https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12913013/Brigitte-Bardot-nearly-90-shes-baring-claws-today.html

Brigitte Bardot - the Sixties sex kitten the world lusted over - is nearly 90 but she's still baring her claws today as she picks fights with everyone from gays to Muslim migrants

>Pronouncing from her 14-bedroom villa near Cannes, Bardot was, and remains, appalled by the ritual slaughter of sheep – Islamic halal – for which she has been accused of racism: 'My country, France, my homeland, is again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims.'

Couple: The actress-turned-animal rights activist has been married to far-right political aide Bernard d'Ormale since 1992 (pictured together in 1994)

Bardot's comments and insults have often landed her in court, especially as she insists she's 'fed up with being under the thumb of this population, which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its habits'.

Bardot's fourth husband was a former adviser to France's far-Right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. I suppose you could laugh off her outspokenness – like a batty old granny. Bardot isn't incredibly fond of gays ('fairground freaks') and she accuses hunters with their guns of being drunkards and primitives.

Major pornographic website blocks NC access days before new law takes effect

A new law meant to protect children will require adult websites to verify users' ages, starting next week. What that looks like in practice remains to be seen, but one major site has already blocked access.

https://www.wral.com/story/major-pornographic-website-blocks-nc-access-days-before-new-law-takes-effect/21213582

One of the world's largest pornography websites blocked access to at least some North Carolina users Thursday ahead of a new state law taking effect that will require adult websites to verify user ages.

Instead of complying or providing its usual content, Pornhub redirected North Carolina users to a message asking them to reach out to lawmakers and oppose the new law.

The website has blocked access in a number of states that passed similar laws, including Montana, where new law was also set to take effect Monday.

"Mandating age verification without proper enforcement gives platforms the opportunity to choose whether or not to comply," the site said in its message to North Carolina users. "As we’ve seen in other states, this just drives traffic to sites with far fewer safety measures in place."

North Carolina lawmakers passed the new law in September with an effective date of Jan. 1. The bill doesn’t spell out how websites should verify user ages, beyond saying they must use either a "commercially available database" for age and identify verification or "another commercially reasonable method.”

A 2023 survey found more than half of teenagers reported seeing online pornography by the time they were 13.

“It's a problem," said state Sen. Amy Galey, who pushed for the new law. "And it can’t just be up to the parent. We have to help the parents.”

Beyond Pornhub's decision, it remains to be seen what the law will look like in practice. Some age verification software asks users to hold their drivers license up to a web camera so it can be compared to a live image of their face.

“Everybody sort of makes their own choices," said Mike Stabile, spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition, a pornography industry trade group. "Some sites will block the state entirely. Most will probably ignore the regulations. And there may be some who engage in age verification, but that hasn’t been the case in most states.”

Law enforcement isn’t expected to police sites. Instead the bill set up a process for parents whose minor children are able to access pornography to sue providers.

Louisiana was the first to pass this sort of law, in 2022, and sites saw traffic drop between 80% and 95%, according to the Free Speech Coalition. People tend to simply look for a non-compliant site, visiting darker corners of the internet and sites that are hard to hold accountable because they’re based outside the United States, Stabile said.

North Carolina's law forbids website owners and their vendors from retaining customers' identifying information, but Stabile said users aren't willing to take a risk. Lawsuits have been filed over these laws in at least three other states, though as of Thursday North Carolina had not joined that list.

“We’re looking at, obviously as laws go into effect, what makes sense to challenge,” Stabile said. “The general idea is that all of these laws will be challenged.”

Pornhub said in its statement that it supports laws that require age verification on devices, as opposed at individual websites. Galey, R-Alamance, said she’s “willing to work with anybody to improve the law and to make it better target what we want to do, which is protect children.” She also said it’s “a little challenging to think that this industry is some kind of great player with clean hands.”

Seven other states have passed an age verification law, according to the National Decency Coalition. A similar bill has been introduced in nine other states, according to the Decency Coalition’s count.

North Carolina’s law was was tacked into an unrelated bill that added a computer science course to North Carolina’s graduation requirements. The full measure – House Bill 8 – passed with wide and bipartisan support.

The new law uses long-standing legal definitions of obscenity to identify prohibited material. Galey said the law wasn’t crafted to go after social media sites, where users often post pictures of themselves scantily clad.

