Tag: safety

Uzbek Semi-Truck Driver Who Killed Woman on Texas Highway Caught Lying to Investigators About Crash

A semi-truck driver who killed a woman on a Texas highway last week lied to investigators about the crash.

The driver, identified as Khasan Begbaev, 39, from Uzbekistan, was charged with manslaughter after Lisa Maldonado, 33, died in the crash.

Khasan Begbaev has residency in the United States (New York), but it will be revoked, and he can be deported if he is convicted.

Begbaev initially told investigators that he took the wrong exit while traveling toward Austin on Interstate 635 and was driving slowly in the left lane with his hazard lights on.

However, dashcam footage reviewed by investigators shows that Begbaev was stopped on the off-ramp and reversed on the highway!

“Police said the camera footage showed the semi-truck stop on the ramp at 2:32 a.m. and begin slowly reversing down the highway while other vehicles passed on the right. Video captured the impact of Maldonado’s vehicle striking the rear of the backing semi at 2:34 a.m., after which the truck briefly stopped before pulling forward a short distance, according to the affidavit,” Fox 4 DFW reported.

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NHTSA Opens Investigation into Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybercab

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into Tesla’s Cybercab on Friday morning, just hours after the company put the first of the driverless vehicles on the streets of Austin, Texas.

TechCrunch reports that Elon Musk’s Cybercab has no steering wheel and no pedals. That runs headlong into federal vehicle safety rules requiring manual controls even in robotaxis. The Department of Transportation has proposed dropping those requirements for vehicles built to drive themselves, but the change hasn’t taken effect yet. Tesla told NHTSA it self-certified the Cybercab as compliant with all Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards anyway, which is the normal way automakers bring new vehicles to market.

NHTSA said it opened the investigation to “examine the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab and related issues.”

This also happened to Amazon’s robotaxi company, Zoox. In 2022, Zoox self-certified its own vehicle, a cube-shaped robotaxi that also has no steering wheel or pedals. NHTSA hit back that year with a “special order” demanding information from Zoox, then formally launched an audit query in 2023, the same process now aimed at Tesla. Zoox was still deep in testing at the time, and the investigation stretched out its path to commercialization even as the company kept insisting its self-certification was sound.

The scrutiny didn’t stop there. In 2025, regulators granted Zoox an exemption to demonstrate its technology, though not to operate it commercially. Zoox had filed for a temporary Part 555 exemption from eight separate Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. That exemption got final approval in July 2026, clearing one of the last obstacles between Zoox and a commercial robotaxi launch, and letting the company add up to 2,500 vehicles a year to its fleet over the following two years. A few weeks later, Zoox opened commercial service and now charges for rides in Las Vegas

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Pesticides poison nearly half of world’s farmers each year – study

Nearly half of the world’s estimated 934 million farmers suffer unintentional pesticide poisoning each year, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

The study, conducted by researchers from the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), analyzed 214 publications from 2006 to 2023 alongside World Health Organization mortality data. It estimated up to 433 million cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning annually, affecting around 46% of agricultural workers worldwide. About 11,000 cases are fatal each year.

The burden falls disproportionately on the Global South, researchers found.

South and Southeast Asia and eastern Africa recorded the highest estimated numbers of cases. In Burkina Faso, nearly 84% of farmers are estimated to suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year.

“Behind these staggering numbers are farmers, workers and families paying a terrible human price for pesticide exposure,” PAN India Executive Director Jayakumar Chelaton said. “This research exposes a crisis that can no longer be ignored.”

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FDA Approves Moderna XFG COVID Vaccines 81 Days Before Teen/Adult Safety Study, 126 Days Before Children’s Study

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s new XFG-formulated COVID-19 vaccines on August 27, 81 days before a human study specifically designed to evaluate the safety and immune response of the new formulations was scheduled to begin.

Pfizer’s XFG COVID vaccine formulation was approved on the same day, equally without safety data for its new formulation.

FDA approved the 2026–2027 formulas for Moderna’s SPIKEVAX and mNEXSPIKE vaccines, which are claimed to contain genetic instructions corresponding to the alleged JN.1-lineage XFG subvariant.

But FDA’s own Aug 27 approval letters show that a Phase 3b/4 human study specifically evaluating the “Immunogenicity and Safety of MNEXSPIKE and SPIKEVAX 2026-2027 Formula” is not scheduled to begin until November 16.

The first interim results are not due until March 26, 2027.

