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What do a pizza box, a polar bear and you have in common?All carry a kind of industrial toxicant called poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, that do two things: They make life convenient, and they also appear to increase the risk of cancer.

The scientists I interviewed say that they try to avoid these chemicals in their daily lives, but they’re pretty much unavoidable and now are found in animals all over the planet (including polar bears in Greenland and probably you and me)

PFASs are used to make nonstick frying pans, waterproof clothing, stain-resistant fabrics, fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, firefighting foam and thousands of other products. Many are unlabeled, so even chemists sometimes feel helpless.

31 October 2013 Last updated at 19:42 ET Share this page Email Print Share this page2.6KShareFacebookTwitter Syria chemical weapons equipment destroyed, says OPCW Advertisement $render("advert-post-script-load"); Jerry Smith, OPCW: "We have... observed all of the destruction activities" Continue reading the main story Syria conflict Arms destruction Chemical stockpile 'Please let it be over' Assad opponents Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says. This comes a day before the deadline set by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The weapons have been placed under seal, an OPCW spokesman said. Inspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas. Continue reading the main story Analysis Jonathan Marcus BBC diplomatic correspondent The achievement of this crucial initial target is an important moment for the chemical weapons destruction effort in Syria. The inspectors' first task was to move swiftly to prevent the government from producing any more chemical agent and to destroy facilities and equipment used for mixing agents and filling munitions. Production facilities will be closely monitored to ensure that there are no moves to repair them. The next deadline is mid-November, by which time the OPCW and the Syrians must agree a detailed plan to destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile. All sorts of questions are raised. Where will this destruction be carried out ? Who will provide the necessary equipment and so on? Western intelligence agencies will be studying Syria's declarations carefully. They will be eager to direct inspectors to additional locations if there are any grounds to believe that Damascus has been less than frank in its disclosures. The inspections were agreed between Russia and the US after Washington threatened to use force in Syria. Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad

Syria's declared equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed, the international watchdog says.

nspectors were sent to Syria following allegations, denied by the government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas.

A scientist who worked for the chemical industry nowshapes policy on hazardous chemicals.

Within theE.P.A., there is fear that public health is at risk.

For years, the Environmental Protection Agency has struggled to prevent an ingredient once used in stain-resistant carpets and nonstick pans from contaminating drinking water.

prominent human rights group accused the Syrian government Wednesday of using toxic chemicals during a recent surge in attacks involving barrel bombs on rebel-held areas in northern Syria.

Assad’s government has been accused by Western countries of using chemical weapons over the course of the four-year conflict, including an attack involving sarin gas in 2013 that killed hundreds of people in a suburb of the capital.

Regime opponents and ­activists allege that Assad’s forces have punished residents in rebel-controlled areas with barrages of the crude bombs, which are built from oil barrels or gas cylinders and can be filled with toxic chemicals such as chlorine gas

Norwegian and Danish ships waiting to remove Syria's chemical weapons are returning to port in Cyprus, signalling a key deadline will not be met.

Bad weather, shifting battle lines and road closures are being blamed for the delay.

The international mission is waiting for Syria's most dangerous chemicals to be transported to the port in Latak

It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Islamic State fired crude chemical weapons on US troops – Pentagon

Islamic State forces have fired crude chemical weapons at US troops in Iraq, the Pentagon has confirmed, a startling disclosure that US officials promptly downplayed as resulting in no deaths or injuries.

Mustard, a banned chemical weapon, is relatively easy to manufacture and has a low incidence of lethality in all but extreme doses, such as the bombardment that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein used on Kurdish civilians and Iranian soldiers in the 1980s and early 1990

They’re genetically the same, raised in the same lab and given the same food and chance to exercise. Yet the bottom one is svelte, while the other looks like, well, an American. The only difference is that the top one was exposed at birth to just one part per billion of an endocrine-disrupting chemical.

t one factor in the industrialized world’s obesity epidemic (along with Twinkies, soda and television) may be endocrine-disrupting chemicals. These chemicals are largely unregulated — they are in food, couches, machine receipts and shampoos — and a raft of new studies suggest that they can lead to the formation of more and larger fat cells.

obesity is an important national problem, partly responsible for soaring health care costs. Yet the chemical lobby, just like the tobacco industry before it, has impeded serious regulation and is even trying to block research.

