New Report: Toxic Chemicals in Consumer Products Increasingly Linked to Public Health Problems

http://www.uspirg.org/

New Report: Toxic Chemicals in Consumer Products Increasingly Linked to Public Health Problems

WASHINGTON - April 1 - Serious health problems – including premature birth, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, asthma and allergies, early puberty, obesity, diabetes, reduced fertility, and some types of cancer – are increasingly linked with exposure to chemicals that can interfere with the process of growth and development, according to Growing Up Toxic– a new report released today by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

The new report reviews data from more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers in detailing the effects that toxic chemicals can have on the development of children from before birth to adulthood. Over and over again, new toxic chemical compounds have been introduced into commerce, with their health effects discovered only later. The report also points out the barriers built into the U.S. chemical regulatory systems that prevent meaningful action to protect the public.

“From before they are born, kids are exposed repeatedly to toxic chemicals -- in the toys they play with, the carpets they learn to crawl on and the food they eat,” said U.S. PIRG Public Health Advocate Liz Hitchcock. “Our homes should not be hazardous to our health.  We need common sense laws that require thorough testing before harmful products and toxic chemicals are on the market instead of waiting until the evidence is overwhelming that they're accumulating at toxic levels in our bodies.”

U.S. PIRG calls for reform of U.S. chemicals policy thattakes immediate action on the most dangerous chemicals, holds manufacturers responsible for ensuring the safety of their chemicals and products before they are on the market, and uses the best science to protect public health.

“We could reduce the incidence of childhood cancers, breast cancer, and asthma dramatically by taking common-sense steps, like giving the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to step in quickly when it has reason to believe a chemical is unsafe,” said Hitchcock. “Congress must put public health priorities ahead of the special interests of the chemical lobby.”

###

U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), stands up to powerful special interests on behalf of the American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our well-being.



"Bill McKibben" - Natural Disasters?

Published on Saturday, April 2, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/02/natural-disasters-floods-earthquakes-landslides

 
Floods, earthquakes, landslides: 2011 is a year of disasters. Bill McKibben asks: are we to blame? Plus, survivors tell their tales

by Bill McKibben

At least since Noah, and likely long before, we've stared in horror at catastrophe and tried to suss out deeper meaning – it was but weeks ago that the Tokyo governor, Shintaro Ishihara, declared that the earthquake/tsunami/ reactor tripleheader was "divine punishment" for excess consumerism. This line of reasoning usually fails to persuade these days (why are Las Vegas and Dubai unscathed by anything except the housing meltdown?) but it's persistent. We need some explanation for why our stable world is suddenly cracked in half or under water. Still, over time we've become less superstitious, since science can explain these cataclysms. Angry gods or plate tectonics? We're definitely moving towards natural explanation of crises.

Click to read more ...

"Jonathan Owen" - More Than One in 10 Nuclear Power Plants at Risk From Earthquakes

Published on Sunday, April 3, 2011 by The Independent/UK

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/more-than-one-in-10-nuclear-power-plants-at-risk-from-earthquakes-2260817.html

Many stations are in countries that would be less able than Japan to cope with disasters

by Jonathan Owen

Scores of nuclear power plants worldwide are at risk from tsunamis or earthquakes similar to the natural disasters that crippled Japan's Fukushima reactors, according to new research. Many at-risk plants are in countries less able to cope with a disaster than Japan, experts have warned.

Seventy-six operating power stations in Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, India, Pakistan and the US are located in areas close to coastlines deemed vulnerable to tsunamis.

Click to read more ...

"Sarah Posner" - Welcome to the Shari'ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

By Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches
Posted on April 1, 2011, Printed on April 3, 2011
http://www.religiondispatches.org/

At February’s Conservative Political Action Conference, a student from the group Youth for Western Civilization at Liberty University asked members of a panel titled “The Shari'ah Challenge to the West”: “Are we going to see a rise of Islamic Europe, and America just sits there on its own... are we actually going to win?” Another audience member asked, “what recourse does America have as a country... to deal with that problem with a completely won Islamist population? What recourse do we have at home and abroad?”

That these questions were treated as legitimate lines of inquiry at a conference that serves as a dog and pony show for Republican presidential candidates demonstrates the success of a cottage industry of anti-Muslim fearmongers (politicians, religious groups, ministers, self-styled national security experts, former government officials, retired military officers, pundits, and writers) who have cultivated a wide-ranging conspiracy theory that totalitarian Islamic radicals are bent on infiltrating America, displacing the Constitution, and subverting Western-style democracy in the U.S. and around the globe.

Click to read more ...

"Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall" - Wyeth and the Multibillion Dollar Menopause Industry

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Wyeth-and-the-Multibillion-by-Dr-Stuart-Jeanne-B-110401-592.html

April 1, 2011

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

I have written previously (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Marketing-Serotonin-Defici-by-Dr-Stuart-Jeanne-B-100713-513.html) about the ingenious -- and deadly -- strategy by pharmaceutical companies of inventing fictitious illnesses to market highly profitable drugs that allegedly "treat" them. The technical terms for this are "medicalizing" or "disease mongering." Dr Marcia Angell, in her 2004 The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It, also talks about "generalized anxiety disorder," "erectile dysfunction," "premenstrual dysphoric disorder," and "gastro-esophogeal reflux disorder (heartburn)" as examples of common complaints that drug companies have reinvented as chronic illnesses requiring lifelong treatment (see http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/171/12/1451).

Click to read more ...

"Rob Edwards" - Mounting Alarm Over US Use of Depleted Uranium Arms in Libya

Published on Sunday, April 3, 2011 by the Sunday Herald/ Scotland

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/mounting-alarm-over-us-use-of-depleted-uranium-arms-in-libya-1.1094257

by Rob Edwards

The countries involved in air strikes on Colonel Gaddafi’s forces in Libya are coming under pressure to ban the use of toxic depleted uranium (DU) weapons because of the dangers they could pose to civilians.

The US has refused to rule out the use of DU shells in Libya, though it claims not to have fired any so far.

“I don’t want to speculate on what may or may not be used in the future,” the US air force spokeswoman, Paula Kurtz, said yesterday.

The US admitted using A-10 tankbuster aircraft designed to destroy armoured cars and tanks, and which are capable of firing 3,900 armour-piercing DU-tipped shells per minute.

Click to read more ...

"Ari Bermaan" - Meet Jim Messina, Obama's 'Enforcer' Against Progressives

By Ari Berman, The Nation
Posted on April 1, 2011, Printed on April 3, 2011
http://www.thenation.com

In March 2009 the Campaign for America’s Future, a top progressive group in Washington, launched a campaign called “Dog The (Blue) Dogs” to pressure conservative Blue Dog Democrats to support President Obama’s budget. When he heard about the effort, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who was regarded as the Obama administration’s designated “fixer,” called CAF’s leaders into the White House for a dressing down, according to a CAF official. If the group wanted to join the Common Purpose Project, an exclusive weekly strategy meeting between progressive groups and administration officials, CAF had to drop the campaign. We know how to handle the Blue Dogs better than you do, Messina said. Not wanting to sour its relationship with the White House at this early date, CAF complied, and the campaign quickly disappeared from its website. Despite Messina’s assurance, however, the Blue Dogs would remain a major obstacle to the realization of the president’s legislative agenda.

Click to read more ...

"Darren Samuelsohn" - Barack Obama's on Thin Green Ice

Published on Saturday, April 2, 2011 by Politico.com

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/52406.html

by Darren Samuelsohn

President Barack Obama's relationship with environmentalists sits on thin ice after a major league meltdown over whether he will really defend their biggest demand: EPA climate change rules.

Tensions have crossed into the danger zone between the two camps after a year of cross-ups, including the failure to get a cap-and-trade bill through the Senate and Obama’s embrace of what historically have been green no-no’s like oil drilling and nuclear power.

Angst grew this week after Obama failed to use a major energy policy speech at Georgetown University to explicitly back the EPA's global warming agenda. Then, in what might have begun as a misunderstanding over acronyms, the AP reported that the president was leaning on House Democrats to accept a GOP-authored budget rider that would thwart EPA's greenhouse gas regulations.

The White House furiously denied the story, but the fate of the budget debate over the next eight days could govern the relationship between the administration and environmental community through the 2012 election.

Click to read more ...

"Russell Mokhiber" - How Milton Friedman and Chicago Economics Undermined America

Published on Saturday, April 2, 2011 by Corporate Crime Reporter

http://corporatecrimereporter.com/realityignored04022011.htm

by Russell Mokhiber

Here’s the thing about the Chicago School of Economics – it wasn’t always this way.

Chicago School now means – market good, government bad.

But that was Chicago School hijacked by Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, and Richard Posner.

There was a Chicago School before Friedman, Bork and Posner.

“The Chicago School began with the view that in order to have a properly functioning free market, the government must drastically curtail the ability of businesses to build and maintain concentrated economic power,” writes Kenneth Davidson in his new book Reality Ignored: How Milton Friedman and Chicago Economics Undermined American Institutions and Endangered the Global Economy (2011).

Click to read more ...

"Gary Null" - The New American Folly in Libya

What happens when we extend the logic and beliefs of Ed Schultz and others, including Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, who accept Obama’s rationale for intervening militarily in Libya, which mirror those of the neocons and personalities like O’Reilly and Hannity on the radical right? For the reason that Gaddafi was responsible for the bombing of the Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland, killing 259 passengers, we are being told that arming, funding and training any opposition factions in Libya is perfectly justified. But then, is it not also true by that same logic that any civilians or innocent bystanders that were killed, tortured or disappeared as a direct result of America’s interventions in other nations are also justified to attack Americans and US interests globally? It is this old adage of “an eye for an eye” reactionary posturing that repeatedly leads us into multiple disasters, wars, revolutions, regime changes and a trail of failed foreign policies.

Click to read more ...