Those e-cigarettes can be dangerous, especially for truckers

Smoking is a known health risk, of course, with a well-established nexus to cancer and other adverse outcomes. As such, warnings regarding the practice have become progressively more dire and explicit over time. Here’s one that could not have been remotely imagined even a year or so ago: Be careful with a certain type of…

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Report: USA Gymnastics gets no medal for policing sex offenders

“It’s horrible, but it’s not the worst.” As far as endorsements go, that is, what, rather … tepid? Depending on the context, the comment might not be much of a big deal, but the context is this: sexual predators having close access to millions of young American gymnasts in clubs and training facilities from California…

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Nation’s vice president to spotlight untested rape kits

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has long taken a strong advocacy stance on behalf of sexual assault victims, and he will reportedly promote his involvement in that realm by rendering a cameo performance in an upcoming television episode on a long-running and popular series. That show is Law & Order: SVU (special victims unit), which…

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California ramping up school-based sexual harassment education

It’s really not hard to understand, say school officials, advocates promoting harassment-free school environments, many parents and other interested parties. Here’s the deal, in a nutshell: Much harmful and unlawful sexual conduct hat manifests itself in adulthood owes centrally to a perpetrator’s wrongful behaviors learned — and, importantly, not discouraged — years earlier. As in…

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Federal regulators concerned with U.S. traffic fatality numbers

Dismal. That is the clear and unadorned assessment of U.S. safety regulators who have culled and closely examined 2015 data relating to motor vehicle accidents across the country that resulted in fatalities. And here’s what is especially troubling to transportation and highway safety officials: Fatal accident-related numbers are up for virtually every type of crash.…

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Opinion: LAUSD on wrong track re teachers’ sexual abuse of kids

Two guest commentators in a recent media article on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s response to the problem of predatory sexual behavior committed by teachers initially note what they say was the response to child molestation first structured by the Catholic Church and the Los Angeles Archdiocese. That response was grossly ineffectual and unethical,…

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A tragedy re many serious, fatal accidents: they are preventable

It is of course infinitely sad every time a serious or fatal accident occurs in Southern California or elsewhere across the country. And the personal loss suffered by an individual or family can seem even more tragic when the precipitating factor most centrally contributing to harm is human error. A catalyst in many catastrophic injury…

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Former high-ranking politician’s sex-abuse saga enters new stage

We last left off with one-time U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert in a previous post, noting therein that the former politician — the longest-tenured Republican House speaker in the nation’s history — was soon scheduled to be sentenced in a high-profile criminal case involving allegations of sexual abuse committed against juveniles. There was…

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