Air emissions of toxic chemicals from industrial facilities saw an 8 percent decrease from 2014 to 2015, continuing their 10-year decline, according to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) National Analysis.

hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, toluene and mercury were among chemicals with significantly lower air releases at TRI-covered facilitie

This year’s report also includes a section highlighting the new Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which updated the Toxic Substances Control Act

Syria is likely to miss its year-end deadline for getting its most deadly chemical weapons out of the country despite an international effort to mobilize the resources needed to do so

They said that volatile security in Syria had “constrained planned movements” and that logistical problems and bad weather had contributed to the delay.

Once movement of the chemicals gets underway, the mission can be conducted quite quickly, but it appears that Syria has not yet started transporting any chemicals, according to observers familiar with the mission, who spoke on the condition they not be identified publicly because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had entered an expansive but largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

merican troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs

In the latest evidence of the pervasiveness of “forever chemicals,” a new study from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that these contaminants now taint nearly half of the nation’s tap water.

PFAS refers to more than 12,000 chemicals that persist in the environment and can build up in the body. They are widely used in industry and consumer products, ranging from clothing and cosmetics to fast-food wrappers and microwave popcorn bags.

Exposure to PFAS has been associated with severe health risks, including some kinds of cancers, developmental delays in children and reproductive effects in pregnant people,

The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.

Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.

Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.

Russia Blocks U.N. Move to Renew Syria Chemical Weapons Inquiry

Russia blocked an American-sponsored United Nations Security Council resolution on Tuesday that would extend the life of a panel investigating who has committed chemical weapons assaults in the Syria war, in a session punctuated by Cold War-era acrimony.

Both sides accused each other of cynicism and dishonesty in acidic exchanges before and after the vote on the resolution, which was vetoed by Russia using its power as a permanent Security Council member.

The report is a collaboration of nonprofit partner organizations, including the environmental advocacy groups Toxic-Free Future, WE ACT for Environmental Justice and Defend Our Health.

This year's Toxic Hall of Shame includes the well-known brands of Starbucks, Subway, Publix, Nordstrom, Ace Hardware, 7-Eleven, Sally Beauty and Restaurant Brands International (RBI), the parent company of Burger King, Popeyes and Tim Hortons, a popular Canadian fast-food chain.

Called "forever" chemicals, because they do not degrade in the environment, PFAS are so widespread that levels have been detected in the blood of 97% of Americans, according to a 2015 report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro, one of the busiest in Europe, will be the transfer point for hundreds of tons of the most deadly Syrian chemical weapon compounds en route to their neutralization at sea, the organization responsible for helping oversee the destruction of the arsenal announced on Thursday.

The first load of the most dangerous weapons was placed aboard a Danish vessel in the Syrian port of Latakia last week. Related Coverage U.N. Says Executions in Syria By Rebels May Be War Crimes JAN. 16, 2014 Donors Offer $2.4 Billion to Aid Syrian Civilians, but U.N. Says More Is NeededJAN. 15, 2014 video Video Feature: Watching Syria's War: Bombardment on a Damascus Suburb

Syria agreed to renounce their use and sign the global treaty that bans them last September after an international uproar over an Aug. 21 sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of people in a Damascus suburb. The Syrian government and the insurgents seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad accused each other of responsibility.

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.”

Germany is recognized as the first to use chemical weapons on a mass scale, on April 22, 1915, at Ypres, Belgium, where 6,000 British and French troops succumbed

once again emerged as an issue after the massacre in Syria last month, in which the United States says nearly 1,500 people, men, women and children, were killed, many as they slept.

The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.

The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Army’s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion and teams of chemical-defense and explosive ordnance disposal troops, officials and veterans of the units said

the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide Roundup, probably causes cancer in humans. Two insecticides, malathion and diazinon, were also classified as “probable” carcinogens by the agency

an announcement by the Food and Drug Administration that new breeds of genetically engineered potato and apple are safe to eat. Which they probably are, as are the genetically engineered papayas we’ve been eating for some time. In fact, to date there’s little credible evidence that any food grown with genetic engineering techniques is dangerous to human health

unlike Europeans, Canadians, Australians and others, we don’t subscribe to the precautionary principle, which maintains that it’s better to prevent damage than repair it.

Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op-ed, annotated and fact-checked

It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Putin here is implicitly defending Russia's right to use its veto to block the United Nations from any action on Syria, including simple press releases condemning the use of chemical weapons.