NEW YORK – Amy VanDeventer has always been a cheapskate. The recession is taking her to new extremes.

Before the economy tanked, she was still wearing maternity clothes from her last pregnancy, clipping coupons and using hand-me-downs to dress her daughters, ages 2 and 3. Now, she's salvaging bagel scraps left on their plates for pizza toppings and cutting lotion bottles in half so she can scrape out the last drops.

"I was already cheap," said VanDeventer, a 36-year-old mortgage loan underwriter from Broomfield, Colo. "Now I am neurotic about it."

If you thought those cheapskate friends and relatives couldn't pinch pennies any tighter, think again. The recession is making tightwads like VanDeventer cut back even more. They're going way beyond sharpening their coupon scissors, replacing already cheap store-brand fabric softener with vinegar and even making their own detergent. VanDeventer was drying her hair in front of a fan after her portable hair dryer broke — until her friends bought her a new one.

The recession is radically changing behavior among many different types of people, from the Wall Street bankers who are now waltzing into Wal-Mart for the first time to buy their groceries to teens who are now thumbing through the piles of status jeans at secondhand shops to save money. And experts say that such behavior could linger long after the economy recovers.

What surprises frugality bloggers is that many cheapskates such as VanDeventer haven't lost their jobs and are not in danger of losing their homes. Many have stashed a good chunk of cash away. But the economic uncertainty is catapulting them to new levels of thriftiness.

"I do it out of fear because I would rather put that money in the bank or purchase something we really need," said VanDeventer, who now saves about 50 percent of her take-home pay, up from 25 percent before the recession began more than a year ago.

The trend is disturbing for merchants, who are already reeling from the sharp pullback by spenders. Such extreme miserly behavior could only worsen the decline in consumer spending.

"Frugal people are now looking at more ways not to spend money," said Lynnae McCoy, who runs a blog called beingfrugal.net, which attracts seasoned penny pinchers. In January, her site received 110,000 hits, up 30 percent from a year ago. What intrigued McCoy was the interest among frugal folks to save even more money by making their own detergent and other household goods.

Elizabeth Schomburg, a credit counselor from Roscoe, Ill., is now replacing store brand softener with vinegar in her laundry. The 31-year-old, who used to comb the 80 percent off sales racks, said she has stopped doing any "recreational buying."

"I am questioning every single purchase," she said.

She's also not stockpiling discounted groceries because she wants to limit how much money she puts out for each trip to the supermarket. That kind of behavior is showing up in fourth-quarter results at companies including foodmaker H.J. Heinz Co., whose sales suffered as consumers are cleaning out their cupboards before buying new items.

Jeff Yeager, author of The Ultimate Cheapskate's Roadmap to True Riches, sees a silver lining to the economic downturn.

"Whatever you do to simplify your life is a good thing," Yeager said. A self-proclaimed cheapskate, he has spent no more than $100 over the past five years on clothing for himself and won't throw anything out until it literally falls apart.

But he's found ways to cut back even more now, such as eating more lentils — which are cheap and nutritious — and biking more to save gasoline. His mantra for buying food? Buy not what you want, but what's affordable at the time.

Unlike many big spenders during the boom years, he says he and other cheapskates are "sleeping easy" these days.

They're also getting some respect from the spenders, who even just a few months ago mocked their thrifty ways.

"My friends used to laugh at me," said Jodi Furman, referring to her obsession with 70 percent off sales and her knack for saving money with coupons.

They're not laughing now. The mother of three from Lake Worth, Fla., parlayed her knowledge into a blog called neverpayretailagain.net last fall. The blog helps shoppers save money on fashionable clothing and healthy food.

"If you can't make more money, then you can spend less — and that's the equivalent of making more money," Furman said.

While she doesn't scrape pizza crumbs or make her own detergent, Furman said she's "laser-focused" when it comes to saving on groceries. She's saving 60 percent to 70 percent off her grocery bills. On a recent trip to Winn-Dixie, she scooped up $63.50 worth of groceries for $16.45. She picked up a box of TLC Cereal bars, regularly priced at $3.99, for $1 — it was on sale for $3 but she used a $2 coupon. She got a $3.99 package of Equal sweetener for free — combining a coupon with the sale price.

