FDA flexes regulatory muscles, says vaping, e-cigs now under its control

The US Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that it has extended its authority and will now regulate electronic cigarettes, hookah tobacco, cigars, and other tobacco products under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.

The regulatory move, first proposed in 2014, is largely aimed at protecting kids from tobacco and nicotine products. The result is that e-cigs and the other products will now be subject to the same federal regulations as regular cigarettes. These regulations include some relatively uncontroversial rules such as a ban on selling e-cigs to minors (which some states have already done), requiring a photo ID to buy e-cigs, not selling e-cigs out of vending machines, and a ban on free e-cig samples.

Good. They should be.

#positivechange #ecigs

BREAKING: Supreme Court Rules Same-Sex Marriage To Be Law Of The Land Nationwide In Historic Ruling

Same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry, and states cannot take that right away from them, says the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling handed down moments ago. The decision requires all 50 states and all U.S. territories to recognize all legally-performed marriages from all jurisdictions, and to extend marriage to same-sex couples. In short, the court’s decision requires all states to treat marriages of same-sex couples exactly as they treat marriages of different-sex couples.

The United States now becomes one of about 21 countries that have extended marriage to same-sex couples.

#LGBT #politics #positivechange

Warner Bros scraps Dukes of Hazzard car toys over Confederate flag controversy

The Confederate flag may or may not be removed from government buildings in South Carolina, but the relic is definitely being removed from at least one southern icon. Warner Bros. today announced that it was halting production of toys and replicas of the General Lee, the car from the Dukes of Hazzard, which famously bore the flag on its roof. The company follows in the footsteps of retailers Amazon, Sears, eBay, and Walmart, all of whom elected to ban sales of the Confederate flag and its image this week after the racially motivated murders in Charleston on Sunday.

Wow, the world is going all out to rid itself of a symbol of hate.

I hadn’t really considered going this far with the General Lee being an every day part of my childhood and all…but I couldn’t imagine seeing the swastika flying without thinking of racism either.

#positivechange #confederateflag

General Mills to remove artificial colors, flavors from cereals

General Mills announced Monday it will remove all artificial colors and flavors from its cereals beginning with Trix, Cocoa Puffs and Reese’s Puffs by the end of 2015.

Golden Valley-based General Mills appears to be the first major U.S. cereal maker to systemically extract artificial colors. But it’s the latest of several big food companies to dump artificial colors and flavors.

As more consumers have become wary of processed foods, they’ve gravitated toward “clean” labels free of stuff that doesn’t look natural.

“Consumers increasingly want the ingredient list for their cereal to look like what they pull out of their pantry,” Jim Murphy, president of General Mills U.S. cereal business, told the Star Tribune. They don’t want labels chock-full of “colors with numbers and ingredients you can’t pronounce.”

That means Red 40, Yellow 6, Blue 1 and other artificial dyes common in some cereals — particularly kids cereal — will give way to colors made from spices and fruit and vegetable juice concentrates.

Murphy said that over 60 percent of General Mills cereals already have no artificial colors or flavors. By the end of 2016, the company expects 90 percent of its cereal portfolio to be free of them, with the remainder going natural in 2017.

This is big step in the right direction.

#foodies #positivechange

Solar-Powered Water Wheel Can Clean 50,000 Pounds of Baltimore’s Trash Per Day | BillMoyers.com

A large wheel has been strolling the Baltimore Inner Harbor this summer, doing its best to clean the trash that has littered a city landmark and tourist attraction.

It’s called the Inner Harbor Water Wheel, and though it moves slowly, it has the capability to collect 50,000 pounds of trash. The timing for John Kellett’s solar-powered creation is crucial — hands and crab nets simply can’t keep up with the growing amount of wrappers, cigarette butts, bottles and other debris carried from storm drains into the harbor.

“It looks sort of like a cross between a spaceship and a covered wagon and an old mill,” Kellett told NPR. “It’s pretty unique in its look, but it’s also doing a really good job getting this trash out of the water.”

This is the kinda thing that I wanna be a part of.

#videos #positivechange

The longest floating structure in world history is about to hit the ocean to fix a very big problem.

Don’t worry — it’s not another super yacht or party barge or some other contraption that will further pollute the ocean.

It’s called The Ocean Cleanup, and it’s a 1.2-mile-long system designed to collect and remove plastic from the ocean.

For two years, it will hang out in the ocean hopefully to begin undoing what we’ve done for decades: polluted the heck out of the water with plastic trash.

Might need to add some miles to that system with the amount of bottled water we drink.

#positivechange

Stop Drinking Bottled Water

Boycotting bottled water means you support the idea that public access to clean, safe water is not only a basic human right, but that it’s a goddamn technological triumph worth protecting. It means you believe that ensuring public access to this resource is the only way to guarantee it will be around in a few more years.

Clean, safe drinking water that flows freely out of our faucets is a feat of engineering that humans have been been perfecting for two millennia. It is a cornerstone of civilization. It is what our cities are built upon. And over the years the scientists and hydrologists and technicians who help get water to our houses have also become our environmental stewards, our infrastructural watchdogs, our urban visionaries. Drinking the water these people supply to our homes is the best possible way to protect future access to water worldwide.

Companies that package water in a single-use bottle are not concerned with the future. They are not invested in the long-term effects of climate change on an endangered watershed, nor are they working to prepare a megacity for an inevitable natural disaster. What they are interested in is their bottom line: Marketing a “healthy” product to compensate for the fact that people are buying less of their other products that are known to case obesity and diabetes—and selling it for at prices that are 240 to 10,000 times higher than what you pay for tap water.

Drinking municipal tap water means connecting yourself to your local water system, where the goals are to think holistically about the conservation of natural resources, replenish local aquifers, and build a resilient infrastructure to distribute water to the public.

Drinking bottled water means colluding with a corporation which is not required to release any public information about how it plans to cut costs, exploit workers, dig wells, or employ a fossil-fueled supply chain in its quest to get a bottle of overpriced water into your hands.

We drank so much bottled water when we were at Great America last Saturday. $4 for a 16 ounce bottle. They also searched my backpack for weapons and food items before we could enter.

#corporatedollars #foodies #positivechange