Word: local
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Still, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) said in 2003 it found no negative effect on health from the Navy's decades on Vieques. Much of the scientific community howled at that verdict, given that independent studies of hair, vegetation and other local specimens indicate island residents have been exposed to excessive levels of lead, mercury, cadmium and aluminum. "The [ATSDR] conclusion seemed borderline criminal," says former Vieques mayor Radames Tirado, a plaintiff in the Sanchez suit who says at least 13 of his relatives there today have cancer. Says Arturo Massol, a biologist at the University...
...readily disciplined - by withdrawing privileges or adding time - and this leads, they argue, to an escalation by kids who feel empowered. "The staff feel alienated from state officials, who they feel are not supporting them enough," says Stephen Madarasz, spokesperson for the New York Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA; Local 1000), which represents the guards and operational staff. State officials, for their part, express frustration that despite retraining, too many of the staff continue to over-rely on force. Most observers admit that the conflict is at least in part a cultural clash between minority kids, mostly from tough...
...assaulted by three others who smashed his head with a piece of wood they had ripped from a desk. A colleague in an adjoining wing helped foil the escape attempt, but Lofty suffered headaches for weeks. While out on leave, he had a stroke and died last August. The local Fulton County coroner ruled his death was not work-related, but colleagues are convinced otherwise, said Madarasz. Similar complaints are raised by the New York State Public Employees Federation (NYSPEF), which represents the state facilities' counselors, doctors and other professionals; it reports a spike in assaults against staff...
...methyl mercury in bottlenose dolphin meat is 32 times the limit set by Japan's Health Ministry. School children in Taiji eat dolphin, like the rest of the town's population. Junichiro Yamashita, who years ago raised national awareness of dolphin meat's health risks as Taiji's local assemblyman, was interviewed for the film along with current assemblyman Hisato Ryono. But Ryono, who was touted as a hero on the mercury issue in the documentary, told a local television station that he was informed his interview would be used in a film on "international contamination of the oceans...
...permitted, the global reaction to The Cove has a whiff of the enduringly contentious whaling debate (Japan has hunted whales in the name of science for decades despite environmentalists' ire). The new wave of criticism of dolphin hunting that has been spurred by the film has many fishermen and local bureaucrats rolling their eyes over what they interpret as a another bout of foreign outrage at a practice that is legal, regulated and culturally acceptable in Japan, where dolphin meat - like whale - is eaten in the regions where it's hunted...