Parents who are shopping for the right car booster seat for their kids have better (and safer) options to choose from than ever before, according to testing and new ratings issued by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

When it comes to car booster seat safety, finding the right fit is the name of the game. And after its most recent comprehensive study of 62 booster seat models, IIHS has named a record 31 seats as “Best Bets.” According to the group’s press release on the study, a booster seat qualifies as a “Best Bet” when it “correctly positions a vehicle safety belt on a typical 4 to 8 year-old in almost any car, minivan, or SUV.”

Since a vehicle’s seatbelts are designed for adults, a booster seat is needed to elevate the child into a position where the belt can properly restrain the child in case a car accident happens or a sudden stop is necessary. IIHS advises parents to make sure that the lap belt lies flat across a child’s upper legs, and that the shoulder belt comes down over the middle of the shoulder — not up close to the child’s neck, and not down closer to the upper arm.

Read the IIHS press release on the study, and check out the complete ratings.

The IIHS website has a lot of useful information on child passenger safety, including this Q&A.

Before the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 people and triggered the largest oil spill in history, BP’s main priority was cost-cutting, and the company let little things — like, say, effective risk assessment and minimization — fall by the wayside. That’s the conclusion reached after a federal investigation into the Gulf Oil spill. Findings are detailed in a comprehensive report issued earlier this week.

Other companies involved in the incident don’t escape blame, including Transocean (which owned the Deepwater Horizon rig) and Halliburton (which did cement work on a well that would later explode). But the report puts the majority of fault squarely on BP’s shoulders.

A few of the more scathing findings from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Resource Management and Enforcement (BOERME):

• In the weeks leading up to the blowout on April 20, the BP team made a series of operational decisions that reduced costs and increased risk.
• BP personnel in Houston did not transfer critical information to rig personnel…[T]his communication failure, which resulted in the rig crew being unaware of increasing operational risks, may have created a false sense of security among those on the rig.
• BP personnel were compensated and their performance reviewed, at least in part, based upon their abilities to control or reduce costs.
• An “operational” performance measure for BP drilling personnel was delivering a well with costs under the authorized expenditure amount. There was no comparable performance measure for occupational safety achievements.
• In the weeks leading up to April 20, the BP Macondo team made a series of operational decisions that reduced costs and increased risks.
• A number of BP decisions were not subjected to a formal risk assessment process. In addition, the Panel found no evidence indicating that, at the time of the blowout, BP had in place any policy or practice to assess whether safe operations were being compromised to achieve cost savings.

There’s already talk that the BOERME report — and its fairly damning conclusions as to BP’s liability for the Deepwater disaster — will add tens of billions to BP’s civil liability for the spill. And the federal government’s findings may even trigger federal criminal charges against BP.

Allstate this week released its seventh-annual Best Drivers Report, ranking U.S. cities where the best and worst drivers can be found.

For the second year in a row, residents of Fort Collins, Colorado drove away (very cautiously) with top honors as the city where drivers are least likely to experience a car accident. According to Allstate, the average Fort Collins driver will go about 14 years between car accidents.

After Fort Collins, the top five stays midwest-heavy (maybe it’s those wide open spaces):

1. Fort Collins, Colorado

2. Boise, Idaho

3. Lincoln, Nebraska

4. Colorado Springs, Colorado

5. Huntsville, Alabama

And the cities where you’re most likely to get into a car accident? Steer clear of the coasts, and if you’re driving our nation’s capital, have your car insurance agent on speed-dial. In Washington D.C., drivers can expect to get into a car accident once every 4.8 years. So, for one-term politicians, getting run out of town may not be all bad.

Here is Allstate’s bottom five:

189. Hartford, Connecticut

190. Newark, New Jersey

191. Glendale, California

192. Baltimore, Maryland

193. Washington, D.C.

Where does your city rank? Check out this press release from Allstate.com, which includes a link to the full report as a PDF file.

Lawyers for the Los Angeles Dodgers have thrown a brushback pitch in response to a lawsuit filed by the family of a man who suffered severe injuries after an attack at Dodger Stadium.

