Free Republic

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison claims to be the “People’s Lawyer.” But documents say he spoke at a lavish Hawaii retreat in June 2021 partially funded by companies he’s investigating, including Meta and Google. A 2021 retreat agenda of the Attorney General Alliance says Ellison participated in a lunch conversation at the Grand Wailea hotel with New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas about managing high-profile criminal matters. The AGA is a bipartisan group funded via corporate sponsorship tiers from $10,000 to $50,000, according to documents reviewed by The Center Square. A 2020 AGA sponsorship list obtained by The Center Square...

There’s something terrifying about a government so powerful that it can shut down your business overnight without even bothering to offer substantive arguments. Yet that’s what Food and Drug Administration bureaucrats just did to the e-cigarette company Juul. While Juul got a stay of execution from a court, the company is one of the many victims of the FDA’s counterproductive war on nicotine. Most of the other victims will be cigarette smokers.I have followed the issue for several years and there is no doubt in my mind that Juul is an effective way to transition away from smoking into alternative,...

A federal appeals court has agreed to halt the FDA's ban on Juul products thanks to a lawsuit filed by the e-cigarette manufacturer. Juul asked a federal court Friday to block a government order to stop selling its electronic cigarettes, and was told the application had succeeded. The news was first reported by Reuters, with further details on how long the ban on sales will be suspended for yet to emerge. The e-cigarette maker had earlier asked the court to pause what it calls an 'extraordinary and unlawful action' by the Food and Drug Administration that would require it to...

On Thursday, The Food and Drug Administration officially ordered all Juul electronic cigarettes to be removed from the United States market, the Associated Press reported. “Today’s action is further progress on the F.D.A.’s commitment to ensuring that all e-cigarette and electronic nicotine delivery system products currently being marketed to consumers meet our public health standards,” Dr. Robert M. Califf, FDA commissioner, said in a press release Thursday. “The agency has dedicated significant resources to review products from the companies that account for most of the U.S. market,” he added. “We recognize these make up a significant part of the available...

The Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that it will ban the sale of Juul e-cigarettes...On Tuesday, the agency said it plans to require tobacco companies to slash the nicotine content in cigarettes to minimally addictive or nonaddictive levels.

The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to order Juul Labs Inc. to take its e-cigarettes off the U.S. market, according to people familiar with the matter.The FDA could announce its decision as early as Wednesday, the people said. The marketing denial order would follow a nearly two-year review of data presented by the vaping company, which sought authorization for its tobacco- and menthol-flavored products to stay on the U.S. market.

Whether you like them or not, a lot of big businesses are sucking up to government in ways couched as being principled, but are really just attempts to make sure they maintain their dominance. Preemptively addressing an issue is one way, an effective way, to keep the government from crushing your business, but it’s also a way some companies are hoping to fend off further scrutiny from legislators. This week we saw two examples: one from Facebook and the other from Juul.In one case, Facebook is pretending to be pro-free speech, and in the other, Juul is pretending to care...

uul Labs has agreed to stop advertising its popular e-cigarettes in the United States and announced that its chief executive officer is stepping down as state and federal regulators examine hundreds of cases of people who are sick from what appears to be a vaping-related lung disease. The company also said in a Wednesday statement that it will not push back on a Trump administration plan to pull flavored e-cigarettes from the market until the controversial products win approval from federal regulators. In the statement, Juul officials said the company will be "refraining from lobbying the administration on its draft...

Sen. Mitt Romney is pushing legislation to raise the federal legal age to buy tobacco to 21, an effort backed by the tobacco industry and that health advocates hope will curtail younger Americans from smoking. Romney, a Utah Republican, said the bill was the first step in addressing an avoidable health crisis of young Americans taking up e-cigarettes as well as traditional tobacco products. The legislation would raise the age to buy any tobacco product to 21 as well as allow the Health and Human Services Department to conduct undercover compliance checks, retail inspections and enforce the law with fines.

Martha Coakley did not exactly join ISIS. But she just might as well have, given the almost universal condemnation of the former Massachusetts attorney general from Democrats and progressives over her latest career move. To say that they were disappointed is to put it mildly. Coakley, 65, was hired by JUUL Labs, the leading retailer of those e-cigarettes that Maura Healey, 48, Coakley’s successor, is investigating for allegedly hooking schoolchildren on nicotine through vaping or “juuling.

The December solstice happens at the same instant for everyone, everywhere on Earth – and this year the solstice occurs tomorrow, on Thursday December 21st at 16:28 GMT. The winter solstice happens every year when the Sun reaches its most southerly declination of -23.5 degrees. In other words, it is when the North Pole is tilted farthest away from the Sun, delivering the fewest hours of sunlight of the year. The Sun is directly overhead of the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere during the December solstice and is closer to the horizon than at any other time in the year, meaning shorter...