For younger children eligible to receive the new SPIKEVAX formulation, a separate human safety and immunogenicity study is scheduled to begin even later.

In other words, FDA approved Moderna’s new XFG vaccines first.

The human studies specifically evaluating the new formulations come afterward.

The regulatory pathway allows FDA to rely on claimed evidence from previously licensed formulations rather than require a new human safety trial of every updated formulation before approval.

But that raises consequential health, informed-consent, regulatory, and accountability questions:

  • How can FDA determine that a newly reformulated vaccine is safe before formulation-specific human safety data exist?
  • What evidence justifies carrying earlier safety findings forward to a changed product?
  • And why is FDA requiring a Phase 3b/4 study specifically to evaluate the new formulas’ “Safety” only after Americans are permitted to receive them?
  • And most fundamentally, if FDA is approving a newly reformulated vaccine before human safety data specific to that formulation exist, is the agency fulfilling its responsibility to independently establish that products are safe before Americans receive them, or shifting that uncertainty onto the public and collecting the answers afterward?

Congressional committees have confirmed that the FDA “is not meeting important federal safety requirements to protect its employees and the public while also failing to prioritize scientific data quality delivered from FDA laboratories.”

You can contact the FDA here.

And Moderna here.

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Court Gives FCC 30 Days to Respond to CHD Petition on Wireless Harms

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has 30 days to explain why it hasn’t complied with a 2021 court order requiring the agency to reveal how it determined that current wireless radiation exposure limits — which haven’t been updated in 30 years — adequately protect people and the environment, a federal appeals court ruled today.

Within a month, the FCC must respond to a petition filed earlier this year by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) requesting the information.

“This is a huge deal, and we are very pleased with the court’s order,” said Miriam Eckenfels, director of CHD’s Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless Program.

Today’s order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit represents a big step toward holding the FCC accountable for its ongoing refusal to protect people and the environment from wireless radiation, Eckenfels said.

“The FCC’s inaction to address the mountain of science on the health impacts of wireless radiation is nothing short of reckless,” she said.

‘This signals that the court is interested in the issue’

In 2019, the FCC chose not to update its 1996 radiofrequency (RF) radiation exposure safety limits and to terminate a legal inquiry into scientific evidence of adverse biological effects of RF radiation.

In response, CHD and other petitioners, including the Environmental Health Trust, sued the FCC. The groups filed 11,000 pages of evidence of harm from 5G and wireless technology — evidence that they alleged the FCC ignored in 2019, when it decided not to update its safety limits.

In 2021, after CHD and the other petitioners’ cases were consolidated into EHT et al. v. FCC, the District of Columbia Circuit sided with CHD.

The 2021 ruling called the FCC’s 2019 decision “arbitrary and capricious” because it failed to consider the non-cancer evidence of adverse health effects caused by wireless technology.

According to the 2021 ruling:

“In addition to the Commission’s inadequate response to the non-cancer-related effects of RF radiation on human health, the Commission also completely failed even to acknowledge, let alone respond to, comments concerning the impact of RF radiation on the environment.

“That utter lack of a response does not meet the Commission’s obligation to provide a reasoned explanation for terminating the notice of inquiry.”

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CHD Scientists Call for Retraction of Danish Study Claiming Aluminum in Vaccines Is ‘Safe’

The controversial 2025 Danish study on aluminum in vaccines should be immediately retracted because the study’s own data contradict the authors’ conclusion, according to a new peer-reviewed article by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker and Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski.

Hooker and Jablonowski’s article was published this week in Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal.

Jablonowski told The Defender that the Danish study, published July 15, 2025, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is “a good lesson in how bad science can propagate.”

The study claimed to find no link between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 negative health outcomes, including autism, asthma and autoimmune disorders.

Since then, the Danish study has been cited 36 times in published research as evidence that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines are safe, Jablonowski said.

The study received so much media and academic attention that it ranked in the top 5% of all research outputs, according to Altmetric, a data influence company.

But that attention doesn’t mean the Danish authors’ conclusions were correct, Jablonowski said. In their critique, he and Hooker presented a detailed analysis showing a mismatch between the Danish study’s data and the authors’ conclusions.

“The study that convinced the world that aluminum in vaccines does not cause autism was a facade,” Jablonowski said. That facade crumbled under scrutiny, he said.

“We were left with a heap of unanswered questions and evidence that aluminum in vaccines is positively associated with neurodevelopmental disorders.”

