Tag Archives: association

The Gun Lobby Blames the Charleston Mass Shooting on "Gun-Free Zones"

by cazaresibiuieftina Posted on June 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the aftermath of the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, gun rights activists and their allies in the conservative media are once again blaming “gun-free zones,” arguing that an armed citizen could have otherwise been at the church to stop the attack. As Mother Jones has previously reported, there has never been any evidence that mass shooters picked their targets based on gun regulations; to the contrary, data from scores of cases shows perpetrators had other specific motivations for where they attacked, including racial hatred, as is strongly suspected to be the case in Charleston. The idea that armed citizens stop crimes in the United States has also been wildly exaggerated by the gun lobby, as a new study reaffirms.

One of the gun lobby’s key talking points is that firearms are frequently used in self-defense—as often as 2.5 million times per year. The widely repeated claim has its origins in a 1993 telephone survey conducted by a pro-gun researcher, and while the numbers have since been walked back to some degree, the National Rifle Association asserts there are at least three-quarters of a million defensive gun uses per year. But a new report from the Violence Policy Center analyzing federal data shows that even this claim is way overstated. America’s legions of “good guys with guns,” in other words, are a myth (and not least when it comes to mass shootings).

Using FBI data, the study shows citizens are far more likely to use guns to commit violent crimes than to defend against them. The FBI’s 2012 “Supplementary Homicide Report” tallied 8,342 criminal gun homicides nationwide, while finding only 259 justifiable gun homicides from around the country, as identified in reports from state and local law enforcement agencies.

Moreover, 13 states reported no justifiable gun homicides at all in 2012, according to the report. That included states with large urban regions like New York and New Jersey, as well as rural states such as North Dakota and Wyoming. Notably, Wyoming, which has a small population, lax gun laws, and a high gun-ownership rate, also led the nation in 2012 for gun suicides and had the highest per capita costs from gun violence. (You can read more about that in Mother Jones’ groundbreaking investigation of the $229 billion annual cost of gun violence in America.)

In the five-year period between 2007 and 2011, there were a total of 29,618,300 violent crimes committed, according to the study. Among those, people used guns in self-defense 235,700 times.

Even with an additional 103,000 defensive gun uses related to property crimes over the same five-year period, the total still comes to fewer than 70,000 a year—less than 10 percent of the amount claimed by the NRA and other gun rights advocates.

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The Gun Lobby Blames the Charleston Mass Shooting on "Gun-Free Zones"

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The American Medical Association Just Voted to End Personal Vaccination Exemptions

by EdwinFortin Posted on June 9, 2015

Mother Jones

The American Medical Association, the country’s largest association of physicians, is weighing in on the vaccination debate by supporting the end of personal vaccination exemptions on both the state and federal levels.

At the group’s annual meeting in Chicago on Monday, members voted to mobilize the organization in order to persuade state legislatures to eliminate nonmedical reasons for exemption, such as religion, which are used to dodge crucial immunizations against diseases such as measles and whooping cough.

“As evident from the recent measles outbreak at Disneyland, protecting community health in today’s mobile society requires that policymakers not permit individuals from opting out of immunization solely as a matter of personal preference or convenience,” said board member Dr. Patrice Harris, according to Forbes. “When people are immunized they also help prevent the spread of disease to others.”

Last December, 117 people who had visited Disneyland in Orange County, California were infected with the highly contagious disease. Other states also reported outbreaks and an old debate about the safety of vaccines was revived.

CDC

At the time, the right to personal exemptions quickly became a lightening rod of controversy that even extended to potential presidential candidates who were asked for their position in the vaccine debate. Senator Rand Paul said vaccinations should be voluntary and suggested immunization could even lead to “profound mental disorders.” Hillary Clinton took a firmer stance than she had in previous years by supporting vaccinations outright.

Although the debate has died down in recent months on the national scale, on the state level vaccination remains a contentious issue. Today in California, where the measles outbreak began, the state’s assembly will vote on a bill to end personal waivers.

