An Italian court cleared 28 company managers last week of charges ranging from manslaughter to environmental damage brought after more than 250 workers died or fell ill at plants producing a toxic chemical...Environmental groups reacted to the ruling with fury and some of the dead workers' relatives yelled "assassins" after the verdict was read out in a packed north Italian court room...the court ruled that the dead workers had contracted the illness before 1973, when the dangers of VCM [vinyl chloride monomer] were first known. It said fewer than 10 of them had died of liver cancer, which doctors link to exposure to VCM.