Many people are embracing the new challenge of squeezing the most value out of every last penny. Who knew you could make household products such as detergent? McCoy says it's not hard: mix Borax with a half bar of soap, baking soda and its relative washing soda, which cuts grease and can be found in the laundry areas of many supermarkets.

"If you have vinegar, Dawn soap and baking soda, you can pretty much make any cleaning product," McCoy said.

WASHINGTON – Acknowledging it's an "imperfect" bill, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he will accept a $410 billion spending package that includes billions in earmarks like those he promised to curb in last year's campaign. But he insisted the bill must signal an "end to the old way of doing business."

The massive measure funding federal agencies through the fall contains nearly 8,000 pet projects, known as earmarks and denounced by critics as pork.

Obama defended earmarks when they're "done right," allowing lawmakers to direct money to worthy projects in their districts. But he said they've been abused, and he promised to work with Congress to curb them.

"I am signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it's necessary for the ongoing functions of government," Obama declared. "But I also view this as a departure point for more far-reaching change."

In a sign of his discomfort with the bill, Obama planned to sign the bill quietly rather than in public. He declined to answer a shouted reporters' question about why.

Running for president, Obama denounced the many pet projects as wasteful and open to abuse — and vowed to rein them in.

Explaining his decision, Obama said that future earmarks must have a "legitimate and worthy public purpose", and the any earmark for a private company should be subject to competitive bidding rules. Plus he said he'll "work with Congress" to eliminate any the administration objects to.

But he acknowledged that earmarks have bred "cynicism", and he declared, "This piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business."

White House officials in recent weeks have dismissed criticism of the earmarks in the bill, saying the legislation was a remnant of last year and that the president planned to turn his attention to future spending instead of looking backward.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama wouldn't be the first president to sign legislation that he viewed as less than ideal. Asked whether Obama had second thoughts about signing the bill, Gibbs' reply was curt: "No."

Obama's modest set of reforms builds upon changes initiated by Republicans in 2006 and strengthened by Democrats two years ago. Most importantly, every earmark and its sponsor must be made public.

In new steps — outlined in concert with House Democratic leaders Wednesday morning — the House Appropriations Committee will submit every earmark to the appropriate executive branch agency for a review. And any earmark designed to go to for-profit companies would have to be awarded through a competitive bidding process.

But perhaps the most tangible change may be Obama's promise to resurrect the long-defunct process by which the president proposes to cut spending from bills that he has signed into law.

Under this so-called rescissions process, the White House sends Congress a roster of cuts for its consideration. Congress is free to ignore the cuts, but both Obama and senior members like Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., say they want to use it to clean out bad earmarks that make it through the process.

But Obama declined to endorse a stronger process advocated by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others, that would have required Congress to vote on a presidential rescission earmark package. Senior Democrats dislike the idea even though many of them backed it in the early-to-mid 1990s.

During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to force Congress to curb its pork-barrel-spending ways. Yet the bill sent from the Democratic-controlled Congress to the White House on Tuesday contained 7,991 earmarks totaling $5.5 billion, according to calculations by the Republican staff of the House Appropriations Committee.

The 1,132-page bill has an extraordinary reach, wrapping together nine spending bills to fund the annual operating budgets of every Cabinet department except Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs. Among the many earmarks are $485,000 for a boarding school for at-risk native students in western Alaska and $1.2 million for Helen Keller International so the nonprofit can provide eyeglasses to students with poor vision.

Most of the government has been running on a stopgap funding bill set to expire at midnight Wednesday. Refusing to sign the newly completed spending bill would force Congress to pass another bill to keep the lights on come Thursday or else shut down the massive federal government. That is an unlikely possibility for a president who has spent just seven weeks in office.

The $410 billion bill includes significant increases in food aid for the poor, energy research and other programs. It was supposed to have been completed last fall, but Democrats opted against election-year battles with Republicans and former President George W. Bush.

WINNENDEN, Germany – A 17-year-old gunman dressed in black opened fire inside his former high school in southwestern Germany on Wednesday killing 15 people, 11 of them women and girls, before turning the gun on himself, authorities said.

Police said the attacker's father, a gun club member, owned 16 guns, one of which was missing.

The gunman entered the school in Winnenden at 9:33 a.m. after classes had begun and opened fire, shooting at random, police said. He killed nine students, three teachers and a passer-by outside the building, officials said. Two other people were killed later.

