Read the Huffington Post story about the study, and one might think that only clearing out the makeup bag and replacing its contents with “organic” cosmetics can save someone from terrible diseases. Actually, that’s not even what the study author suggests. As she says, “I don’t think that people should go into a panic, or abandon lipstick.” One possible reason: The study didn’t actually attempt to determine if people had been harmed, but only if the levels of chemicals exceeded an arbitrary threshold.

So who actually makes sure cosmetics are safe? The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has responsibility under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to regulate cosmetic product safety. Despite claims that no limits are set on lead in cosmetic products, the FDA actually does limit the types of color additives that can be used in cosmetic products based on safety assessments. These regulations include a limit on lead in these additives.

Should cosmetics companies fail to sufficiently demonstrate that their products are safe before bringing them to market, the products must bear a warning label stating that. And if any cosmetic is found to be unsafe, FDA can go to court to take it off the market and companies can be liable for steep damages.

When CSC touted its finding that that some lipsticks contain supposedly potentially dangerous levels of lead (i.e. more lead residue than is allowed in food), FDA responded by conducting two separate rounds of tests. After the tests, FDA ruled that it “[does] not consider the lead levels we found in the lipsticks to be a safety concern.” CSC has a history of overstating risks and is the offspring of a group that toxics experts think overstates risks. There’s no reason to expect these latest findings to be different.

The dog was lucky for another reason, too. Portsmouth sits across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk, home of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ shelter of horrors, where last year the group killed nearly 90 percent of the pets in the group’s care. If circumstances were different, Hope might have needed to abandon all hope.

PETA defends this wanton slaughter of pets by protesting that they are compassionate. Ingrid Newkirk, PETA’s president, argues thusly:

We run a shelter but in the most merciful way. We help–because no one else will–the animals who are society’s rejects in the area near our Virginia headquarters. These animals are aggressive, feral, on death’s door (often with large tumors hanging from their bodies), or otherwise unadoptable.

While there is plenty of evidence that disputes the “death’s door” claim by Newkirk, it stands to reason that Hope, having been found so emaciated that trained dog wardens thought her dead, would not have any hope in PETA’s shelter. Perhaps they should call the recovering dog “Lucky,” since she not only survived a delinquent former owner but avoided being the recently killed subject of a PETA self-defending “but we only kill desperate animals” blog post.

As for “aggressive” dogs, what about the animals seized as part of the Michael Vick dogfighting case in Surry — again, not far from PETA’s HQ? Many of the animals were rehabilitated through hard work and have new homes. They may well have been put down if they had been given to PETA.

So if PETA isn’t saving these pets with its $30 million annual budget, what is the animal liberation group that hasn’t seen a press event it didn’t like up to? Buying drones. No, seriously: U.S. News reports that PETA will “‘soon have some impressive new weapons at its disposal […]’ and that it is ‘shopping for one or more drone aircraft.’” The drones would be used by PETA to “stalk” hunters. Even though the group denies that it wants to arm its new, expensive spy toys, given PETA’s history of supporting violent extremists the rhetoric about “weapons” is chilling. But this all may be pointless, because if armed hunters don’t like drones…

So, donors have a choice: Rehabilitate sick dogs by donating to their local shelters, or help a multimillion dollar national group buy drones, while it kills pets in the name of mercy. Sounds like an easy choice to us.

In a ruling against the Sea Shepherds last week, Kozinski called out the group’s tactics—ramming ships, hurling acid, and similarly violent stunts —for what they are: Piracy on the high seas. He wrote, on behalf of a unanimous panel:

You don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch. When you ram ships; hurl glass containers of acid; drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders; launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate, no matter how high-minded you believe your purpose to be.

So, while Judge Kozinski’s ruling may make life and fundraising a bit more difficult for Watson and his acolytes, what does it mean for those who have helped him out in the past? Their number include Wayne Pacelle, boss of the Humane Society of the United States (not to be confused with your local animal shelter), who helped the Sea Shepherds raise money when he worked for the Fund for Animals some years back.

The answer? Probably not much, unfortunately. Consider Neal Barnard, head of the 90 percent doctor-free Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. A decade ago, he co-signed a letter with a representative of the violent animal liberation group SHAC who was later sentenced to six years in federal prison for animal enterprise terrorism. Barnard is now hawking his latest vegan-shilling diet book and cutting PSAs for PBS. The no-animals diet plan now purports to prevent Alzheimer’s Disease. (Nobody tell him about the proven brain benefits of omega-3 (n-3) fatty acids found in fish—that would be inconvenient.) Next week veganism will cure cancer, improve your vision, and tie your shoes for you, but we digress.

