Good Morning Humboldt County!
It’s a chilly morning and I have a pot of streaming hot coffee on, so c’mon in and grab a cup. I have a few stories to start your day. You might call them the “Good, Bad, and the Ugly!”
Activists call for boycott of Johnson & Johnson over chemicals in baby shampoo
Two chemicals considered harmful to babies remain in Johnson & Johnson's baby shampoo sold in the U.S. and some other countries, even though the company already makes versions without them, according to an international coalition of health and environmental groups. Now the coalition is urging consumers to boycott Johnson & Johnson baby products until the company agrees to remove the chemicals from its baby products sold around the world.
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has unsuccessfully been urging the world's largest health care company for 2 1/2 years to remove the trace amounts of potentially cancer-causing chemicals — dioxane and a substance called quaternium-15 that rele
ases formaldehyde — from Johnson's Baby Shampoo, one of its signature products.
Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.
Want to live longer? Get happy, study says
If you’re happy and you know it, maybe you really should clap your hands. That’s because being happy might make you live longer. In a study published today in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from University College, London found that happy people reduced their risk of premature death by as much 35 percent.
Unlike other “happiness” studies that rely on a participant’s long-term recall of emotional states, the researchers used a technique called Ecological Momentary Assessment, which gives a quick picture of what a person is feeling in real time. In this study, the nearly 4,000 participants, ages 52 to 79, were asked to rate their feelings of happiness or anxiety on a sliding scale four times over the course of one day, beginning when they woke up in the morning. The scientists then followed them for five years, recording the number of deaths during that time.
Time to walk on down the road…
isitors to this middle-class town of around 67,000 people, which attributes its mysticism to the region’s ancient Olmec roots, had for decades sought wizards to cast love spells and cure physical ailments. 
