Mercury Metal

Rick Allnutt has closed all but one section of his funeral home on the north end of town. The chapel is dark and quiet, the reception hall bare. But in the bay out back, two side-by-side ovens rumble as the 1,650-degree heat blasts two corpses into bone and ash. Allnutt has moved the rest of the business to another location and wants to move his crematory to a site near a cemetery in Larimer County, but he has reached a stalemate with health officials there.

Environmentalists and industry representatives pleaded their case with federal regulators Tuesday over rules that would slash toxic emissions from cement kilns, the top source of mercury emissions in California. The Environmental Protection Agency issued proposed regulations for Portland cement kilns earlier this year, after more than a decade of pressure from environmental groups.

Environmentalists and industry representatives pleaded their case with federal regulators Tuesday over rules that would slash toxic emissions from cement kilns, the top source of mercury emissions in California. The Environmental Protection Agency issued proposed regulations for Portland cement kilns earlier this year, after more than a decade of pressure from environmental groups.

The separatist Tamil Tiger rebels have forcibly recruited teenagers and a U.N. worker, and are shooting and killing people trying to flee the war, said Neil Buhne, United Nations resident coordinator for Sri Lanka. He did not give a number for the dead. Buhne said the rebels forcibly recruited one of 15 local U.N. employees into their ranks. Those 15 were physically barred from leaving the war zone last month, along with 75 dependents, including 40 children, he said.

A lawsuit filed Tuesday accuses the American Dental Assn. and the California Dental Assn. of unlawfully deceiving patients about the presence of mercury in the most widely used type of dental fillings. The class-action suit, on behalf of several individuals and organizations, seeks to eliminate the use of mercury-containing dental amalgam. It also seeks "restitution" for payments that the ADA allegedly received to endorse amalgam products.

Drug maker Wyeth removed a mercury compound from a popular nasal spray more than a decade ago to skirt warning label requirements, but continued using the chemical in infant vaccines for several years until it came under pressure to stop.

A new report has found that nine chlorine factories are among the nation's largest sources of mercury, a potent neurotoxin that spreads globally and has rendered some seafood unsafe to eat. To be released today, the report, written by the environmental group Oceana, documents what it calls a "long-overlooked" source of mercury polluting the air. The findings are based on a review of toxic inventories filed by the chemical companies. The chlorine industry and the U.S.

The prevalence of autism in California children continued to rise after most vaccine manufacturers started to remove the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in 1999, suggesting that the chemical was not a primary cause of the disorder, according to a study released Monday. The analysis found that from 2004 to 2007, when exposure to thimerosal dropped significantly for 3 to 5 year olds, the autism rate continued to increase in that group from 3.0 to 4.1 per 1,000 children.

Lee Flynn thought she had a healthy lifestyle. She was thin and active and she ate well -- with lunches of tuna and fresh vegetables and dinners of halibut, sea bass or swordfish. Yet she spent over a decade plagued by fatigue, stomachaches and headaches, as if she had "a wicked hangover." Her hair started falling out. Memory lapses made her think she was losing her mind. "I really felt something was poisoning me, but I couldn't find the source," said Flynn, 59.

When Shinobu Sakamoto labors to produce speech from her poison-twisted body, her hands flutter like wounded birds, her right eye rolls upward and her mouth contorts with effort. She needs a friend to translate some of the ensuing sounds into language a stranger can understand. The process is slow and obviously exhausting, but Sakamoto is undaunted. She is angry and wants to be heard.

New studies in infants show that the mercury used as a preservative in vaccines is cleared from the body at least 10 times faster than researchers had previously believed, a finding that casts further doubt on the theory that the preservative causes autism. Researchers had believed that the ethyl mercury in the preservative thimerosal is metabolized in much the same way as the methyl mercury found in fish and other sources.

The prevalence of autism in California children continued to rise after most vaccine manufacturers started to remove the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in 1999, suggesting that the chemical was not a primary cause of the disorder, according to a study released Monday. The analysis found that from 2004 to 2007, when exposure to thimerosal dropped significantly for 3 to 5 year olds, the autism rate continued to increase in that group from 3.0 to 4.1 per 1,000 children.

Rick Allnutt has closed all but one section of his funeral home on the north end of town. The chapel is dark and quiet, the reception hall bare. But in the bay out back, two side-by-side ovens rumble as the 1,650-degree heat blasts two corpses into bone and ash. Allnutt has moved the rest of the business to another location and wants to move his crematory to a site near a cemetery in Larimer County, but he has reached a stalemate with health officials there.

A study of 1,047 children who received mercury-containing vaccines as infants has concluded that the mercury does not cause learning difficulties or developmental delays. The research released Wednesday said mercury exposure was associated with very small changes on some measures of attention, speech and motor control. But the changes varied by gender and were mostly beneficial, leading scientists to conclude they were the result of chance. Dr.

A day after two boys were discovered playing with mercury at a Riverside County elementary school, the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday told county officials to evacuate more than 950 students and called in teams to determine whether the hazardous material had been properly cleaned up. County officials said they had learned that after school Tuesday, the boys, ages 6 and 9, allegedly climbed through a fence into the yard of a welding shop in Romoland and stole vials of mercury.

Federal and local authorities on Tuesday arrested a 27-year-old man they believe spilled mercury on a downtown L.A. subway platform, ending a weeklong dragnet that raised more questions about the handling of the incident. Armando Bustamante Miranda was being questioned by FBI agents and Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators, who are trying to determine why the hazardous chemical was dropped in the station on Dec. 22 by a man who then called an MTA operator to say what he had done.

Increasingly high concentrations of mercury have been found in a species of sand bass caught 5 miles off Huntington Beach, where Orange County's treated sewage is discharged into the ocean. County sanitation officials have detected the rising amounts of mercury in barred sand bass for the last five years during their annual marine monitoring. They said that although the poisonous chemical can pose a risk of birth defects, they believe that the threat to consumers is minor.

Three students at a Santa Ana junior high school were rushed to a hospital Wednesday after eating globs of mercury they had sprinkled on a potato chip, and more than 110 other students believed to have come into contact with the element were examined, authorities said. The three students at Stephen R.

At least four subway passengers either touched or stepped on six ounces of mercury that a man dropped onto a downtown L.A. subway platform, with one commuter finally alerting authorities about the spill eight hours after it occurred. Among those exposed to the mercury was a woman who lives in downtown Los Angeles. She got the mercury on her red house slippers minutes after the man dropped it, said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Det. Danny Regalado.

Who is the young man in the sports coat shown on a grainy videotape spilling mercury on a platform of the Red Line subway station at Pershing Square? When it happened on Dec. 22, officials quickly labeled it a harmless accident. But Thursday, officials acknowledged that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority botched its response, waiting eight hours after being told mercury was on the platform before clearing the station and cleaning up the spill.