Here to ruin your weekend, a healthy dose of freakout headlines from the worlds of parenting, science, health, education, and safety:
- Not to freak you out or anything, just that Consumer's Union really wants something to be done about all the arsenic and lead in your kid's under-regulated grape and apple juice. [consumerreports.org via publicist]
- The professional freakout group National Vaccine Information Center would like to freak you out of getting thimerosal-laden flu vaccinations at grocery stores and Target and whatnot. [some press release, can't find it online, via publicist]
- "Your laptop wi-fi is frying your sperm!" is exactly the kind of alarming headline the Freakout was designed to collect. Reuters' version of the story wins the link for including the, "eh, or not really" right in the headline. [reuters via dt sr freakout correspondent sara and like four other freakout-savvy readers]
- Basically, every umbilical cord that has been clamped has been clamped too soon. It is unclear whether the world can survive long enough for the delayed clamp generation, with their iron-rich blood, to take it over. [nyt]
- Somehow no parent noticed this while it was happening? The highest-ranked school in Dallas got its ranking by spending the entire 3rd grade year teaching kids nothing but how to beat the state's math and reading test. The rest of their grades were made up. At least in DC, the principals just faked the grades without disrupting the kids' actual education. [washpost]
- Here is a story about an ad campaign that appears to be promoting condoms by sending guys Facebook friend requests from their imaginary future children, but which was actually designed to generate articles about wacky ad campaigns. [adweek via sara]
- I've been hearing a lot of foster care-related horror stories lately. NPR's series on state-run foster care systems preying on American Indian families so they can get more federal funding was infuriating and depressing. [npr]
- There's the desperate Queens parents who abducted their eight kids from a supervised visit after hearing that the foster care system was putting them up for adoption. The kidnapping charges were dropped. [nyt]
- People are still using Bumbo foam baby seats on elevated surfaces, and so kids are still falling out and cracking their skulls. How many times does the CPSC have to remind you people? [cpsc]
If the prematurely-clamped-umbilical-cord generation fought the crack baby generation, who would win? What if we throw in the too-many-vaccines generation? It's getting so hard to keep track of what's destroying society as we know it.