How many times do I have to say it? You can buy them here and here, among other places.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iEkdLWmmwoHWwwFK08n-mt9_RCrQ

(AFP) – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON — A third of the most popular children's toys in the United States this year contain harmful chemicals including lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury, a US consumer group said Wednesday.

The Ecology Center, which published its findings on the website HealthyStuff.org, tested nearly 700 toys ahead of the Christmas shopping season and found that 32 percent contained one or more toxic chemical.

The number of products exceeding current federal limits for lead in toys has dropped by 67 percent since 2007, though the chemical, which can affect the nervous system, was still present in 18 percent of toys, according to the center.

Lead levels in toys varied, with seven percent containing more than 40 parts per million (ppm), the highest level recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2007.

Another three percent of the products tested had levels exceeding 300 ppm, the federally-mandated limit, the study said.

Among the toys with detectable lead levels were the Barbie Bike Flair Accessory Kit, the Dora the Explorer Activity Tote and the Kid's Poncho sold by Wal-Mart stores, the Michigan-based Ecology Center said.

The study, which used a portable x-ray fluorescence analyzer, also found cadmium levels greater than 100 ppm in 3.3 percent -- or 22 -- of the products tested and arsenic levels over 100 ppm in 1.3 percent -- or nine -- of the toys.

The authors said they were also concerned after finding that 42 percent of the toys tested contained PVC.

"PVC is the worst plastic from an environmental health perspective because it creates major hazards in its manufacture, product life and disposal, and can contain additives that are dangerous to human health," the study said.

The center, which has tested some 4,000 children's products over the past three years, has created an online database where consumers can check whether the toys they have purchased contain toxic chemicals.

"Fish meat" at Tyson's Fort Worth plant apparently isn't stored at a cold enough temperature. If there's anything that makes me not want to buy a food vendor's product, it's the phrase "warm fish." Ick. I love that the company spokesman chose to declare that the Fort Worth plant is clean. Does it matter if the floor is clean, if the food products are kept warm enough to let bacteria grow? Um, no.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jTv33vxPeQTAcZljITR9cRVv1CfwD9CANT380

By MATTHEW PERRONE (AP) – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON — U.S. health regulators have warned Tyson Foods about unsanitary conditions at a Texas plant that makes seafood soups.

In a warning letter posted online Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration said its inspectors found fish meat stored at dangerously high temperatures at the company's plant in Fort Worth.

Tyson stored fish and crab for about 18 hours between 40 and 55 degrees. The FDA said those products should be stored below 40 degrees to keep bacteria and toxins from growing on them.

Inspectors in August also cited the company for not documenting procedures for stopping bacterial growth.

Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson said the problems deal with documentation, not actual product safety.

"Our Fort Worth plant is clean and sanitary and the products produced there are safe to eat," company spokesman Gary Mickelson said in a statement. The shrimp and crab meat observed by FDA inspectors was not used in company products, he added.

Tyson responded to the FDA's complaints in September, arguing that its thawing procedures provided sufficient safety. FDA officials disagreed.

"Pathogen growth and potential toxin formulation is a hazard reasonably likely to occur in the absence of (temperature) control, consequently, the hazard needs to be addressed," according to the FDA letter, which is dated Nov. 13. The agency often waits several weeks before publicizing its warning letters.

Tyson said it has since updated its temperature control plan.

The FDA regularly issues warning letters to companies that do not follow regulations for manufacturing and marketing. The letters are not legally binding, but the agency can take companies to court if they are ignored.

Earlier this summer, new FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg announced several changes designed to speed the pace of warning letters. They included a streamlined review process for sending the letters and shorter deadlines for companies to respond.

If I decide that eating meat is causing too much animal suffering, I'll just go vegetarian. Until then, I'm eating organic meat from humanely raised animals. (Try the grass-fed beef from these guys.)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/6684854/Scientists-grow-meat-in-laboratory.html

http://www.naturalnews.com/027620_ClimateGate_global_warming.html

ClimateGate scandal demonstrates intellectual protectionism of modern scientists

Monday, November 30, 2009
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) The inconvenient release of private email conversations among climate change scientists has been a boon for climate change skeptics. What emerges from the leaked emails is a depiction of a group of scientists who practice "intellectual protectionism" -- meaning they know they're right and they'll do anything to protect their beliefs, even if it means hiding or manipulating data.

Sound familiar? Scientists in the pharmaceutical industry have been practicing this for decades. If you think the ClimateGate emails are revealing, just imagine what kind of similar emails are flying around between Big Pharma scientists who routinely manipulate study data and commit scientific fraud in the name of medicine. Time and time again, we see revelations of manipulated clinical trials where data was intentionally distorted in order to make a dangerous, useless drug appear to be safe and effective.

