Word: brockoviches
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Further undermining Brockovich's charges, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, responsible for testing and ensuring air quality in the region, has reported that, "To date, monitoring at the high school area has not shown readings of benzene, hexane and other air toxic levels that are considered abnormal." A private testing company, hired by the oil company currently operating the wells, reached the same conclusion. And the Brockovich firm has not provided any evidence of a valid epidemiological study - which it does not have the expertise to conduct - to support its charges that rates of cancer and other illnesses...
...Erin Brockovich's latest crusade, against several oil companies and the city and school district of Beverly Hills, California, is as misguided as the one chronicled in the movie that made her famous. With Ed Masry, head of the law firm in which she serves as research director, Brockovich charges that fumes from active oil wells under the campus of Beverly Hills High School have caused inordinate levels of cancer and other disorders among the school's graduates. In June, the firm brought suit on behalf of 21 of those graduates against the oil companies that have, in succession, owned...
...Beverly Hills cancer scare erupted in February, after Brockovich's firm alerted the local CBS-TV affiliate that she'd soon be filing suit. The resulting two-part TV series caused widespread concern, if not panic, among Beverly Hills high school students, parents and graduates. Six hundred people attended a meeting hosted by Brockovich at the posh Beverly Hills Hotel to recruit potential litigants, who were asked to fill out questionnaires to document their illnesses. Armed with these data, Brockovich charged that emissions of benzene, toluene n-hexane and other substances on the high school campus have caused 300 cases...
...also doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out this is junk science. School officials dispute the numbers Brockovich is throwing about. They say 216 claims have been filed against the school district, and only 94 of them involve cancers. And what about those specific cancers - Hodgkin's Lymphoma, non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and thyroid cancer - listed in the initial suit filed against the oil companies by the Brockovich firm? As the University of Southern California medical school's Cancer Surveillance Program flatly states, "Known causes of these cancers are not petroleum or petroleum products...
After a few epic-size Hollywood films (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean's Eleven), director Steven Soderbergh has gone small. Full Frontal, his terrific new movie, is intimate and innovative. It boasts rules of Dogma-like rigor: the budget was $2 million; the shoot took just three weeks; most of it was photographed (by the director) on video; the stars were responsible for their own makeup; no limos or trailers were allowed. He also constructed a Chinese box of a film-within-a-film-within-a-film. The result is his liveliest experiment since the strenuously weird Schizopolis six years...