"He went into the school with a weapon and carried out a bloodbath," said regional police chief Erwin Hetger. "I've never seen anything like this in my life."

Triggering a land and air manhunt, the gunman hijacked a car and forced the driver to head south, sitting in the back seat, according to Stuttgart prosecutors, who are leading the investigation.

When the driver swerved off the road to avoid a police checkpoint, he managed to escape and the suspect, identified only as Tim K., ran into an industrial area in the town of Wendlingen with police in pursuit.

There he entered an auto dealership, shooting and killing a salesman and a customer, and then went back outside, prosecutors said.

"In front of the auto dealership the young man then opened fire toward the many police vehicles," prosecutors said. "A gunbattle ensued between the 17-year-old and the many police involved in the pursuit of him. According to our current information, the 17-year-old then shot himself."

Two police officers suffered serious but not life-threatening injuries.

Police said the suspect was a German teen who graduated last year from the school of about 1,000 students.

No motive has been identified. The victims were primarily female. Of the students killed, eight were girls and one was a boy. All three teachers were women. The victims at the auto dealership were men, as was the passer-by who was shot near the school.

In their hunt for the gunman, police searched his parents' home in a nearby town. The suspect's father, who is a member of a local gun club, had 16 firearms, one of which was missing, police said.

Police identified the weapon used in the attack as a high-caliber pistol.

The death toll was close to that of Germany's worst school shooting.

In the 2002, 19-year-old Robert Steinhaeuser shot and killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two students and a police officer before turning his gun on himself in the Gutenberg high school in Erfurt, in eastern Germany.

Steinhaeuser, who had been expelled for forging a doctor's note, was a gun club member licensed to own weapons. The attack led Germany to raise the age for owning recreational firearms from 18 to 21.

German Chancellor Angel Merkel called the shooting "a horrific crime."

"It is hard to put into words what happened today, but our sadness and sympathy goes out to the victims' families," Merkel said at a news conference.

The European Parliament, meeting in Strasbourg, France, stood in silence for a minute, to honor the victims.

"It is our task as responsible politicians in the European Union and, indeed, all the member states to do our utmost that such deeds can be prevented," said EU assembly president Hans-Gert Pottering, a German.

WASHINGTON – The United States and China looked to ease tensions over a confrontation between American and Chinese vessels in the South China Sea as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met Wednesday with her Chinese counterpart.

Before their private meeting, neither Clinton nor Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi mentioned the countries' dispute, even as China's Foreign Ministry in Beijing fired back for a second consecutive day at U.S. complaints that Chinese vessels harassed a U.S. Navy mapping ship in international waters on Sunday.

Clinton told reporters that Yang's visit to the State Department was a "very positive" development, and she looked forward to continuing discussions she had with Yang during her well-received trip to Beijing last month.

Yang said, "We are here to get prepared for our two heads of state meeting in London and to work together to push our relationship forward," referring to a crucial early April meeting in London between President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

The South China Sea incident, however, would be very likely to come up in private talks, State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters before the meeting.

"From time to time, there are going to be elements that come up that cause some tension," Wood said. "But the most important thing is that the U.S. and China need to work together to solve a whole host of issues that the international community confronts."

Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell told a Pentagon news conference that the United States hopes that "face-to-face dialogue in Beijing and in Washington will go a long way to clearing up any misunderstanding about this incident."

Even if diplomatic efforts by Clinton and Yang are successful in toning down the dispute, however, it may be only a temporary lull in a larger military disagreement.

Beijing has long complained about U.S. surveillance operations around China's borders. Without better communications between the two militaries as they operate in the South China Sea, the possibility for future conflict will remain.

Clinton and Yang "can have a productive exchange to keep this bounded, but the real bureaucracies that need to be there aren't going to be at the meeting," said Jonathan Pollack, professor of Asian studies at the U.S. Naval War College.

He suggested that without stronger military-to-military links, the potential for "something ugly" happening "should not be minimized."

On Wednesday, China's Foreign Ministry in Beijing reiterated that the U.S. claims are "gravely in contravention of the facts and unacceptable to China." Beijing says the U.S. ship was operating illegally in China's exclusive economic zone.