What ClimateGate scientists and Big Pharma scientists have in common is that they have both abandoned the core principles of good science in their quest to be right. Rather than asking questions of nature and humbly listening to the answers provided by the data, these scientists have staked out a position and decided to defend that position at all costs -- even if it requires hiding or distorting data!

That approach is entirely unscientific, of course. In my mind, it now puts much of the recent global warming science in the same category as Big Pharma's research: Pure quackery.

As Christopher Booker explains in The Telegraph, "The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated. What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...)

Claiming to save the planet is no excuse for scientific fraud

Global warming may, indeed, be a real phenomenon. But trying to "prove" it by conspiring to manipulate the data in order to be right is absolutely the wrong way to go about studying the issue. In fact, these ClimateGate revelations have soundly discredited much of the global warming scientific community to the point where whatever these people say from now on simply cannot be trusted.

And that's a shame because the question remains: What if the global warming scientists are really right? What if they're right for all the wrong reasons, and they let their egos and their professional pride get in the way of conducting real science, thereby discrediting the very notion they were attempting to prove? That's a possibility we would still do well to consider.

Yet, from their released emails, it's quite clear these scientists were manipulating data to make the "science" fit their beliefs. They weren't focused solely on the real facts; they were interested in forwarding their climate change theories using any means necessary -- including scientific trickery.

What's truly sad about all this -- both in the climate change community and the pharmaceutical community -- is that real science has seemingly been replaced by pseudoscientific quackery. I've known for a long time that you can't trust scientists who work for pharmaceutical companies because they tend to distort their findings to support their employer. Now learning that a similar approach to junk science was apparently pursued by climate change scientists is more than a little disconcerting. It makes me wonder: Are there any honest scientists left anywhere?

The structure of scientific revolutions

It seems that in all realms of science, egos are more important than observational data. Whether you're dealing with astronomy, oceanography, anthropology or biology, every scientist wants to be right, and most will do whatever it takes to defend their proclaimed theories and beliefs. This is why it remains so ridiculously difficult to penetrate the minds of modern doctors with facts about vitamin D and cancer, for example: These "scientific thinkers" have already decided what to believe, and they'll defend those beliefs at all costs, even in the face of strong evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

What I've come to realize in all this is that many of today's scientists aren't scientific thinkers. They're really just followers of their own private cult. Some "scientists" belong to the Cult of Pharmacology, and they believe pharmaceuticals are the answer to everything. Others belong to the Cult of Climatology, where scientific evidence is replaced with "faith" beliefs that are not allowed to be questioned. These micro-cults of scientific "truth" explain why science usually doesn't advance until a whole generation of scientists either retires or expires.

It all brings us back to the amazing book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As this book explains, science almost never advances based entirely on new research, new ideas and new data. Instead, these new understandings collide with a wall of ego-driven resistance from the established scientific community. At times, such new ideas may linger for decades or even centuries before finally being seriously considered by the scientific community and then adopted as "truth." The classic example of this is the "Earth is the center of the universe" belief that was eventually replaced with the current sun-centric solar system model -- but not before many scientific thinkers were condemned (and even put to death) for their "preposterous" belief that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

In reality, modern science advances much like vomit -- in sudden wretched heaves that are both painful and revealing. The modern scientist is far more interested in being right than in being humbly informed about the mysteries of nature, and this makes much of so-called science more of a laughing matter than anything to be taken seriously. There are, no doubt, many very good scientists operating today who truly take to heart the Scientific Method and who avoid entangling their egos in their work, but I'm coming to discover that the number of such scientists may be far smaller than I had hoped.

In my mind, all of this further discredits the very idea that science is a reliable pathway to knowledge. There are many ways to glean knowledge about the world around us, and science is only one of them. Other methods included meditation, "communing" with nature, spiritual study or even embarking on spirit journeys with the help of plant medicines. Western science has given us much in terms of practical discoveries in fields like electricity, chemistry and physics, but it has utterly failed to provide us with answers on the things that really count: What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of human consciousness? What is the human soul?

None of these questions, it seems, will ever be answered by an ego-driven, profit-focused scientific community that would rather be right than enlightened.

Three questions we need to be asking

In order to know what's truly happening with human-caused climate change, we need to get accurate answers to the following three questions:

Question #1) Are CO2 emissions on the rise? And by how much? (The answer to this is clearly yes. This part isn't being debated.)

Question #2) Will high CO2 levels in the atmosphere cause global warming? If so, what will be the climate effects at different CO2 levels? (This is the part being debated.)

Question #3) What can we do to prevent devastating climate change from occurring? (This is also being heavily debated.)