Bryan Stow, a 42 year-old paramedic from Santa Cruz, attended a Dodgers-Giants game at Dodger Stadium on the night of March 31, 2011. Stow, who was wearing Giants gear, was attacked in the parking lot after the game. He suffered head injuries and has been in a medically-induced coma since shortly after the attack. A recent lawsuit filed on behalf of Stow and his two children alleges nine separate claims against the Dodgers, including charges that the team failed to provide adequate security at the stadium.

But lawyers for the team and owner Frank McCourt argue that Stow’s two children shouldn’t be able to sue the team, in part because they weren’t at the stadium on the night of the incident. So (the team’s argument goes) the kids’ negligence-based claims against the team and their requests for loss of consortium and other damages should be dismissed.

The team is also trying to limit the scope of the lawsuit by asking the judge to reject a claim for punitive damages. And not only that, the Dodgers want the court to throw out the complaint’s references to consumption of alcohol (gasp!) at the stadium, McCourt’s “lavish lifestyle” (McCourt is a named defendant, and no stranger to the L.A. county court system these days), and the lawsuit’s characterization of the incident as “brutal and vicious,” according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Over 36 million pounds of ground turkey is being pulled from stores — and hopefully, from consumers’ fridges and freezers too — in one of the country’s largest-ever meat recalls.

The fresh and frozen ground turkey is produced by Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation, and affected products include well-known brand names like Honeysuckle and Shady Hill Farms.

The recalled turkey has been linked to dozens of salmonella cases. At least 76 people have been sickened, and one person has died. Federal safety officials are still trying to pinpoint the exact source of the problem, although right now attention is being focused on a Cargill production plant in Arkansas, a facility that has been shut down as part of the investigation.

To learn whether any of the recalled Cargill turkey products may be hanging around in your fridge or freezer, check out this full list of products affected by the turkey recall, from the USDA. And if it turns out you’ve got them, toss them.

Although the problem seems to be limited to Cargill’s Arkansas facility, the affected products have been distributed nationwide, and the list of people who have been sickened so far includes residents of at least 25 states.

To learn more about the health and legal issues related to food poisoning outbreaks and recalls like this one, check out Nolo’s articles Food Poisoning and Foodborne Illness and Lawsuits Involving Food Poisoning.

Kahr Arms, a Massachusetts-based firearms manufacturer, has agreed to pay almost $600,000 to the families of two shooting victims, in what’s being billed as the largest-ever settlement in a lawsuit linking a gun maker’s alleged negligence to a shooting incident.

The case is fairly unique (and therefore may not be exactly ripe for precedent-setting) because the company’s wrongdoing came via its failure to provide adequate security against theft at its manufacturing plant. According to the Worcester Telegram & Gazzette, those security lapses allowed a drug-addicted Kahr employee to steal handgun parts, assemble the gun, and then sell the weapon for cocaine. After the gun changed hands a second time in another drugs-for-guns transaction, it was used to shoot two people (one fatally) at a nightclub in Worcester, Massachusetts. Another strike against Kahr: the employee was hired despite the fact that he had a criminal record.

The settlement is significant not just for the high dollar value, but also because it came after enactment of a federal gun law (the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act) which gun makers have argued shields them from liability in most civil cases – this according to the Brady Campaign for Gun Violence, which was co-counsel in the Kahr lawsuit.

Dangerous driving habits like texting and talking on cell phones while driving can be “drastically reduced” when public awareness of the problem is increased and enforcement is ramped up, at least that’s the conclusion federal highway safety officials have reached based on two pilot programs that sought to kick distracted driving to the curb.

The pilot programs in Syracuse, New York and Hartford, Connecticut utilized an intensive media campaign and stepped up enforcement efforts to get drivers’ attention when it comes to distracted driving laws. The media campaign theme was “Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other” (somewhere Don Draper is shedding tears of jealousy into his Dewar’s).

The pilot programs were very effective, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which did some before-and-after investigation to conclude that in Syracuse, both handheld cell phone use and texting behind the wheel decreased by one-third. And in Hartford, the NHTSA saw a 57 percent decrease in drivers’ use of handheld phones, plus a decline of almost 75 percent when it came to drivers’ texting behind the wheel.

