The Toxies

Just days before the 82nd Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood, the First Annual Toxies Awards took place at the legendary Egyptian Theatre across the boulevard. A rogue’s gallery of “bad actors” with names like Trichloroethylene, Hydrofluoric Acid and Toluene competed for Toxies in this first-ever awards ceremony celebrating the worst of the 85,000 chemicals we come into contact with on a regular basis. One bad actor, Perchlorate, was a sleak silver rocket girl with thrusters for feet, so beautiful as fireworks, she was ‘the chemical that launched a thousand rockets’ including mine.

We, Robot

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home of America’s greatest robotic explorations of the heavens, isn’t sold on deep-sixing the manned space program. Part Two of a special Pasadena Weekly cover story investigation that also explores the origins of NASA’s manned space program, the brainchild of an infamous Nazi rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, whose V-2 rockets killed thousands during the London Blitz of World War II, rockets built by concentration camp slave labor who were worked to death, tortured and executed during the production of these American-coveted missiles. Von Braun is considered by NASA to be the 20th Century’s greatest rocketeer illustrating that one man’s Nazi is another man’s hero.

Space Monkey Business

Critics say NASA is taking a giant leap backwards by irradiating monkeys in space-travel tests designed to simulate the intense radiation astronauts would experience in voyages to the moon and Mars. The Pasadena Weekly discovers that Italian human radiation tests aboard the International Space Station obviate the need for these crude and inhumane radiation tests on primates, the first of their kind in nearly three decades.

Grave Mistakes

Despite public outrage over soldiers’ tombstones disposed of in the VA’s biomedical nuclear and chemical dump in Brentwood, focus turns to the VA’s $1 million Phase II testing for toxins. VA refuses to answer LA Weekly and EnviroReporter.com questions about its million dollar boondoggle as it cores for contamination away from the known dump, ignoring Phase I recommendations to test near upscale Barrington Avenue condominiums and exclusive Brentwood school despite high radiation readings in 2006.

Atomic Tombstones

Soldiers’ tombstones are emerging from the muck of a biomedical nuclear and chemical dump on the Department of Veterans Affairs grounds in Brentwood, California. The VA says its long-promised $1 million investigation of the dump is still on yet it hasn’t noticed the gravestones. The dump is far larger than previously known. Adjacent Brentwood School’s athletic fields may have been impacted with heavy metal contamination with football field reportedly built over trench of syringes. School denies all and VA isn’t talking to LA Weekly or EnviroReporter.com.

Dereliction of Duty

A ghoulish graveyard of atomic tombstones, actually American military veterans’ headstones, were dumped in Brentwood’s toxic grave, according to a new LA Weekly article by Michael Collins. This online companion piece digs deeper into the biomedical nuclear and chemical dump on West Los Angeles VA land, land that stretches up under exclusive Brentwood School where headstones have also been found.

  • VA Nuclear Dump

  • Grave Mistakes

    Grave Mistakes

    Despite public outrage over soldiers’ tombstones disposed of in the VA’s biomedical nuclear and chemical [...]
  • Atomic Tombstones

    Atomic Tombstones

    Soldiers' tombstones are emerging from the muck of a biomedical nuclear and chemical dump on [...]
  • Dereliction of Duty

    Dereliction of Duty

    A ghoulish graveyard of atomic tombstones, actually American military veterans' headstones, were dumped in Brentwood's [...]
  • More VA Nuclear Dump

  • Rocketdyne

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    Career Day

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    Age of Consent

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