In my mind, there's no question that what we dump into the air affects the climate in some way, but as I'm not a climate scientist, I must rely on others to determine what levels of carbon dioxide are correlated with observable climate effects (such as a change in atmospheric temperature or lack thereof). What I've learned from the ClimateGate scandal is that I really can't trust these scientists to tell the truth about their findings, and that leaves me in a position of having more questions than ever before.

It won't change my behavior, though. I'll still engage in recycling. I'll continue with my plans to install solar panels to power my house. I'll keep planting trees and growing most of my own food locally. Regardless of who's right about ClimateGate, we all have a responsibility to reduce our footprint on this planet, or we may someday discover some other environmental tsunami rising up to haunt us in ways we may have never imagined.

The ClimateGate scientists may have made complete fools of themselves, but I believe we must still practice ecologically-sound "green living" in our own way, each and every day, to the best of our abilities. In other words, don't let the egos of a small group of scientists distract you from the very real need to protect the future of life on our planet. Reduce your own environmental footprint in ways that you can. Conserve and protect what we have on this planet, and we may yet have a planet left for our children a few generations down the line.

Remember: Just because these scientists manipulated the data doesn't mean we all have free license to endlessly pollute the planet. If these scientists really were hiding data indicating global warming isn't as bad as we thought, that would only be a blessing because it would mean we have more time than we thought to reduce the eco-footprint of human life on Earth (hopefully without invoking nefarious Big Brother population control measures...)

It will be fascinating to see how this story develops. We'll continue to cover it here on NaturalNews.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/24/AR2009112401601.html

Lead, chemicals found in toys despite stricter law

Group's tests discover that some products still 'slip through the cracks'

By Lyndsey Layton

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Despite a new law that bans six chemicals from children's products and lowers the lead limit for them, a public interest group has found a number of toys at major retailers that contain the chemicals and illegal amounts of lead.

In a report released Tuesday called "Trouble in Toyland," the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) found that while many manufacturers and retailers are complying with the new law, a handful are not, and it is hard for consumers to tell the difference.

"We have seen substantial progress over the last year because of the new law and new leadership at the Consumer Product Safety Commission," said Elizabeth Hitchcock, public health advocate at U.S. PIRG. "At the same time, we are seeing some products that slip through the cracks."

For 24 years, U.S. PIRG has released a report about toy safety at the start of the holiday season. This is the first report since Congress approved broad changes to consumer safety laws in 2008, in response to dangerously high levels of lead in thousands of toys imported from China in the past several years.

Concerns have also been growing about a family of chemicals known as phthalates, which are widely found in plastic toys and have been linked to reproductive disorders and other health problems. Congress overwhelmingly voted to outlaw phthalates from children's products, as well as to significantly reduce the amount of lead allowed in them.

U.S. PIRG sent 15 children's products to an independent laboratory for testing. Four were found to have excessive lead levels, and two contained phthalates. For example, a charm made by Claire's boutiques was 71 percent lead by weight, when the legal limit is .03 percent. A cloth book for toddlers, "Big Rex and Friends," which was purchased at Toys R Us, contained 0.19 percent lead. After being notified by U.S. PIRG, Toys R Us stopped selling the book, but it is still available through other retailers.

A Pretty Princess Puppy Purse from Claire's boutiques had a level of 5.4 percent of one of the banned phthalates, while an Elmo lunch bag made by Fast Forward New York had a level of 7.2 percent of another banned phthalate.

On Monday, Inez Tenenbaum, chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, told reporters that "parents and grandparents can have more confidence this year than ever before" because of the new law. Toy recalls have dropped from 162 last year to 38 so far this year, she said. Recalls of children's products with excessive lead levels have decreased from 85 last year to 15 this year, she said.

Since she became chairman of the commission in June, Tenenbaum has traveled twice to China and Southeast Asia to discuss with her Asian counterparts "how to build safety into toys." The Chinese government shuttered several toy factories because of concerns about product safety, she said, adding: "The Chinese are taking toy safety very seriously."

Still, shoppers have no way of telling whether the products on store shelves comply with the law, Hitchcock said. "To take a product that you buy and send it off to a laboratory costs some money and is not something that parents can or should have to do with a product," she said.

U.S. PIRG is launching a tool with toy safety tips that consumers can access via cellphone, Hitchcock said.

The new law requires manufacturers to send their products to independent laboratories to verify that they meet the standards, but that provision will not take effect until February. Still, the statute makes it illegal for manufacturers to create children's products that violate the standards and for retailers to sell them.

The group's report also examined toys that pose a choking hazard to young children and those that make excessive noise, which can cause hearing loss. The report and the mobile site are available on the U.S. PIRG Web site.