“It’s such a no brainer. You’re protecting the kid next to you,” said AMA member Dr. James Felsen.

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The American Medical Association Just Voted to End Personal Vaccination Exemptions

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The Saddest Reason We Keep Having These Awful Ferry Disasters

by RickPaceuorrp Posted on June 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Much is still unknown about Monday’s deadly passenger ship accident on China’s Yangtze River that has left over 400 people missing, likely trapped in the hull of the capsized boat. The Eastern Star cruiser, carrying 456 people, was sailing in treacherous conditions, according to the ship’s captain and engineer, who were both rescued hours after the boat sank. China’s official weather service has since confirmed that there were heavy storms in the area.

While global statistics on boat disasters are hard to come by, the Eastern Star incident could end up being among of the deadliest passenger ship accidents in recent years, anywhere in the world. Just 26 fatalities have been confirmed so far, with 14 people rescued, according to CCTV. But once all the passengers are accounted for, the death toll could surpass the number of victims from last year’s ferry disaster in South Korea, which killed 304 people.

It’s been a tragic two years on the world’s waterways. Roughly 700 migrants from the Middle East and Africa drowned off the Libyan coast in April. A Bangladeshi ferry carrying up to 140 people capsized and sank in February, killing an estimated 70 people. And in May of last year, rescuers found just 40 bodies, after another boat sank in Bangladesh. Police there estimated that roughly 100 passengers were never found.

Monday’s accident in China raises questions about whether or not the ship should have been sailing in such extreme weather, and how quickly search and rescue teams were able to locate the boat and mount and effective operation. Those two factors are common contributors to maritime disasters around the world, according to Abigail Golden, a research associate with the Worldwide Ferry Safety Association.

While details about the latest incident are still sketchy, generally speaking “there are trends around the world that you can see, if you look at the data,” Golden said.

Golden maintains what is perhaps the most comprehensive database of ferry accidents that have occurred around the world in recent years (it’s open source, and available here). Golden conservatively estimates that, as of September 2014, roughly 16,880 fatalities had occurred in 160 deadly ferry accidents since 2000. Ninety-five percent of those accidents occurred in the developing world. A quarter were in Bangladesh, and nearly 6 percent were in China. Other countries where its particularly dangerous to take a ferry ride include Senegal, Tanzania, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

It’s unclear from this data whether or not boat trips like this week’s journey down the Yangtze are necessarily more dangerous than other forms of transportation, such a driving or taking a plane—a definitive, apples-to-apples comparison is hard to come by. But with boats, “a lot of issues are the same around the world,” said Golden. “It’s weak regulation, it’s overcrowding of vessels, lack of things like weather information, and a lack of training of the crew.”

“Human error is immensely prevalent,” Golden added. She estimates that 54 percent of total accidents and 67 percent of total fatalities are caused by human error. That includes over-crowding, misjudgment of weather conditions, and improper storage of cargo, which can result in unexpected shifts in the ship’s balance if cargo moves suddenly or is too heavy for the boat. (South Korean authorities pointed to this as a factor in last year’s accident).

Weather incidents, such as high waves and typhoons, were present in half of all the accidents Golden compiled, and while not fatal in and of itself, overcrowding played a role in roughly half of ferry accidents in the dataset.

Passengers reacting to a disaster, without proper safety advice or direction from the crew, might “rush to a single side of the ferry which of course can then capsize it, or they might climb to higher points of the ferry like the roof, which would then of course raise the center of gravity,” causing the ship to sink, she said. Once the ship has sunk, the disaster can quite easily overwhelm the search and rescue capabilities of the country involved. The final death tolls tend to be a result of “very multi-faceted” causes, Golden said.

Golden stressed that until more is known about Monday’s accident, it’s unclear whether the Eastern Star could qualify as a “ferry” for purposes of her study, since Golden’s dataset only includes boats that are part of regular commuter fleets that make scheduled stops, rather than chartered cruises.

