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It breaks no new ground to observe that the Bush Administration’s record on respecting science and scientists is dismal. Three examples tell the tale: The President’s 2001 decision to severely restrict federal support for stem cell research; The President’s embrace of Intelligent Design – the latest ruse for insinuating the religious doctrine of Creationism into […]

Last year at about this time, the toy giant Mattel was up to its ears in recalled toys – more than 20 million of them to be specific. Not a good posture for a toy company right before Christmas.   Nevertheless, there’s an argument to be made that Mattel caught something of a PR break […]

CPR Member Scholar Catherine O’Neill has posted a blog entry on Marlerblog, discussing the conflict reportedly under way between the FDA and the EPA over whether to stop warning pregnant women against eating mercury-laden tuna.   Relying on studies that EPA staff scientists describe as, “scientifically flawed and inadequate,” FDA has forwarded to the White […]

CPR Member Scholar Frank Ackerman has an interesting piece in the November/December issue of Dollars and Sense magazine. He points out that the opponents of genuine action to prevent climate change have shifted their principal line of argument in an important way. Rather than arguing as they did through much of the 1990s and the […]

Shortly before Thanksgiving, a quartet of heavyweight health organizations issued their annual “Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer.” The principal finding of the study from the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries is that the […]

CPR’s Tom McGarity has an op-ed this morning in the Austin American Statesman on Wyeth vs. Levine, the Supreme Court case testing an assertion by pharmaceutical manufacturer Wyeth that FDA approval of its proposed drug label shields the company from tort litigation over harm that drug subsequently causes.  The Court heard oral arguments on the […]

If you’re a Washington, D.C., commuter, it’s hard these days to miss the series of transit ads from Chevron on subway walls, bus shelter windows, and even the exteriors of subway cars.  “I will finally get a programmable thermostat,” says one, over the picture of a concerned woman. “I will at least consider a hybrid,” […]

In January, “committed environmentalist” Henry Waxman will take the chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, the body through which environmental legislation – and most significantly, climate change legislation – will pass on its way to the floor of the House of Representatives next year. As it happens, Representative Waxman is a charter […]

Don't miss CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus's piece in Slate, published November 14, on the Supreme Court's ruling in NRDC's challenge to the Navy's use of harmful-to-whales sonar in anit-submarine training off the California coast. [Also available in PDF.]