Occupational Safety

Blood changes, including a decline in disease-fighting white cells, have been found in workers persistently exposed to low levels of benzene, a common industrial chemical that poses a leukemia risk at high concentrations. Researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science that workers in a Chinese shoe factory exposed to less than one part per million of benzene experienced a significant decline of white cells and found their blood-forming cells were less vigorous than normal. U.S.

Southern California Edison Co., which has admitted to using faulty workplace safety data to win performance bonuses from the state, Friday placed most of the blame for the flawed reports on its failure to track minor injuries such as cuts and bruises among its 12,000 employees. In its most detailed analysis yet of the faulty data, Edison said it also had uncovered "several hundred" other, more serious injuries that had gone unreported between 1999 and 2004.

Zhao Yanmei, 24, sobbed uncontrollably. Gasping for air, the baby-faced mother tried to make sense of it all: Why did it have to be her husband? Why was he on the night shift again? Why was she faced with raising their 3-year-old son without a father? On Sunday, a gas explosion swept through Chenjiashan mine here in Shaanxi province, about 450 miles southwest of Beijing.

Southern California Edison Co. used faulty workplace safety data -- and in some cases may have suppressed reports of on-the-job injuries -- over the last seven years to win performance-related bonuses from the state, the utility acknowledged Thursday. Edison told the California Public Utilities Commission staff that it would forgo or return to the agency $35 million in payments that the company said were based on flawed safety ratings.

To hear Kelly-Moore's lawyer tell it, the Union Carbide salesmen had their mantra down: Don't worry, they'd say, don't worry. Union Carbide Corp. was one of the companies that supplied Kelly-Moore Paint Co. of San Carlos, Calif., with the asbestos used as a thickening agent in its products.

Art Valdez spent 26 years working in the dust in the nation's last asbestos mill, pulling down $17.85 an hour before the place shut down last year. He had a pension and five weeks' paid vacation. He had health insurance for his family. He could afford to give cars to his two boys, visit friends in Texas and take his wife to Denny's as often as he wished. "I didn't know what asbestos was," he recalled recently. "I thought that was the best job ever."

A state board on Thursday banned unnecessary hand-weeding on farms to protect workers from back injuries, acting on an emergency basis to fix a problem they had discussed for a decade. "We support the regulation not because it's perfect, but because it's better than the state of nonregulation today," Mark Schacht, deputy director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, told the Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board.

The former head of a federal mine safety school alleges that Bush administration appointees stopped an investigation of a coal mine sludge spill that polluted about 100 miles of creeks and rivers along the Kentucky-West Virginia state line. A coal mine waste impoundment collapsed near Inez, Ky., in October 2000, killing fish and fouling drinking water. Jack Spadaro, who helped investigate the spill, says the investigation showed Martin County Coal Corp. knew its containment was weak.

South Korea's overseas trade association advised companies Monday not to try to work in Iraq for now, as the bodies of two Korean electricians killed in an ambush Nov. 30 near Tikrit were returned home for burial. Omu Electric Co., the South Korean firm that employed the slain workers, also said Monday that it was withdrawing its remaining 60 employees from Iraq.

A judge Friday let stand manslaughter charges against two men indicted in the deaths of two irrigation workers who drowned in a manure pit, but told prosecutors to reduce 20 worker safety violations to a single count. The case is among the first to be prosecuted under a new state law that lets authorities file felony charges for worker safety violations. Merced County prosecutors used that law to charge Patrick J.