Tag: safety

DANGER IN ORBIT: International Space Station Is Leaking Air Again in a Problem First Detected in 2019

The aging ISS is plagued by a dangerous air leak.

The leak was confirmed by NASA last week, another instance of a recurring problem that the agency thought it had resolved earlier this year.

The New York Post reported:

“The 27-year-old orbiting space station has been plagued with air leaks since 2019 in a part of the station called the PrK module, a narrow transfer tunnel or vestibule on the Russian segment.

In January, NASA announced that the PrK module had finally reached a ‘stable condition’ after multiple inspections and sealant applications. But on May 1, the issue returned.”

NASA confirmed a ‘slow pressure drop’ within the PrK module, noticed as Russian cosmonauts unloaded cargo.

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Toxic Plastics Causing ‘Silent Epidemic Of Kids With Lower IQs,’ Pediatrician Tells RFK Jr.

Dr. Leo Trasande, one of the nation’s leading experts on environmental health and toxic exposures, warned this week that plastics pose “a multidimensional and urgent threat to human health,” with children facing some of the greatest risks.

Speaking on “The Secretary Kennedy Podcast,” Trasande — a pediatrician, professor at New York University and director of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Division of Environmental Pediatrics — described mounting evidence linking chemicals in plastics to developmental, hormonal, metabolic, reproductive and neurological harm.

“The impacts run from cradle to grave and womb to tomb,” he said.

The discussion comes as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launches STOMP — Systematic Targeting Of MicroPlastics. The $144 million initiative aims to measure, study and eventually remove microplastics and nanoplastics from the human body.

The program will develop standardized testing methods, map how plastics accumulate in organs, rank plastics by biological harm and pursue future removal technologies.

Trasande said the growing concern extends beyond visible plastic waste to microscopic and chemical exposures embedded throughout modern life.

“We know that there are 16,000 chemicals — synthetic chemicals — that are in plastic,” Trasande said. “We don’t know anything about 10,000 of them.”

Among the chemicals with the strongest evidence of harm are bisphenols used in plastics, phthalates found in food packaging and personal care products, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — also known as “forever chemicals” — used in nonstick and stain-resistant products.

Trasande said the evidence is “extremely strong” that many of these chemicals disrupt hormones, which in turn regulate metabolism, reproduction, growth and brain development.

‘A silent epidemic of kids with lower IQs in the U.S.’

As a pediatrician, Trasande repeatedly emphasized that children are uniquely vulnerable.

“Pound for pound, they eat more food, drink more water, breathe more air, so they’re uniquely susceptible,” he said. “Their organ systems are also just being primed. And so if you disrupt that, there are lifelong and permanent consequences.”

He pointed to evidence linking phthalate exposure during pregnancy to roughly 50,000 premature births in the U.S. each year, along with impaired brain development and poorer educational outcomes.

Trasande warned that some of the most damaging effects may be subtle and population-wide, rather than immediately obvious in individual children. Even small disruptions to thyroid hormones during pregnancy are associated with cognitive deficits, autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), he said.

“What you see is a silent epidemic of kids with lower IQs in the U.S.,” Trasande said. “Just to put this in context for the audience, a kid loses an IQ point, mom doesn’t notice, pediatrician doesn’t notice.”

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared the issue to the impact of lead exposure on the national average IQ before leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1980s.

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HORROR: Bus Driver Who Caused Deadly Crash in Virginia That Killed FIVE People is From China and Doesn’t Speak English

The bus driver who caused a fatal crash in Virginia is a naturalized US citizen from China and doesn’t speak English.

Five people were killed, including two children, and more than 40 were injured in a bus crash on I-95 early Friday morning.

Multiple vehicles were involved in the crash after the bus driver failed to slow down in time and crashed into a Suburban.

The Suburban got pushed into an Acura SUV.

“The Acura caught fire, police said. Four of the five people killed were in the Acura: a 45-year-old man, a 44-year-old woman, a 13-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy, all from Greenfield, Massachusetts, police said,” ABC News reported.

“The fifth victim killed, a 25-year-old woman, was in the Suburban, police said,” the outlet reported.

“Forty-four people were taken to hospitals, including three with critical injuries, police said,” ABC reported.

According to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the driver of the bus doesn’t even speak English.

The driver obtained his CDL in Democrat-run New York in 2024.

Full statement from Transportation Secretary Duffy:

Five people are dead, including a 13-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy, after the driver of a motorcoach slammed into stopped traffic on I-95.

@FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs and our investigators are on the ground at the crash site working with the @NTSB.

Local police confirm the driver of this motorcoach — a man from China who became a U.S. citizen — doesn’t speak English. He received his commercial drivers license from New York State in 2024.

Unacceptable. This is exactly why we are holding states’ accountable, enforcing the rules of the road, and cracking down on drivers who can’t speak English.

If you can’t be properly trained, read our road signs, or communicate with law enforcement, you have no business driving a bus.

