Articles by Paul Feldman

As the nation’s fleet of small recreational and commercial drones keeps soaring — the government projects nearly 3 million will be in the skies by 2022 — safety concerns are rising even as federal enforcement stalls. The Federal Aviation Administration has collected 6,117 reports of potentially unsafe use of drones from February, 2014 through April of this year, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.

In a closely watched election contest, San Francisco voters have upheld a first-in-the-nation ban on the sale of menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products, overwhelmingly rejecting an $11.6 million campaign by R.J. Reynolds to scuttle the law. San Francisco officials last June approved the ban but a petition drive funded by Reynolds, the maker of the top-selling menthol brand, Newport, forced the issue onto yesterday’s ballot.

Farmers in California, the nation’s top agricultural state, are applying near-record levels of pesticides despite the rising popularity of organic produce and concerns about the health of farmworkers and rural schoolchildren. The latest figures, released in April by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation and covering 2016, show that 209 million pounds of pesticide active ingredients were used in agriculture.

Dicamba, an herbicide sold by agribusiness giants Monsanto, BASF and DowDupont, doesn’t just kill weeds. Last year, according to a University of Missouri survey, dicamba damaged an estimated 3.6 million acres of soybeans across 25 states when it drifted from farms planted with seeds genetically engineered to resist the chemical onto regular soybean fields.

The increasing use of smartphones and recreational marijuana may be contributing to a surge in the numbers of pedestrians killed in traffic crashes, according to a new analysis. The report by the Governors Highway Safety Association estimates that pedestrian fatalities totaled about 6,000 in 2017, roughly the same as the year before, when the official count was 5,987.

The victims include a Bible college student in Iowa who was bicycling home from work, a 13-year-old Michigan boy riding in his older sister’s car and a Minnesota school bus driver picking up the morning newspaper in front of his home. All were killed in recent years by distracted drivers who had been texting or looking at their GPS. Yet none of the drivers responsible for those deaths spent more than a few days behind bars.

Amid a resurgence in U.S. traffic fatalities now taking roughly 100 lives a day, an advocacy group today issued a report card identifying states that do the most, and least, to improve highway safety. The ratings by Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety credited six states — California, Oregon, Washington, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island—with having the most protective road safety laws.

The era of driverless vehicles appears to be rapidly approaching, raising a bevy of urgent questions about how to prevent the emergence of new hazards on the nation’s roads. So, how much preparation have federal transportation authorities carried out to meet the challenge of the advent of self-driving cars and trucks? Not nearly enough, according to a new 44-page report by the Government Accountability Office, a Congressional watchdog agency.

Anti-smoking groups, frustrated by federal inaction on restricting menthol cigarettes, are taking matters into their own hands. In recent months, cities ranging from Oakland and Los Gatos, Calif., to Minneapolis and St. Paul have passed laws limiting the availability of menthol cigarettes, which health advocates say have a particular appeal to beginning smokers. St. Paul is the latest, voting this month to restrict sales to adult-only tobacco and liquor stores.

Scientists have known for decades that drinking water contaminated by fertilizer nitrates can pose a threat to infants by undermining the ability of their blood to carry oxygen. The condition, known as ‘blue baby syndrome,” led federal regulators to impose an environmental standard of no more than 10 parts per million, or ppm, for nitrates in public water supplies.