Women

With the passage of the California Safe Cosmetics Act of 2005, cosmetics companies will have to tell California state health officials about the ingredients in their products that might cause cancer. It would seem that the American Cancer Society would be a natural supporter of this kind of legislation, but grassroots cancer-prevention organizers found this not to be the case. "The bill’s proponents said that one of the new law’s biggest obstacles was the silence of the ACS, the most powerful cancer-research and cancer-lobbying organization in the world.

"From oral contraceptives to estrogen therapy, Barbara Seaman has been exposing pharmaceutical industry cover-ups of drug health risks for 30 years," writes Linda Nathan. In response, pharmaceutical companies have exerted influence to get her fired from three different women's magazines -- Ladies Home Journal, Family Circle, and Hadassah -- where she wrote columns criticizing their products.

The Feminist Majority Foundation has objected to the U.S. Department of State's decision to award part of a $10 million grant to an anti-feminist group, the Independent Women's Forum for "leadership training, democracy education and coalition building assistance" to women in Iraq. The IWF, which was created initially to defend Clarence Thomas against charges of sexual harassment during his U.S.

PR Week's Douglas Quenqua asks: "Of the three men honored by a women's-empowerment group in Los Angeles last week for their 'support and advocacy of the issues that are important to women,' how many... have publicly mused over his great fortune at getting to stick a woman's face in the toilet?" If you guessed just one - named Arnold Schwarzenegger - you're correct.