The Worldwide Ferry Safety Association database is imperfect, Golden admits. Without a central agency to report statistics to, most of the information is gleaned from local news reports, which can be spotty and contradictory. “Obviously these reporters are not naval engineers or weather experts, so a lot of that information is quite vague,” she said. “Finding incident and accident reports that we can actually use for our purposes is quite difficult.”

But one thing is certain about ferry deaths, says Golden: “There is definitely more out there. If anything, what we have is an underestimate rather than an overestimate.”

Why is it so hard to find an authoritative dataset of passenger boat accidents and their causes?

“Honestly, safety is not a sexy or exciting concept to many people,” Golden said. “It’s not a quick fix. It’s not like going in with UNICEF after an earthquake and handing out bottles of water and seeing people’s beaming faces. It’s a long, slow, arduous process.”

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The Saddest Reason We Keep Having These Awful Ferry Disasters

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Literally the Only Good FIFA News You’ll Hear This Week

by DanutaSievwrigh Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Electronic Arts, the gaming company that makes the popular FIFA video game franchise, is bringing women to the virtual pitch, adding 12 women’s national teams to FIFA 16 this September.

From the Wall Street Journal:

EA announced Thursday that a dozen women’s international soccer teams will be included in the coming FIFA 16 game scheduled for release in September. EA didn’t say in its announcement why it took so long to mend the gender gap or whether the petition played a role. In an email, EA said it had been considering adding women for years and that it had made the necessary advancements to more accurately represent how the characters run and sprint, for example. The game’s motion capturing tracked four members of the U.S. Women’s National Team: Sydney Leroux, Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, and Megan Rapinoe.

EA’s decision came three years after an online petition called for inclusion—and right before this year’s Women’s World Cup starts next week in Canada. (It also came a day before Sepp Blatter won his fifth term as FIFA president, with the governing body embroiled in the ongoing corruption crisis.)

Last fall, a group of women’s soccer stars, including US forward Abby Wambach, filed a gender discrimination lawsuit claim against FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association over the organization’s decision to play this year’s World Cup games on artificial turf, even though the men’s games are played on grass. The group later withdrew the suit. And in an interview with Time, star US forward Alex Morgan, who will be featured in the new game, said that Blatter didn’t recognize her at the 2012 FIFA Player of the Year event—even though she’d just been named one of the three best women’s players in the world.

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Literally the Only Good FIFA News You’ll Hear This Week

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Video Visitation Giant Promises to Stop Eliminating In-Person Visits

by GraigVisconti Posted on May 11, 2015

Mother Jones

Video visitation is the hot new trend in the corrections industry. Companies like Securus and Global Tel*Link, which have made big bucks charging high prices for inmate phone services, are increasingly pitching county jails new systems that will allow inmates to video-chat with friends and family. Using new terminals installed onsite, inmates can communicate with approved users who log in remotely on a special app similar to Skype. For inmates whose loved ones don’t live anywhere near their corrections facility, that can be good news.

But as I reported for the magazine in February, those video-conferencing systems sometimes come with a catch—jails that use the systems are often contractually obligated to eliminate free face-to-face visits, leaving family members no choice but to pay a dollar-a-minute for an often unreliable service.

In a press release last week Securus has announced it will no longer require jails to ditch in-person visitation:

“Securus examined our contract language for video visitation and found that in ‘a handful’ of cases we were writing in language that could be perceived as restricting onsite and/or person-to-person contact at the facilities that we serve,” said Richard A. (“Rick”) Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Securus Technologies, Inc. “So we are eliminating that language and 100% deferring to the rules that each facility has for video use by inmates.”

Translation: Nothing to see here, move along! But while inmates might be getting their face-to-face visitation back, Securus’ concession on in-person visits comes even as it’s fighting the Federal Communication Commission’s efforts to regulate the cost of intrastate prison phone calls (it capped the price of interstate prison phone calls in 2014 at 25 cents per minute). And the corrections technology industry isn’t the only group defending the status quo—the executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association told IB Times earlier this month that if the FCC interferes with phone prices (corrections facilities often get a cut of the profits), some jails may just decide to cut off access to phone calls.