Our investigators are reviewing New York licensing records, training documentation, and the driver’s history. Any company, trainer, or school that contributed to putting an unqualified driver on the road will face intense scrutiny.

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‘Reckless’: Virginia Recommends MMR Vaccine for Infants as Young as 6 Months

Virginia’s Department of Health is recommending infants ages 6 to 11 months receive a MMR vaccine — earlier than the age recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Doctors and other vaccine experts told The Defender that Virginia’s guidance is “reckless” and “not grounded in science.”

The state’s recommendations also include an accelerated measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination schedule, advising that infants get the second dose in the two-dose MMR series 28 days after the first.

Virginia’s recommendation comes in response to a recent measles outbreak in Buckingham County, which as of Tuesday had reached 54 cases.

The state’s MMR vaccine guidance was included in a May 13 letter from Virginia State Health Commissioner Cameron Webb. The recommendations call for infants ages 6 to 11 months to “get an early dose of the MMR vaccine,” and two more doses at the AAP’s recommended ages, at least 28 days apart.

The CDC and AAP recommend a minimum age of 12 months for MMR vaccination, except in “special situations,” such as international travel.

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“I’m just a number to them”: Garden Grove residents demand closure of GKN plant after toxic emergency

On Tuesday evening, California officials lifted the remaining mandatory evacuation orders for some 16,000 residents in Garden Grove, California, who live near an overheated chemical tank at a GKN Aerospace facility. Evacuation orders for some 50,000 residents were initially issued last Thursday, rescinded later that same evening, and then reissued Friday morning.

A 34,000-gallon storage tank at the facility containing methyl methacrylate (MMA), a volatile and flammable chemical, was found to be leaking. The chemical is not only dangerous when inhaled, but also posed the risk of causing a massive toxic explosion.

While the evacuation orders were lifted Tuesday night, police and emergency personnel are maintaining a several-block closure around the facility as chemicals continue to leak from the ruptured tank.

In addition to thousands of residences, several schools are also located close to the facility.

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Consultants Push HPV Vaccines for Infants, as Merck Tests Gardasil in Kids as Young as 4

Consultants paid by Merck and the Gates Foundation are publicly advocating to administer HPV vaccines to children as young as 12-24 months — an age group in which the vaccine has never been tested and for which no safety data exist.

Mark Kane and Eduardo Franco laid out the campaign to extend HPV vaccination to toddlers in an opinion piece published in Clinical Infectious Diseases — an official journal of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA).

Merck, a “Silver” level industry partner, donates tens of thousands of dollars annually to the IDSA foundation.

The push to vaccinate younger children comes as Merck — maker of Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine marketed in the U.S. — partners with major universities to run clinical trials of its HPV vaccine in children ages 4-8 in the U.S. and Gambia.

Merck’s Gardasil vaccine is designed to protect against human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease. In the U.S., the drug is approved for children starting at age 9 — well before children are sexually active.

Conflicts of interest ‘so thick’ they obscure the science

In the conflict-of-interest statement at the end of the IDSA op-ed, Franco disclosed that he is a vaccine consultant who also holds a patent on a cervical cancer test.

Kane reported no conflicts of interest. However, that claim omits these significant financial and professional credentials:

“The conflicts are so thick it’s impossible to tell if this is a serious immunization policy suggestion, or a fact-pattern of Merck publishing Merck recommendations to use more Merck products,” said Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

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Justice Clarence Thomas Blasts Supreme Court For Refusing To Hear Florida’s Lawsuit Against Blue States Issuing Driver’s Licenses To Illegal Alien Truckers

Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a scathing dissent Tuesday as the Supreme Court refused to let Florida sue California and Washington over their lawless practice of handing out commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens who cannot read English road signs.

The Court denied Florida’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint in the original jurisdiction case, leaving the state with “nowhere else to bring” its claims, Thomas wrote. He was joined by Justice Samuel Alito.

This decision comes after the horrific August 12, 2025, crash on the Florida Turnpike. Illegal alien Harjinder Singh, an Indian national who entered the U.S. illegally through the Mexican border, obtained CDLs from both California and Washington despite failing English proficiency tests at least ten times in Washington and once in California.

Singh approached a clearly marked “no U-turn” sign for official use only, ignored it, and swung his massive tractor-trailer across both lanes of the highway. The trailer crushed a minivan traveling behind him. All three passengers in the minivan were killed.

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration testing after the crash confirmed Singh could not correctly answer most verbal questions and identified only one out of four highway signs.

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Vermont Applauded for Banning Parkinson’s-Linked Neurotoxic Herbicide Paraquat

In a move cheered by advocates for public health and the environment, Vermont on Tuesday became the first US state to ban paraquat, a neurotoxic herbicide banned in over 70 countries but protected by the Trump administration despite being linked to Parkinson’s disease.

Democratic Vermont Gov. Phil Scott signed H. 739, which bans the sale and use of paraquat, after the legislation was passed by the state Legislature with strong bipartisan support. The ban—which contains a provision allowing for limited use of the chemical on fruit orchards through the end of 2030—is set to take effect on November 1.

As Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) campaigner Liam Sacino recently noted, the US Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] acknowledges that “even a small amount” of paraquat “can be fatal, and there is no known antidote.”

“The agency has also decided that due to health risks, it should never be used around home gardens, schools, recreational parks, golf courses, or playgrounds,” Sacino added. “Regardless of these conclusions, the EPA still allows paraquat to be sprayed on farms, posing a potentially increased risk to those who work on the farms and live nearby.”

The EPA paradoxically calls paraquat “an important tool for the control of weeds in many agricultural and non-agricultural settings,” a stance promoted by the chemical industry, some of whose highly toxic products the pesticide-friendly Trump administration has designated as vital to US national security.

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SCOTUS Case Makes Freight Brokers Responsible For Crashes Caused By Commercial Immigrant Drivers

hirty people died in 17 semi-truck crashes caused by noncitizen commercial truck drivers in 2025, according to the Department of Transportation. That number is almost certainly an undercount. Prior to 2025, the immigration status of a commercial truck driver was mostly not recorded in crash reports, court filings, or news coverage. The national conversation focuses on the truck driver at fault for the latest accident, but rarely goes deeper. Why was this truck driver on the highways? What trucking company hired him? How are operations like this still in business?

Somewhere between receiving a package from the distribution center to your doorstep, there is a strong possibility that a freight broker was involved. Freight brokers exist to manage freight and risk for shippers, and to hire motor carriers (trucking companies) to haul that freight. They collect the margin between what the shipper pays them and what they pay the trucking company.

Until a Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, it was not considered the freight broker’s problem whether the trucking company it hired had a history of terrible safety violations, employed properly trained drivers, or safely maintained its trucks. Brokers had little reason not to hire cheaper, non-compliant trucking companies over compliant ones.

On May 14, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, and found that freight brokers can be held legally responsible for negligently hiring unsafe trucking companies.

Before the ruling, a freight broker’s liability depended on which state the crash occurred in. Negligent hiring claims against freight brokers have proceeded for years in the Sixth and Ninth Circuits, but not in the Seventh (Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) and Eleventh (Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) Circuits, as freight brokers claimed preemption by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994. This left semi-truck crash victims in different parts of the country with fundamentally different legal options against the same class of defendant.

When a freight broker hired a trucking company, and that company’s truck driver caused a wreck that killed someone, the broker often walked away. The trucking company absorbed the liability, the family absorbed the loss, and when the verdict exceeded the carrier’s $750,000 minimum insurance coverage (a federal floor set in 1980 and never adjusted for inflation), the family absorbed that too. The middleman who chose the trucking company and profited from the load often faced no legal consequence.

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Garden Grove Reminds California That Competence Saves Lives

Garden Grove gave California a Memorial Day weekend emergency no family wanted: A damaged chemical tank at the GKN Aerospace facility forced tens of thousands of residents from their homes after methyl methacrylate began creating a serious fire, vapor, and explosion risk.

Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for Orange County, and state officials said the tank held roughly 5,000 to 7,000 gallons of the volatile chemical.

Orange County Fire Authority Division Chief Craig Covey described the tank as unstable after crews found its internal temperature had climbed from 77º F to 90º F and was rising about 1º F per hour, saying that responders couldn’t accept a tank failure or explosion as an outcome, which was the right message for a public already staring at road closures, shelter plans, and evacuation maps. From Reuters:

Craig Covey, division chief of the Orange County Fire Authority, said crews had gone back into the danger zone in Garden Grove overnight after drone readings on Friday suggested water sprayed on the tanks was helping stabilize the situation.

But those drone readings measured the outside of the vessel, not the chemical inside, Covey said in a video update posted on social media on Saturday morning. When crews reached the tank’s gauge, they found ⁠the internal temperature was 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), up from 77 degrees (25 C) when responders had pulled back.

The temperature was increasing by about one degree an hour, he said. “That’s the bad news,” Covey said.

Officials have warned since Friday that the tank, which contains methyl methacrylate, a flammable chemical used in plastics and manufacturing, could rupture and spill up to 7,000 gallons (26,500 liters) of toxic material or explode and endanger nearby tanks.

On Saturday, Covey said firefighters were exploring whether a heavy flow of cooling water might slow the curing process inside the tank enough to reduce pressure and prevent an explosion.

“Letting this thing just fail and blow up is unacceptable to us,” Covey said. “Our goal is to find something and not allow that to happen.”

Garden Grove Police Chief Amir El-Farra said about 15% of residents in the evacuation zone had refused to leave. Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, chief health officer for the Orange County Health Care Agency, warned that extended exposure to chemical vapors could create serious respiratory concerns, along with eye irritation, headaches, nausea, and other symptoms.

Emergency orders reached Garden Grove and nearby communities, including Cypress, Stanton, Anaheim, Buena Park, and Westminster.

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