The Discovery Channel recently saw the ugly side of a nutjob with a wacky environmentalist agenda, so it’s bizarre that the station continues to make money off of eco-pirates. Hopefully the execs there will wise up to the not-so-controversial idea that cozying up with Pirate Paul or his crew can backfire in one way or another. As for Barnard and Pacelle, we’ll keep making sure people know that these two smooth-talkers aren’t who they seem.

The Waterkeeper Alliance has a knack for filing questionable lawsuits, but one now-dismissed suit in Maryland might be its worst yet. The Waterkeeper Alliance alleged that the Hudson family, fourth-generation poultry farmers, violated environmental law by allowing improper waste runoff into the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The problem was that the facts were not on their side, since the suspected pile of manure wasn’t, in fact, manure.

Already chided by a judge for having a weak case, the Waterkeeper Alliance pressed on to trial. Not surprisingly, it failed miserably. According to the Baltimore Sun:

Meanwhile, the Alliance took a hit in West Virginia as well. It tried to butt into an EPA suit there to go after another family farmer for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act. The theory, again, was that chicken litter was running off into a stream when it rained. But thanks to a favorable Supreme Court ruling for property owners this past spring, the farmers filed suit against the EPA, causing it to back down. It’s not what the Alliance hoped for. Just two weeks ago, Waterkeeper Alliance Executive Director Marc Yaggi said that if the EPA did not win this suit, it would “roll back core Clean Water Act protections that safeguard human health and the environment.”

What’s in RFK Jr.’s stocking this year? Hyperbole and disappointment—which itself is a gift to family farmers across the country.

PCRM wants its campaign to go on, and is trying to access more of the researcher’s records in a public records request. Wayne State University has gone to court to defend O’Leary’s privacy, citing PCRM’s “inflammatory accusations” and other (unaffiliated) activists’ campaign of threats and harassment as grounds to deny the request. According to Courthouse News Service, Wayne State’s complaint also alleges that PCRM “refused to remove defamatory articles from its website until Wayne State’s general counsel demanded it.”

The threats and harassment were serious. One extremist started posting O’Leary’s personal information online and sent the researcher an e-mail wishing him a painful death. Wayne State University officials and the courts took her threatening rhetoric very seriously. She was subsequently arrested for trespassing on University property and pleaded guilty to another offense. Wayne State’s filing notes that Michigan law permits denial of an open records request if the information “would present a realistic risk of being used to identify the personal safety and security of [named] individuals.” (For more on the particular extremist who made these threats and the advocates of violent extremism in the modern animal rights movement, see this piece at the Popehat blog.)

For all the cute puppies-and-kittens commercials and “compassion” talk, the animal rights movement has a history of criminal and violent extremism, including stalking, death threats, and arson. And PCRM should know this, as it has been linked with those more radical elements. A former PCRM representative, Jerry Vlasak, endorsed the murder of medical researchers at an animal rights conference in 2003. (PCRM has denied that Vlasak was speaking on its behalf, but the event’s program described him as “Jerry Vlasak, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.”) PCRM didn’t commit this latest example of the animal rights movement’s unhinged underbelly, but it serves as a reminder of the violent mindset that many supposedly “compassionate” activists share.

The radical Waterkeeper Alliance, no stranger to dubious lawsuits, might soon find itself neck-deep in chicken litter. The group, run by the “very reckless” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — you might remember him for his dangerous claims against childhood vaccines — is slated to go to trial next week in its war against a family farm in Maryland.

The suit alleges that the Hudson family, owner of Romarlen Farms, violated the federal Clean Water Act (CWA) by storing poultry manure in a pile on their property. The Waterkeeper Alliance went after both the Hudsons and Perdue Farms, which contracts with the Hudsons.

There’s only one small problem: there wasn’t a pile of chicken litter. It was a pile of natural fertilizer for crops legally purchased from the authorities in Ocean City, Maryland, which, although improperly stored, was not what the trigger-happy plaintiffs initially said it was. The Hudsons complied with a state order and moved it. Nonetheless, Waterkeeper Alliance went forward with its suit, claiming that the water pollution it found in a ditch couldn’t have come from anywhere else but the Hudsons’ farm.

We will keep you posted as the case goes on, because this is going to be a watershed case.

You want to eat only “local” food? Go for it. Just don’t tell us about how you’re saving Mother Earth. You’re not.

But, your inner Mark Bittman will say, these “researchers” must be bought puppets. Nope.

The interrupted sentence concludes, “researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.” Yes, that Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that takes its green agenda to the extreme.