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‘Industrial, Human and Hospital Waste’: What’s Really in ‘Organic Compost’ Sold in Garden Stores?

Sewage sludge is being sold in garden stores as “organic compost,” with consumers taking it home and using it in their gardens without knowing what it truly is, filmmaker Galassia Grassetto said in an interview this month.

“It’s a mixture of industrial, human and hospital waste, all concentrated together,” Grassetto said. “You can buy it as organic compost in bags. And people don’t realize, and they take it home and they put it in their gardens.”

That discovery is at the center of a new documentary, “The Sludge War.” In the film, Grassetto investigates what happens to the waste left behind after sewage is treated — a practice she said “has been deliberately hidden from the American public.”

After reviewing the film, John Stauber, who writes for the Organic Consumers Association, said the film documents the “poisoning” of a nation.

“For the very first time a major documentary exposes the massive, ongoing poisoning of every state in America, as each year billions of pounds of toxic sewage sludge is spread on crops, pastures, gardens, parks and lawns, disguised as ‘harmless organic fertilizer and compost,’” Stauber wrote.

In-person screenings of the new film are scheduled in New York, with additional showings planned in other states.

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MIT student claims he synthesized one of the deadliest chemicals known to man — sparking massive hazmat response

A student at MIT claimed he synthesized one of the world’s deadliest chemicals last week — sparking a massive hazmat response and the closure of the lab where he worked.

The unidentified grad student arrived at a local emergency room, saying he had synthesized dimethyl mercury, a highly toxic compound that can be fatal if exposed to humans in even the smallest amounts, NBC Boston reported.

The student was not authorized to be working with the compound and it was not part of his research, according to school officials.

MIT closed off Building 18 where the experiment took place on Wednesday and called in city emergency responders to begin the cleanup.

Common areas in the student’s residence hall were also professionally cleaned as a precaution, and the student’s room was sealed off.

Building 18 remained closed through Sunday as testing and investigations continued.

“Emerging information calls into question whether this compound was in fact synthesized,” an MIT spokesperson said on Saturday.

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Dog-eaten meat, rats and urine: Stomach-churning details of 10K LA street food complaints revealed

A dog eating meat out of a street vendor’s bag before it was served to customers. Cockroaches crawling out of a food truck. Mice scurrying beside open salsa. Raw meat baking unrefrigerated in the heat. People urinating around cooking equipment.

These are just a handful of the stomach-churning allegations listed in a staggering 662-page dossier of 9,746 public health complaints about street food vendors filed across Los Angeles County from 2023 until early 2026.

The disgusting details, obtained by the California Post through a public records request, emerge as LA Mayor Karen Bass ordered the LAPD this week to stop issuing criminal citations to street vendors who flout the rules.

The move will give un-permitted food carts free reign across the city, potentially letting the conditions get even worse.

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Senate Probes Flock Safety Over 20 Billion Vehicle Scans

The US Senate has joined a host of other actors in putting pressure on Flock Safety, a maker of automated license-plate readers, over misuse of its technology by law enforcement and others.

The Senate’s scrutiny came in the form of a letter that was sent by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, on August 26.

The senator gave Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley until September 8 to answer a series of questions and produce documents.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The investigation targets the scale of the operation, the retention of data collected from the more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states that Hawley said the company has, as well as customers’ search capabilities.

Hawley’s letter says the cameras produce more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. The scans are then turned into records that can be searched by customers.

Hawley’s concern is that this is turning the act of driving a vehicle into a record that can be searched – and he said that Congress has never authorized the creation of such a network.

“But Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church,” the senator wrote. “Congress never authorized the network your industry has built.”

The letter seeks information on whether customers can run statewide or nationwide searches of vehicle or driver data, and if this is the default option. The retention periods, both default and maximum, are also of interest to Hawley, as is the number of confirmed misuse cases since January 1, 2021.

Hawley also wants to know what information customers must provide to justify a search, what restrictions Flock imposes, and what the accuracy is when it comes to complete and correctly attributed vehicle identification. The frequency of incorrect alerts is also a question.

Flock is also asked to provide details about the data the devices capture, whether the data is linked to any outside source, and whether multi-factor authentication is required of all users.

And in a question that goes beyond the plate readers, Hawley wants to know if Flock has the capability to biometrically track people.

The request for documents includes contracts with governmental customers, prices and fee schedules, information about pilot programs, discounted or donated equipment, and help given to customers to secure federal, state, or private grant funding.

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