“It consists of two round, textbook-thick, palm-sized chocolate cakes that sandwich a creamy vanilla filling to create one sinfully rich snack. It’s the whoopie pie, a snack so beloved that residents in two states have cooked up a good-natured tug of war over which place is its rightful home — Maine or Pennsylvania? A state legislator in Maine whipped up passions when he introduced a bill in January to make the whoopie pie Maine’s official state dessert. Like a group of chefs tweaking a recipe, a legislative committee has since dropped “dessert” in favor of making the snack Maine’s official “treat.” No matter — residents in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County say that’s just baloney. Those round mounds of cakey goodness originated from kitchens of the area’s Amish families, dating back generations, they say. “We’ve had this thing going with the whoopie pie here for years and years and decades,” John Smucker, CEO of the family-run company that owns the Bird-in-Hand Bakery, said as kitchen workers busily put together a batch of red velvet whoopie pies. “And all of a sudden they try to enter into the picture… It’s just a bunch of nonsense.” w/ photo

“The war on terror recently became a battle for a clean floor in Germany after a man of Tunisian descent found out his order of a vacuum cleaner part had been flagged on a terrorism watch list. Berliner Ali ben Salem told daily Der Tagesspiegel on Monday that a delivery of a vacuum cleaner floor extension part worth $20.00 had been stopped by the authorities. A letter from the Bosch und Siemens household products company in Fürth informed Salem that the delivery had been halted through their “inspection system” and would only be shipped after he provided a copy of his personal identification. Tunisian-born Salem, a German studies specialist who has lived in Berlin for more than 40 years and holds German citizenship, took the letter to a local BSH service centre to find out more, he said. He was stunned to discover that his name was on a terrorism watch list, the paper said. Der Tagesspiegel contacted the company, which said they assumed Salem was not necessarily on the terror suspect on the list, but that European Union regulations required them to review the situation. The EU rules also dictate that people on the list are not to be provided with “financial assets or economic resources,” apparently including vacuum cleaner parts, the paper was told.” w/ photo