23 primaries.

In Fairfax, the state’s largest county, officials project it will cost more than $750,000. In Prince William County, officials have budgeted $260,000.