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Video Visitation Giant Promises to Stop Eliminating In-Person Visits

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Ben Carson Hired a Magic-Loving, Castle-Owning, Crisis-Management "Fireman" to Plot His 2016 Bid

by TerrellFoelsche Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ben Carson’s resumé doesn’t read like those of your average presidential aspirant—pediatric neurosurgeon, best-selling author, motivational speaker. And to help plot his long-shot path to the White House, this unlikely candidate has turned to a man with an even more unconventional background: a magic-loving entrepreneur and celebrity lawyer named Terry Giles who made a cameo in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, defended serial killers, and for 14 years chaired the board of a controversial self-help empire created by a mercurial pop psychologist. That is, not the usual political operative.

When Carson formally announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on Monday, he gave a shout out to Giles, his campaign chairman. “When I started this endeavor…I asked him to put together the rest of the team in order to be able to do this,” Carson said, introducing Giles to the audience. With no more political expertise than the candidate himself, the 66-year-old attorney has spent the last nine months assembling a campaign outfit from scratch, including mining Newt Gingrich’s 2012 operation for key hires.

For Giles, putting together a presidential bid is the latest venture in an eclectic career that has included stints as a car dealer, chateau baron, and magic-club owner. “I have adult ADD,” he says in an interview. But Giles is no dilettante; as a lawyer, he has been ruthless in defending his clients’ interests—a trait that may be particularly useful during what will likely be a combative GOP primary contest.

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Ben Carson Hired a Magic-Loving, Castle-Owning, Crisis-Management "Fireman" to Plot His 2016 Bid

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The NFL Is About to Pay Taxes for the First Time in More Than 70 Years

by Charity1825 Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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The National Football League paid its commissioner, Roger Goodell, a staggering $44.1 million in 2012. The year before, he took home $29 million. The year before that, $11 million. That’s corner-office-at-Goldman-Sachs-level money—to run what for decades has been a tax-exempt organization.

Soon, however, the public won’t have a clue what Goodell or anyone else in the NFL league office earns. On Tuesday, Goodell announced that the NFL will give up its tax-exempt status, claiming that it has turned into a “distraction” that “has been mischaracterized repeatedly.” Here’s what that means: For the first time in more than 70 years, pro football’s league headquarters will pony up its share of federal taxes. But it also means the NFL won’t have to file the tax forms that require it to be transparent about salaries, revenue, spending, and more.

Congress granted the NFL tax-exempt status way back in 1942, long before it was the global juggernaut that it is today, with estimated revenues of $9.5 billion a year. (Goodell wants to grow that to $25 billion by 2027.) For years, budget hawks in Congress and good-government groups have called for stripping the league of its nonprofit status and forcing it to join Major League Baseball’s front office in operating like a normal taxable business. Former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who never saw a piece of pork he didn’t want to trim, waged a lonely war to revoke the NFL’s 501(c)(6) status with a piece of legislation called the Properly Reducing Overexemptions for Sports Act (PRO Sports Act). (The bill specifically targeted the NFL, even though the National Hockey League and Professional Golf Association are also nonprofits.) And in December 2013, I wrote about an anti-corruption group’s campaign to gin up public support for eliminating the NFL’s tax break.

Goodell’s announcement will no doubt be cheered as a victory by the league’s critics. So what I’m about to say will make me few friends, but here goes: The commish has a point. And the NFL giving up its tax-exempt status is bad news.

Goodell frames this decision not as a financial one but as a way to move past what he sees as the misguided controversy and anger over the league’s tax status. As he’s quick to point out, the league’s 32 teams pay taxes on all that revenue. The Pats, the Colts, my beloved Detroit Lions: None is tax-exempt. It’s the NFL front office—which reported $326,882,787 in 2013 revenue—that doesn’t pay taxes. Sure, $327 million is a lot of money, but it’s a pittance compared to $9.5 billion. How much do we lose in tax revenue from this? The Joint Committee on Taxation crunched the numbers and found that the 10-year cost for giving the NFL and NHL tax-exempt status is roughly $109 million—a relatively paltry sum.

