Pow! Wham! Permission Denied! No homoerotic exegesis of Batman for DC Comics, thanks. Lingua Franca

Arsenic: A new type of endocrine disrupter? “Recently, it has become clear that decades
of exposure to very low doses of arsenic — such as levels found in drinking water in many areas of the United States — may
substantially increase the risk of vascular disease, diabetes and several types of cancer. Until now, little was known about
how arsenic might contribute to these diseases, however.

Using cultured animal cells, a team led by toxicologist Joshua Hamilton, director of Dartmouth’s Toxic Metals Research
Program, found that exposure to very low concentrations of arsenic disrupts the function of the glucocorticoid receptor, a
steroid hormone receptor that regulates a wide range of biological processes.” EurekAlert!

You’re not as nice as you think you are. EurekAlert!

Evidence of Celtic ritual cannibalism in Iron Age Britain.

Slaughter of the innocuous. A vet and researcher into the history of
foot-and-mouth at the University of
Manchester (UK) writes: “From the panic and the headlines you would imagine that this
is a most dreadful disease. Yet foot-and-mouth very rarely kills
the animals that catch it. They almost always recover, and in a
couple of weeks at that. It almost never gets passed on to
humans and when it does it is a mild infection only. The meat
from animals that have had it is fit to eat. In clinical terms,
foot-and-mouth is about as serious, to animals or to people, as a
bad cold.

Why, then, the concern? And why the policy of wholesale
slaughter? The concern, of course, is economic. This is a
financial issue, not an animal welfare issue, nor a human health
one.” The Times of London

The British Medical Journal reviews Vivisection or Science? An Investigation into Testing Drugs and
Safeguarding Health. Italian scientist Pietro Croce used to do it himself, but now says animal experimentation is unethical — not because of what it does to the animals, but what it does to us. As Russ points out, however, a response by a Dr JH Botting to the favorable review of this book points out: ‘The antivivisection literature is replete with emotive propaganda and exaggerated claims of “bad
science”. However a definitive examination of the literature generally exposes criticisms as spurious.
Their perpetuation in books such as “Vivisection or science” does nothing for the ethical debate.’