Those numbers are encouraging, especially in light of some more stark statistics on distracted driving: 20 percent of injury car accidents in 2009 involved reports of distracted driving, according to the NHTSA, and drivers who use hand-held devices are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Read the full report from NHTSA.gov here. To learn more about distracted driving laws, check out Nolo’s article Cell Phones, Texting, and Driving: State Laws.

The Fourth of July is here, and it’s probably best to leave fireworks to trained professionals, so you can focus on other things — hey, how long has that potato salad been sitting out? But every year more than a few Americans wonder what their state and local laws have to say on the purchase and use of fireworks (from sparklers to M-80s) because nothing says independence quite like flaunting the freedom to suffer third degree burns in your own garage. Luckily, there are a number of reputable websites that sum up each state’s fireworks laws quite nicely. Two of the better state-by-state collections come from the American Pyrotechnics Association and the National Council on Fireworks.

While these resources will give you the do’s and don’ts of buying and using fireworks at the state level, to get the most accurate and up-to-date understanding of fireworks laws where you live, you might want to start by contacting your local law enforcement agency or fire department (at the city, county, or town level). Local laws on fireworks may be stricter than those at the state level, so what’s legal in other parts of your state may actually be against the law where you live.

On the safety side of things, for everything you ever wanted to know about the risks of using fireworks (and let’s face it, a few horror stories can come in handy when you’re trying to educate kids) check out the 2010 Report on Fireworks-Related Deaths and Emergency Department-Treated Injuries, from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The U.S. Fire Administration offers these warnings and tips on fireworks. CPSC also reminds you that fireworks big and small can pose risks and provides this online fireworks safety portal.

New federal safety standards for cribs are in effect as of June 28, 2011. After dozens of high-profile crib recalls and infant injuries linked to defective crib hardware, the new crib safety rules — which include a ban on all drop-side cribs — seek to establish “a new generation of safer cribs” and provide clear guidelines for parents and caregivers.

The new federal crib requirements (detailed by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission here) can be broken down into five key provisions:
1. Drop-side cribs can no longer be manufactured, sold, or re-sold in the U.S. (parents and caregivers are instructed to either look into getting an immobilizer for a drop-side crib, or to disassemble and discard any drop-side cribs they own.)
2. Mattress supports must be stronger and more durable
3. Slats must be made of stronger wood to prevent breakage.
4. Crib hardware must be more durable, including incorporation of anti-loosening devices to keep hardware from coming loose and falling off.
5. Safety testing that is more rigorous, to better establish a crib’s durability over time.

If you’re in the market for a new crib, or if you’re wondering whether a crib you already have is in line with the new federal standards, you’ve probably got plenty of questions. Hopefully, CPSC has the answers. Check out The New Crib Standard: Questions and Answers and CPSC’s Crib Information Center for more information.

Portable pools have been capable of turning any ordinary backyard into a summertime paradise for generations. But a new safety study provides a somber reminder that water is water — whether it’s six inches in an inflatable pool or six feet in an in-ground model — so parents, caregivers, and kids need to take heed: “Every five days a child drowns in a portable pool during the summer in the U.S.”

The report, prepared by the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, looked at over 200 accidental drowning deaths of children under the age of 12, linked to different kinds of portable pools, from 2001 to 2009.  A press release from the Center quotes the senior author of the study, Dr. Gary A. Smith, on what may be the key disconnect when it comes to understanding the safety risks inherent in even the smallest portable pools: “Because portable pools are generally small, inexpensive and easy to use, parents often do not think about the potential dangers these pools present.” So precautions that have become standard protocol when it comes to larger in-ground pools — like the use of safety fences and gates surrounding the pool — may not even be considered for smaller, portable pools.

Portable pools run the gamut from $100 inflatable models (really more like small ponds) in which the water level doesn’t get more than a few inches deep, to larger and more sturdy pools that can hold thousands of gallons of water. What all portable pools seem to have in common, according to the study, is that under the right (or wrong) circumstances, they can pose the same risk of drowning and submersion injuries as larger in-ground and stationary pools. You can read a free online version of the study, Submersion Events in Portable Above-Ground Pools in the U.S., 2001-2009, from Pediatrics, the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

To learn more, check out this Press Release and Portable Pool Safety Fact Sheet from the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.