Nonetheless, critics like Coburn and government watchdog groups argue that eliminating the NFL’s subsidy is the right thing to do. Any waste, they say, is bad waste. Okay, sure. But at what cost?

There’s a wealth of information in each of the NFL’s annual tax forms—detailed breakdowns of where the league’s money comes from, front-office compensation packages, which law firms the league retains, the amounts and recipients of league grants. Goodell doesn’t mention this in his announcement, but it’s hard to imagine the league not relishing the opportunity to pull some of that information out of the spotlight.

Perhaps the silver lining is this: By taking the tax-exempt issue off the table, activists can instead focus their work on more-meaningful reforms. Take, for example, the grand scam of taxpayer financing for stadiums. A 2012 Bloomberg analysis calculated that federal taxpayers lost $4 billion in the last 25 years’ worth of stadium construction deals. It’s one of the great boondoggles in sports today, an issue where the fleecing is very real.

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The NFL Is About to Pay Taxes for the First Time in More Than 70 Years

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Cruz Campaign Accuses Paul and Rubio of Wimping Out on Gun Rights After Newtown

by ClarissSiggers Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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With the gaggle of GOP 2016 presidential contenders growing, the Republican wannabes have largely refrained from assailing one another and have instead focused their wrath on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. But now Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has launched one of the first R-on-R attacks, and he has done so regarding an issue of primal importance to the Republican voting base: guns.

A few days ago, Cruz’s presidential campaign zapped out an email hitting up conservatives for donations. The solicitation showed Cruz, the tea party favorite, wearing a bright orange hunting vest, with a shotgun on his shoulder, and its message was stark: Send me money so I can support your Second Amendment rights, which “serve as the ultimate check against government tyranny.” Cruz warned that he was “under attack from the left-wing media and even Republicans who want to label me as an extremist—all for supporting a fundamental right.” And then he took a shot at the other GOP 2016 contestants: “I’m the only candidate running for President who not only believes in the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms—but has the record of fighting for it, tooth and nail.”

The only Republican 2016er who’s a proven crusader for gun rights? That was quite the claim—and a dig at everyone else in the crowded field, particularly the other GOPers who are competing for tea party and conservative voters. After all, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has declared himself a champion of gun rights. He has long supported the National Association for Gun Rights—a group that hypes itself as the conservative alternative to the NRA. Rand Paul often signs email solicitations for this outfit, such as one that asserted that President Barack Obama and the United Nations were plotting to “CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL ‘unauthorized’ civilian firearms.'” (Paul was not invited to the NRA’s recent convention—because, NGAR president Dudley Brown claimed, “Paul is more pro-gun that the NRA.”) Paul has repeatedly moved to eviscerate the gun laws of Washington, DC. And prior to becoming a senator, he campaigned at a gun rights rally with armed militia members who noted that guns could be used to prevent “progressive socialists” from thwarting Second Amendment and other rights. That is, Paul has established a rather die-hard stance on guns.

Yet that did not stop Cruz from depicting himself as the only true and tested advocate for gun rights in the Republican’s 2016 gang. So what does the Paul campaign think of this Cruz attack? Paul campaign officials would not comment on the record. “We’ll pass for now,” spokesman Sergio Gor said—a suggestion that the Paul did not want to mix it up with Cruz at this point.

The same sentiment was not evident when I asked the Cruz campaign how Cruz could justify this implied assault on Rand Paul. Rick Tyler, a well-known conservative consultant working for Cruz, responded with a detailed email that essentially accused Paul and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), another GOP 2016 candidate, of wimping out at a key moment for the gun rights crowd:

From April 11-18, 2013 in the shadow of Newtown, CT, when the Democrats were lined up to hammer Republicans, Paul and Rubio never came to the floor to stand up for the Second Amendment when the Toomey-Manchin gun bill which would have required background checks on all commercial gun sales was being considered. On April 17, Cruz came to the floor promoting a bill (Grassley-Cruz) he co-authored which was the conservative alternative to Toomey-Manchin and which did not expand background checks and made it easier to purchase and transport guns against state lines. It got 52 votes including 9 from Democrats but failed the cloture vote. During that time Cruz and Lee were very aggressive in defending the Second Amendment including gathering stories for the Congressional Record of Americans who used a firearm in self-defense.

