by TRACY CONNOR Flint mom Melissa Lightfoot says her youngest child, Payton, is one of the top students in her kindergarten class, but she is “so scared that could all change next year.” That’s because the 5-year-old — along with her two older siblings — was found to have high lead levels in her blood after the Michigan city switched to a more corrosive water source in 2015. The little girl …
Indigenous people who say they lost their cultural identity when they were removed as children from their homes on Ontario reserves to be placed with non-aboriginal families are urging the federal government to negotiate a settlement in a long-standing case that will go before a judge later this year. The class-action suit seeks redress for what the plaintiffs say was the government’s failure …
For a decade and a half, the big chocolate makers have promised to end child labor in their industry—and have spent tens of millions of dollars in the effort. But as of the latest estimate, 2.1 million West African children still do the dangerous and physically taxing work of harvesting cocoa. What will it take to fix the problem?
“There’s real danger that the injury is going to be permanent and lifelong in them,” Dr. Philip Landrigan, Dean of Global Health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said of the residents exposed to the water crisis in Flint. “The problem here is, no level of lead is safe,” Landrigan says. “Even low levels of lead — especially if exposure to low levels continues over many months — is going to …
FLINT, Mich. — It kills him to say it, but Darren Bentley is thinking about leaving town. He was born here, went to Kearsley High School and rents a place near a couple of college campuses. He has never lived anywhere else.
In the early 1970s, as feminists advocated for abortion rights in the lead-up to Roe v. Wade, an L.A. county hospital was years into a federally funded population-control program that targeted poor Mexican American women for sterilization when they came to the hospital to give birth. Several only learned years later that they’d had tubal ligations without their consent; 10 testified against the …
It’s “Katrina II,” and he says he’ll fix it. Michigan’s Gov. Rick Snyder is taking (some of) the blame for the lead-contaminated drinking water that has led to brain damage and other health risks in children in parts of the urban community.
The University of San Diego’s Children’s Advocacy Institute is asking a federal appellate court to reconsider its recent decision upholding Facebook’s $20 million “sponsored stories” settlement. The watchdog, which is part of the law school’s Center for Public Interest Law, says the settlement will empower Facebook to “capture, rearrange and republish” posts by children. “It allows capture of …
A Saskatchewan law firm is representing more than a thousand victims of the so-called ’60s Scoop’ who are seeking compensation from the federal government. The Merchant Law Group served the Federal Government the class-action lawsuit on January 30. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the government ran an Adopt Indian Métis program.
A poster was attached to the note, emblazoned with the words “Cultural Genocide.” It referred to the “Sixties Scoop,” a modern-day echo of the residential schools nightmare. Between 1961 and 1985 child welfare authorities removed thousands of First Nations children from their homes, their families, their communities. They transplanted them in non-aboriginal families, guided by the belief they …