Study: 435 U.S. schools have air hazards
SPRINGDALE, Ark., Dec. 30 (UPI) -- The air around 435 U.S. schools is saturated with carcinogens more than 50 times higher than state standards allow, a newspaper investigation found.
About half of the nation's 127,800 public, private and parochial schools are close enough to industrial sites that they could be affected by a chemical accident, USA Today reported.
Many are within blocks of companies that store or release toxic chemicals, it said.
"What we're seeing all across the country is these schools being built on or near toxic chemicals because the land is cheap," Center for Health, Environment & Justice Executive Director Lois Gibbs told the newspaper.
"But we have a moral responsibility to children," said Gibbs, who helped launch an investigation 30 years ago that found tons of toxic waste under her children's school in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, N.Y.
Twenty-three states put no limits on building schools near environmental hazards, a 2006 study funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and done by Rhode Island Legal Services found.
Pollution killing Chesapeake blue crabs
NORFOLK, Va., Dec. 30 (UPI) -- The Chesapeake Bay's blue crab population has been devastated by pollution, overfishing and lax federal oversight, a U.S. environmental group said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, charged with safeguarding the natural environment, has failed to impose a regulatory cap on the amount of pollution entering the bay and to enforce the Clean Water Act, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation said.
The foundation said in October it intended to sue the agency for failing to fulfill its obligation to reduce pollution in the nation's largest estuary, famous for its blue crabs.
An EPA spokesman did not return a phone call seeking a comment on the report.
The foundation also cited overfishing of crabs as a major factor in the blue crab's decline, but theorized a healthier bay would produce more crabs and, in turn, reduce the need for fishing reductions, The (Baltimore) Sun reported.
The bay's crab population decreased to 260 million in 2007 from 791 million in 1990, costing Maryland and Virginia about $640 million from 1998 to 2006, the report said.
Study: Black U.S. women shrinking
ATLANTA, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Black U.S. women born after the mid-1960s have been shrinking with each new generation, while their white counterparts have been growing, a study indicates.
The difference in stature between white women and black women has now stretched to three-quarters of an inch and appears to be increasing, the study using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data found.
The main culprit appears to be diet, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
The average height of a black woman born in the 1980s is just under 5 feet 4 inches. Her mother, born in the 1960s, is more than half an inch taller. Her grandmother, born in the 1940s, is a bit taller still.
The average white woman born in the 1980s is about a half-inch taller than her mother.
The gap is "truly phenomenal," economist and height historian John Komlos, who conducted the analysis, told the newspaper.
He said he sees significance in this because "height is a very good overall indicator of how well the human organism thrives in its socioeconomic environment."
He also observed that while the heights of low- and middle-income black women are decreasing, upper-income black women are growing taller and closing the gap with their white counterparts.
"The only reasonable explanation we can come up with is diet and the obesity epidemic among (middle- and low-income) black women," Komlos said.
Book: Soviets stole H-bomb secrets
OSCEOLA, Wis., Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Moscow acquired the secret of the hydrogen bomb from an atomic spy at the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, a new book says.
"The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation," by Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman, does not name the suspected spy, but says he was born in the United States, grew up in a foreign country, fell in with communist sympathizers during the Depression and worked at Los Alamos during World War II.
Afterward, he became "deeply involved" in the U.S. effort to develop the H-bomb, the book says.
The book, due out in January, says that co-author Stillman, a physicist who worked at Los Alamos from 1965 to 2000 and served for more than a decade as the lab's director of intelligence, took his suspicions to the FBI in the 1990s.
But the FBI inquiry was "botched beyond recognition" and went nowhere, the book says.
The FBI declined to comment.
The alleged spy is now dead, the book said.
"It's quite intriguing," nuclear historian Robert Norris told The New York Times.
"We've learned a lot about atomic spies," he said. "Now, we find out that a spy may be at the center of the H-bomb story too."
