Massachusetts updates in category: Defective & Dangerous Products

Underscoring the continued hazards to children, created by poorly designed toys, Hasbro recalled its Easy Bake Oven. Nearly a million of the toys have been manufactured. The oven is intended for young children. It is a small plastic replica of a real oven, electrically powered, that heats up internally to as hot as 400 degrees farenheit! No surprise - children have been getting burned - and...

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The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), with the cooperation of General Electric, has issued a recall for washing machines manufactured by the company. The washing machines are sold under various brand names, including, G.E., Eterna, GE Profile, GE Monogram, Hotpoint, and Sears-Kenmore. The CPSC has received a dozen reports of fires causing property damage, emanating from...

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Toys with small, removable parts, continue to pose hazards to children. Last month, Mega Brands, Inc., the maker of "Magnetix" building sets, recalled nearly 4 million of the toys. The recall was an expansion of an original recall of some of the sets, in March 2006. The building sets include magnets that are easily removed, and easily swallowed. To date, at least one death and more than 25...

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Ford Motor Company recently settled a tragic case involving death of a 21 month old girl who was strangled by a rear-seat power window that she inadvertently activated. It turns out that the on-off switch could be activated with very little pressure, that the window rose quickly, and that there was no mechanism to stop the window if it encountered pressure. There was a wrinkle in the case, as is...

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Recent study findings by Consumer Reports have caused a flurry of news reports about the safety of infant and child car seats. The Consumer Reports tests found that most US-manufactured rear-facing car seats passed the standard U.S. car seat test, which is for a frontal collision tests at 30mph. It turns out that these tests are dangerously inadequate. The crash safety test for most cars is for...

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Elevators are often described as the safest means of travel. I don't know if that is true, though it may well be, given the untold numbers of times elevators go up and down across America on any given day. Nevertheless, elevators are machines and like all machines, they can and do fail. The reality of a free-falling elevator can be as frightening as the nightmare. The occupant is completely...

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