We're here to ask him about something he doesn't like to talk about: a job he did 30 years ago, when he owned a trucking company. He got a contract with a local industrial plant called Asian Rare Earth, co-owned by Mitsubishi Chemical, that supplied special minerals to the personal electronics industry.
Esso Man couldn't believe his luck. He wasn't a rich man back then, and Asian Rare Earth offered three times as much as his usual gigs, just for trucking waste away from the plant. They didn't say where or how to dump the waste, and he and his three drivers were paid by the load—the quicker the trip, the more money they earned.
Your Smartphone's Dirty, Radioactive Secret
Workplace chemicals up breast cancer risk
U.S., Canadian, British and Scottish researchers said there was a link between breast cancer in women who work in jobs exposed to a "toxic soup" of chemicals.
The study involved 1,005 women with breast cancer and 1,147 without the disease and found women who worked in jobs classified as highly exposed to chemicals for 10 years had a 42 percent increased risk of breast cancer.
Study leader Dr. James Brophy and Dr. Margaret Keith, both at the Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group at the University of Stirling in Scotland and the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, said women who worked in farming had a 36 percent increased breast cancer risk. Several pesticides act as mammary carcinogens and many are endocrine disrupting chemicals, the researchers said.
Fracking's Toxic Secrets: Lack Of Transparency Over Natural Gas Drilling Endangers Public Health, Advocates Say
Some frustrated residents and anti-fracking activists are finding new names to call the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) -- "Don't Expect Protection," "Department of Energy Production" -- according to Dana Dolney of ShaleTest, a nonprofit that provides free air and water quality testing for low-income residents near natural gas wells.
The department is taking heat for providing what critics see as incomplete water quality test results to property owners who are concerned about pollution from nearby fracking operations. Withholding such information, the critics say, could endanger residents' health.
Jesus was born years earlier than thought, claims Pope
The entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation, the Pope has declared, as he claims in a new book that Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed.
The 'mistake' was made by a sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus or in English Dennis the Small, the 85-year-old pontiff claims in the book 'Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives', published on Wednesday.
Military appeals court to decide: Was Marine’s suicide attempt a crime?
Now, amid growing attention to the rash of wartime suicides, Caldwell’s troubling case will present judges with a legal dilemma balancing the dictates of military discipline against evolving notions of mental health. What happens next will shape military law and order alike.
“I just didn’t feel like I wanted to live anymore, and I feel like I couldn’t have put up with things anymore,” Caldwell told officials, court records show.
Caldwell, of Oceanside, Calif., pleaded guilty to “self injury without intent to avoid service” following the January 2010 wrist-slitting on Okinawa, Japan, but he has since reconsidered his plea. On Tuesday, the nation’s highest military appeals court is scheduled to take up his case.
US politicians urged to seize the moment on climate change after Sandy
Hurricane Sandy might be fresh in the American public's memory, but for advocates seeking action on climate change time is running out. At a recent event, engineering, disaster preparation and climate science professors at Columbia University urged lawmakers to take advantage of the public's post Hurricane Sandy interest in global warming and push through bold policies.
"Memory fades very fast," said civil engineering professor George Deodatis at the university event Monday. "The next six months to a year will be critical."
Alex Baer: Thankfully Adrift in a Haze or Three
It gets harder to concentrate, the closer a holiday comes. For lack of a better term, I call this the Haze Factor -- that inverse relationship of decreased work focus and attention span with the increased nearness of friends, family, free time, and fun.
If the Haze is conjuring up banks of fog moving through your area, and/or your own mind, welcome to the club. (For my part, it's taken ten minutes to write three sentences.) With everyone likewise debilitated today, we'll attempt only one bit of serious business here, then amble over to a transition piece, and finally wander up to the sideboard of those fluffy meringue and cream pies, and puff pastries.
Why the War Against Fracking May Be Our Most Crucial Conflict
There’s a war going on that you know nothing about between a coalition of great powers and a small insurgent movement. It’s a secret war being waged in the shadows while you go about your everyday life.
In the end, this conflict may matter more than those in Iraq and Afghanistan ever did. And yet it’s taking place far from newspaper front pages and with hardly a notice on the nightly news. Nor is it being fought in Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, but in small hamlets in upstate New York. There, a loose network of activists is waging a guerrilla campaign not with improvised explosive devices or rocket-propelled grenades, but with zoning ordinances and petitions.
Mammograms barely lower death rate, lead to many wrong diagnoses, study finds
The growing use of routine mammograms over the past 30 years has done little to lower the death rate from breast cancer but has sharply increased the number of women who are wrongly diagnosed with the disease, a new study reported.
The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is sure to intensify the already fierce debate over how often women should get mammograms, a controversy that has embroiled policymakers, politicians and physicians — not to mention their female patients.
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