With this note, the Cruz campaign, rather than retreat from a political fight over who’s best on gun rights, made its assault on Paul and Rubio explicit, asserting that both Paul and Rubio failed the gun rights movement in its hour of need.

And once again, Paul’s campaign did not engage, declining to answer questions about Tyler’s amplification of the original criticism. Rubio’s campaign also did not respond to a request for comment.

Paul has insisted in the past that after the Newtown gun massacre, he quickly took steps to prevent any gun safety bills from advancing in the wake of that tragedy. On April 10, 2013, he wrote on CNN’s website, “Along with Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas, I circulated a letter promising to ‘oppose any legislation that would infringe on the American people’s constitutional right to bear arms, or on their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance.'”

Following the Newtown tragedy, Paul considered Cruz an ally in the battle to beat back gun safety legislation. These days, Cruz is not returning the favor and looking to turn Paul and Rubio into targets in order to best them among a critical GOP constituency. The question is, how long will this remain a one-way fight?

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Cruz Campaign Accuses Paul and Rubio of Wimping Out on Gun Rights After Newtown

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Will This Be the Nail in the Coffin of Toxic Flame Retardants?

by CarriWinning Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Flame retardant chemicals are in millions of products, from mattresses and couches to car seats to electronics. In 2011, Environmental Science & Technology published a study that found that 80 percent of 100 randomly tested children’s products were covered in fire-retardant chemical. But there’s a growing consensus that these chemicals don’t belong in our homes: They’ve been linked to cancer, hormone deficiencies, and neurological and developmental problems.

Between 2009 and 2013, the chemical industry agreed to phase out a particularly harmful flame retardant known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs)—but further research from scientists at the Environmental Working Group and Duke University has found that manufacturers are simply replacing PBDEs with just-as-toxic, structurally similar chemicals.

Now, a diverse group of organizations—including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the International Association of Fire Fighters, and the Consumer Federation of America—is calling for the ban of any children’s products, furniture, mattresses and electronics that have traces of any of the chemicals associated with flame retardants.

“It’s time to stop moving from one harmful flame retardant to its chemical cousin,” said Arlene Blum, founder and executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute, in a statement about the petition that she and nine other organizations filed with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).

If the ban catches on, it will come as a major blow to the chemical manufacturers, who, for decades, have been downplaying concerns about flame retardants’ toxicity. The companies’ strategies have been compared to those used by Big Tobacco: They cleverly confuse the public into believing scientific findings are a matter of opinion and up for debate.

The similarities between the two industries shouldn’t come as a surprise, given their interconnected past. In an explosive 2012 investigative series, the Chicago Tribune reported that tobacco companies played a major role in the promotion of flame retardants. After a slew of apartment fires caused by lit cigarettes, the tobacco companies looked for a scapegoat and found one in furniture. Suddenly the media was focusing on flammable dangers we live around everyday—instead of the actual cause of many of these household fires: cigarettes.

The chemical companies, too, quickly realized how lucrative fire retardants could be—in 2012, the value of the market for the chemicals was estimated at $5.1 billion. Part of the reason for the companies’ success was a subtle astroturf campaign: In 2007, Albemarle Corporation, a leading flame retardant manufacturer, teamed up with two other chemical conglomerates to create Citizens for Fire Safety, an organization that advocates for increased use of flame retardants. The organization, which marketed itself as a neutral source of information for consumers, folded in 2012 after the Tribune exposed the real players involved.

Another problem with flame retardants: It’s not even clear that they work. According to the Tribune, in 2009 government scientists lit two couches on fire, one with fire retardant chemicals in its foam and one with out them. Within four minutes “both were engulfed in flames.”