“We’re not going after the risqué and the R rated,” Galey said. “But we need some kind of firewall for hard core pornography.”

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/chocolate-makers-urged-to-get-lead-cadmium-out-of-products

Chocolate Makers Are Urged to Get Lead and Cadmium Out of Their Products

Consumer Reports delivered a petition with almost 55,000 signatures to the four companies with bars that CR tests found were high in those heavy metals. Only one responded.

Levels of heavy metals in dark chocolate are sometimes surprisingly high, as shown by a recent Consumer Reports investigation.

CR scientists recently tested 28 different dark chocolate bars and found lead and cadmium in all of them. For 23 of those bars, eating a serving of about an ounce a day could potentially expose people to an amount of lead or cadmium that may have a negative health impact over time, particularly for vulnerable populations like children or anyone who is pregnant. Five of the bars we tested exceeded that threshold for both lead and cadmium.

After CR’s article detailing these findings was published, its food policy team reached out to the four companies that manufacture those five bars and asked them to commit, by Valentine’s Day, to removing heavy metals from the products.

Almost 55,000 people signed a petition urging these four companies—Hershey’s (maker of Lily’s Extremely Dark Chocolate 85% Cocoa bar); Mondelez International (maker of Green & Black’s Organic Dark Chocolate 70% Cocoa bar); Trader Joe’s (maker of The Dark Chocolate Lover’s Chocolate 85% Cacao bar); and Theo Chocolate (maker of Organic Pure Dark Chocolate 70% cocoa bar and Organic Extra Dark Pure Dark Chocolate 85% Cocoa bar)—to address the problem.

By the deadline, only Trader Joe’s had responded.

“Trader Joe’s stands by the safety of its products,” Dawn Sestito, a partner at O’Melveny & Myers LLP, a law firm that serves as counsel for the company, wrote in a letter to CR. “It considers nothing to be more important than the health and safety of customers,” the letter said, adding, “of course Trader Joe’s takes this matter seriously—and in fact, has been working on it for years.”Trader Joe’s took issue with CR’s food safety experts using California’s maximum allowable dose levels (MADL) in its analysis. The company says that these levels are meant to create an “ample margin of safety,” meaning that it takes higher levels than these to definitively cause harm.

CR’s experts disagree. “Consistent consumption of a food that exceeds the MADL for lead or cadmium can compromise the safety margin,” says Tunde Akinleye, the CR food safety researcher who led the chocolate testing project. “And for lead, there is no exposure level for young children to which an adverse health effect has not been identified.”

Cadmium and lead can accumulate in the body, and the best way to protect public health against the long-term health effects of these metals is to reduce exposure, he says: “We believe that the MADLs are the most health-protective limits.”

Trader Joe’s also pointed to the fact that California created new levels specifically for metals in chocolate when chocolate manufacturers settled a lawsuit related to products exceeding the MADL as one part of the settlement.

The company’s response is “an example of how companies try to confuse consumers into believing a legal standard is the same as a public health standard,” says Brian Ronholm, CR’s director of food policy. “It’s important for these companies to address this problem because consistent, long-term exposure to even small amounts of heavy metals can be harmful.”

Akinleye notes that the levels agreed on in the lawsuit settlement are significantly higher than the MADL, and that “we do not believe or agree that changing the permissible level of lead or cadmium in a food mitigates the risks the food may pose to consumers.” And, he adds, “not only is it better to have heavy metals levels that are as low as possible in food, our tests show that it’s possible to make dark-chocolate bars that do not exceed the original MADL threshold.”

>Five of the 28 bars we tested—from Mast, Taza, Valrhona, and two from Ghiradhelli—were below that level for both metals. For that reason, CR continues to urge manufacturers to do more to get metals out of chocolate.

“As for the companies that have not responded, it’s disappointing that they chose not to respond because it could give the impression that they are not interested in addressing an important public health issue,” Ronholm says.

In the meantime, consumers can help protect themselves by choosing chocolates with lower levels of heavy metals and by thinking of chocolate as a treat. Someone who eats a serving a few times a week instead of every day is unlikely to be exposed to high levels of heavy metals from chocolate alone.

I eat chocolate daily (no sugar) - now is a good time to buy it 50%-75%

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