U.S. defense officials said Tuesday that the Navy ship was looking for threats such as submarines, presumably Chinese. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the ship's exact capabilities are sensitive information. Other U.S. officials have said publicly that the United States will continue to patrol in the South China Sea despite Chinese objections.

U.S. National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told lawmakers Tuesday that the incident was the most serious episode between the two nations since 2001, when China forced the landing of a U.S. spy plane and seized the crew.

Yang also was scheduled to meet with U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and with White House officials, the State Department said.

The rising tension comes as the Obama administration tries to get Chinese help on a host of foreign policy matters, including efforts to confront Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs.

WASHINGTON – Four states — California, South Carolina, Michigan and Rhode Island — registered unemployment rates above 10 percent in January, and the national rate is expected to hit double digits by year-end.

The U.S. Labor Department's report on state unemployment, released Wednesday, showed the increasing damage inflicted on workers and companies from a recession, now in its second year. Some economists now predict the U.S. unemployment rate will hit 10 percent by year-end, and peak at 11 percent or higher by the middle of 2010.

In December, only Michigan had a double-digit jobless rate. One month later, four states did and that doesn't count Puerto Rico, which saw its unemployment rate actually dip to 13 percent in January, from 13.5 percent in December.

California's unemployment rate jumped to 10.1 percent in January, from 8.7 percent in December, as jobs have disappeared in the construction, finance and retail industries.

Michigan's jobless rate jumped to 11.6 percent in January, the highest in the country. The second-highest jobless rate was South Carolina at 10.4 percent. Rhode Island was next at 10.3 percent, which marked an all-time high for the state in federal records dating to 1976. California rounded out the top four.

Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia registered unemployment rate increases. Louisiana was the only state to record a monthly drop. Its unemployment rate fell to 5.1 percent in January from 5.5 percent in December.

The U.S. unemployment rate, released last week, rose to 8.1 percent in February, the highest in more than 25 years.

Employers are laying off workers, holding hours down and freezing or cutting pay as the recession eats into sales and profits.

Disappearing jobs and evaporating wealth from tanking home values, 401(k)s and other investments have forced consumers to retrench, driving companies to shrink their work forces. It's a vicious cycle in which all the economy's problems feed on each other, worsening the downward spiral.

And more layoffs are on the way. National Semiconductor Corp. said Wednesday it will lay off 1,725 employees, more than one-quarter of its work force, after third-quarter profits fell 71 percent.

Industrial conglomerate United Technologies Corp., which makes Otis elevators and Sikorsky helicopters, said Tuesday it will lay off 11,600 workers, or 5 percent of its work force. Dow Chemical Co. on Monday said it would cut 3,500 jobs at chemical company Rohm & Haas Co. as part of its $15 billion buyout of the company.

President Barack Obama has urged Americans to be patient, saying it will take time for his economic revival and job-creation programs to bear fruit.

Obama is counting on a multipronged assault to lift the country out of recession: a $787 billion stimulus package of increased federal spending and tax cuts, a revamped bailout program for troubled banks and a $75 billion effort to stem home foreclosures.

Nationwide, the recession has claimed a net total of 4.4 million jobs since December 2007, and has left 12.5 million people searching for work — more than the population of Pennsylvania.

The state unemployment report also showed that North Carolina and Oregon — along with South Carolina — notched the biggest monthly gains of 1.6 percentage-points each.

North Carolina's rate soared to 9.7 percent in January, from 8.1 percent in December, while Oregon jumped to 9.9 percent, from 8.3 percent.

Meanwhile, Georgia's jobless rate climbed to 8.6 percent in January, an all-time high on federal records.

On a brighter note, Wyoming continued to register the lowest unemployment rate — 3.7 percent.

NEW YORK – There won't be any awkward Chris Brown moment at the Kids' Choice Awards — the embattled pop star has withdrawn his name from the ballot.

Brown had been nominated for favorite male singer and favorite song for "Kiss Kiss" at the March 28 awards show on Nickelodeon. The nominations came shortly before his arrest for allegedly attacking girlfriend and fellow pop star Rihanna.

A petition had been circulated to take his name off the ballot, but Nickelodeon said yesterday he was still on. On Wednesday, Brown decided to take his name out of consideration.

In a statement, his representatives said while Brown would like to speak directly to his fans, he can't because of his criminal case.

He thanked his fans for their support.