While HSUS television ads are dominated by imagines of cats and dogs—they constitute more than 85 percent of the animals in the ads—only one percent of HSUS’s budget goes to support pet shelters.  HSUS has said it has a disclaimer, but our analysis found that it only appeared in less than one percent of HSUS commercials over a multi-year period. HSUS includes similar rhetoric about pets in its mail campaigns as well.

And the deception is effective: Our report found that 74 percent of HSUS financial supporters donate in order to either help homeless cats and dogs in shelters or to reduce the number of animals put down in shelters each year. And 90 percent of donors were unaware that only one percent of HSUS’s budget went to supporting local pet shelters.

HSUS is surely nervous about people finding out about this. Polls indicate that once its own donors are aware of where the money goes, 80 percent believe that HSUS “misleads people into thinking that it supports local humane societies and pet shelters.” In turn, almost half of the HSUS donors say they are less likely to give in the future once they know the facts. This deception is rampant and it is a nationwide problem.

That’s why HumaneWatch has also contacted 12 state attorneys general offices in states that protect their citizens against deceptive or misleading charitable solicitation. We told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that there is a disconnect between the fundraising tactics of HSUS and the way it actually spends its funds.

Needless to say, the heat is on at HSUS. So what’s its response? Rather than respond to the report’s findings, HSUS has decided to attack us instead. But no matter: A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Attorney General promised us a response, and we look forward to reading it.

On Radio Australia, the ISSF Scientific Advisory Committee Chair states that Greenpeace is exaggerating its claims about by-catch, which refers to non-target animals caught during fishing (“purse seine” refers to a method of fishing that scoops up fish with a purse-shaped net):

Host: And another of the comments made by [Greenpeace’s] Casson Trenor [is] that they have evidence that turtles are killed by purse seiners that are caught up by accident in their fishing processes and also photos finning sharks. You disagree with that?

ISSF: Well, the catch of turtles in purse seine fisheries is very minor. It’s in the dozens a year and most of them are released alive. The mortality of those turtles is very, very small and it’s almost insignificant compared to the mortality of turtles from other fishing activities, such as long lining or from other human activities, such as building hotels near nesting beaches and so on.

Greenpeace would prefer it if fishermen caught tuna using pole-and-line methods. But as the tuna industry notes, only 2% of the canned tuna consumed is currently caught this way. It’s less efficient than using methods like purse seine, which begs the question: Wouldn’t fishermen have to dispatch more boats to catch the same amount of tuna going by this supposedly more “sustainable” method, resulting in more greenhouse gas emissions? Probably—but that handy problem would give Greenpeace something else to complain about, another way to try to put the fishing industry out of business, and of course, something to fundraise on.

(And speaking of sustainability, Bittman notes that most canned tuna is skipjack—which is not a threatened species.)

Canned tuna is a source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids that’s easily affordable for lower-income Americans. Omega-3s are linked not only to better heart health, but also better brain development in children. Studies already indicate that some 4.4 million lower-income households stopped purchasing canned tuna between 2000 and 2006, no doubt mostly due to the mercury-in-fish scare campaigns from environmental groups that, unsurprisingly, failed on scientific merit. A full-on boycott of this cheap source of omega-3s might serve Bittman’s self-righteousness, but it wouldn’t help the average family.

Maybe next time Bittman shouldn’t rely so much on a “ratbag rabble of intellectual cowards intent on peddling an agenda.” Or better yet, maybe he can go back to simply serving up new recipes.

The movie’s official website boasts that the documentary “examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods.” But such a laughable assertion deserves its own examination. (We couldn’t help but notice the filmmakers do not address the fact that a vegan diet can have serious health risks of its own, particularly for pregnant and nursing mothers.)

First of all, quite a few members of the documentary’s cast and crew have landed in our crosshairs at one point or another for being on the fringe. No vegan documentary would be complete without Neal Barnard, the founder of the PETA-linked “Physicians Committee” for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and author of multiple vegan self-help books. His good friend and fellow PCRM board member T. Colin Campbell is also a star. There’s vegetarian activist Rip Esselstyn, who wants restaurants to have meat-eating sections so that he doesn’t have to watch people enjoying their cheeseburgers. And then there’s Caldwell Esselstyn, who is Rip’s father and another advisory board member for PCRM.

That should be enough to convince most people that Forks Over Knives is little more than a PCRM propaganda piece. And yet, the filmmakers are already trying to get the Oscar buzz going.

Need more evidence that PCRM is a scam with a stethoscope? Check out our article “7 Things You Didn’t Know About PCRM.”