“We did not find flame retardants in foam to provide any significant protection,” Dale Ray, a project manager with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and overseer of the study told the Tribune.

Despite this finding, flame retardants have stuck around—in products, and in people’s bodies. The chemicals, considered persistent organic pollutants, show up in dust particles, which we (and our food) absorb. Particularly vulnerable groups are firefighters, who are exposed to immense doses when extinguishing fires in products that are covered in the chemicals, and children, who are exposed when they play on the floor near dust and stick their hands in their mouths.

Last year, scientists from Duke University and the Environmental Working Group tested the urine of 22 mothers and 26 children. All the samples came back positive for exposure to Tris(1,3-dichloroisopropyl)phosphate (TDCIPP), one of the fire retardant chemicals that was developed to replace PBDEs. The children’s average TDCIPP concentration levels were fives times that of the mothers. TDCIPP caused the growth of tumors when tested on animals and has been labeled as carcinogenic by the state of California under Proposition 65.

“The science is in on this class of flame retardant chemicals,” said Nancie Payne, president of the Learning Disabilities Association of America, which also signed the Consumer Product Safety Commission petition. “They harm brain development, and have no business being in consumer goods.”

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Will This Be the Nail in the Coffin of Toxic Flame Retardants?

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California Nutritionists Just Voted Not To Invite McDonald’s Back as a Sponsor

by LieselotteRinal Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year, I attended the annual conference of the California Dietetic Association, the state’s chapter of the country’s largest professional organization for nutritionists and dietitians. Its premier sponsor—and lunch caterer—was McDonald’s. That won’t be the case at this year’s conference in April: The organization just voted not to invite the fast-food chain back.

Today a member of the California Dietetics Association shared the following letter from conference leadership on the Facebook page of Dietitians for Professional Integrity:

We would like to direct your attention to what the California Dietetic Association (CDA) has done to address our own issues surrounding sponsorship. We heard your concerns regarding CDA Annual Conference sponsorship and we have listened. We voted and McDonalds was not invited as a sponsor in 2015. This decision has impacted our finances; however, we believe it was important to respond to our member feedback. In addition, an ad hoc committee approved by the CDA executive board, reevaluated the sponsorship guidelines. The new sponsorship policy will be posted soon on www.dietitian.org. Any questions regarding the new policy can be directed to Kathryn Sucher, CDA President-elect email address redacted
We look forward to seeing you at the CDA Annual Conference.
Your 2014-2015 CDA Executive Board

That’s not to say that the conference organizers have ditched corporate funders entirely. According to the schedule (PDF), Kellogg’s is sponsoring a panel called “The Evolution of Breakfast: Nutrition and Health Concerns in the Future,” while Soy Connection, the communications arm of the United Soybean Board, is hosting a session titled “Busting the Myths Surrounding Genetically Engineered Foods” (and sponsoring a “light breakfast”). A few other sessions sponsored by corporations and trade groups:

“Why We Eat What We Eat in America and What We Can Do About It” (California Beef Council)
“Probiotics and the Microbiome: Key to Health and Disease Prevention” (Dairy Council of California)
“New Research – Understanding Optimal Levels Of Protein And Carb To Prevent Obesity, Sarcopenia, Type 2 Diabetes, And Metabolic Syndrome” (Egg Nutrition Center)
“New evidence of Non-Nutritive Sweeteners: Help or Hindrance for Weight and Diabetes Management” (Johnson & Johnson McNeil, Inc, LLC)
“Plant-based Meals from Around the Globe” (Barilla Pasta)

Still, says Andy Bellatti, a dietitian and leader of the group Dietitians for Professional Integrity, ditching McDonald’s as a sponsor is a step in the right direction. “There’s still a long way to go,” he said. “But the McDonald’s sponsorship was just so egregious. I’m glad they came to their senses and got rid of it.”

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California Nutritionists Just Voted Not To Invite McDonald’s Back as a Sponsor

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