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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

McDonald's Taken to Task for Low Wages, "Toxic Taters"

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Friday, February 21, 2014   

SEATTLE – Fast-food giant McDonald's is getting it from all sides this week.

Some of its Seattle-area restaurants were targeted in a McPoverty boycott on Thursday, protesting low pay for workers.

And in the Midwest, a coalition of citizens and environmental groups has launched No Toxic Taters, a campaign to get McDonald's to do more to reduce pesticide use by its potato producers.

Under pressure from shareholders, McDonald's laid out a plan in 2009 to use fewer pesticides. But rural Minnesotan Norma Smith says nothing's changed so far at the spud farms near her home.

"They are still spraying the fields every five to seven days, all summer long,” she relates. “Still planting next to places where a lot of us live, when we have no choice about it."

McDonald's says 29 percent of the potatoes used for its fries and hash browns come from Washington farms.

In response to the No Toxic Taters campaign, the chain says it's working with its suppliers on more diligent use of all inputs, including pesticides.

Another person urging McDonald's to change its practices is Robert Shimek of the White Earth Reservation in central Minnesota.

Shimek says between pesticide drift and contaminated groundwater in his area, people have almost become accustomed to the negative effects.

"It's normal to be sick,” he says. “It's normal to have these peculiar types of cancer. It's normal to have immune system disorders in many of these communities, because it's just been going on for so long and crept in so gradually that people think it's a normal way of living."

Research in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives says skin, lung and intestinal irritations are linked to some types of pesticide drift, with the most acute reactions among children.

Shimek hopes the No Toxic Taters campaign will prompt people to become better educated about the consequences of pesticide use.



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