Tag: joe biden

Biden Administration To Propose Ban On Menthol Cigarettes

Joe Biden is set to announce a new ban that is going to have cigarette users furious.

This week the Biden administration is expected to propose a ban on menthol cigarettes because of the damage it apparently does to black communities, The Washington Post reported.

The Biden administration is expected to announce this week that it will propose a ban on menthol cigarettes, an action urgently sought by tobacco opponents and civil rights groups that say African Americans have been disproportionately hurt by the industry’s aggressive targeting of Black communities.

The administration also is poised to say it will seek to ban menthol and other flavors in mass-produced cigars, including small cigars popular with young people, according to administration officials familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss it publicly.

It could be years before such bans would take effect, but the administration’s announcement is likely to be hailed by antismoking organizations as a critical and long-overdue step in curbing tobacco use and improving public health. Despite sharp declines in smoking in recent years, tobacco use remains a leading source of illness and death in the United States and worldwide, especially among people of color.

Antismoking groups have been frustrated for years by Washington’s inaction on menthol cigarettes and have turned to states and localities to request bans, with mixed success. They became more optimistic about a possible federal ban in recent months amid President Biden’s repeated vows to reduce health disparities made glaringly obvious by the coronavirus pandemic, and efforts by the Black Lives Matter movement to focus on institutionalized racism.

“There is not an open question on whether menthol in cigarettes is harmful — the evidence is overwhelming and consistent,” director of commercial tobacco control programs at the Public Health Law Center at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minnesota said.

“The Biden administration doesn’t know how to solve every problem. But they know what to do here, and they can do it,” he said.

This month 10 groups sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra in which they asked for the Food and Drug Administration to begin the process of banning menthol cigarettes.

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Media Mistakes in the Biden Era: the Definitive List

A Politico article by with three bylines, EUGENE DANIELS, KRYSTAL CAMPOS and MICHAEL CADENHEAD, wrongly stated that Rep. Byron Donalds was “Florida’s first-ever Black Republican in Congress.”

In fact, he is third.

A correction added to the article didn’t explain how the basic research impacting the very premise of the article wasn’t done prior to publication.

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Big Tech Colluded With California Democrats To Censor Americans

Big Tech colluded with California Democrats to censor Americans posting about the 2020 election on social media, a new report from Judicial Watch states.

According to documents obtained by Judicial Watch, the California Secretary of State reportedly leveraged the state’s relationship with communications firm SKDK, which Judicial Watch noted “lists Biden for President as their top client of 2020,” to get videos and other social media posts the state deemed “misinformation” removed or flagged. Most of the time, the Big Tech companies lent ear to the “misinformation” concerns brought to them by the state and either removed the posts or applied contextual labels to them.

Not only did the Secretary of State receive “briefings” from SKDK cautioning the state about certain social media posts and YouTube videos that they deemed unacceptable, but the Office of Election Cybersecurity, which is housed under the Secretary of State, also kept a database of posts “coded by threat level” that the state eventually requested be forcibly removed by Big Tech companies. Of the 31 requests for removal, Silicon Valley giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google-owned YouTube either nixed or flagged 24. 

Judicial Watch was allegedly targeted in some of these purges by YouTube and Twitter which prompted the organization to inquire with the state.

“These new documents suggest a conspiracy against the First Amendment rights of Americans by the California Secretary of State, the Biden campaign operation, and Big Tech,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is ‘private’ – as the documents show collusion between a whole group of government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about election controversies.”

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‘It’s the biggest thing in the history of the internet’: Pentagon quietly transfers 175 million internet addresses worth $4BILLION to mysterious firm at shared workspace in Florida

A very strange thing happened on the internet the day President Joe Biden was sworn in. 

A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world´s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the U.S. Department of Defense.

That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses – about 4 percent the size of the entire current internet. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.

‘It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,’ said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company.

The sell off of Internet space sparked theories the Pentagon could be eventually responding to repeated demands to monitise its collections of millions of dormant web pages. 

But it now seems officials hope to place the pages on the open market in order to allow them to gather huge amounts of intelligence data about Internet users, including hostile actors.   

The military hopes to ‘assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,’ said a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, which is running the project. 

But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until September.

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Biden Recognizes Atrocities Against Armenians as Genocide

President Joe Biden has formally recognized that the systematic killings and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces in the early 20th century were “genocide” — using a term for the atrocities that his White House predecessors have avoided for decades over concerns of alienating Turkey.

With the acknowledgment, Biden followed through on a campaign promise he made a year ago Saturday — the annual commemoration of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day — to recognize that the events of 1915 to 1923 were a deliberate effort to wipe out Armenians.

While previous presidents have offered somber reflections of the dark moment in history via remembrance day proclamations, they have studiously avoided using the term genocide out of concern that it would complicate relations with Turkey — a NATO ally and important power in the Middle East.

But Biden campaigned on a promise to make human rights a central guidepost of his foreign policy. He argued when making the campaign pledge last year that failing to call the atrocities against the Armenian people a genocide would pave the way for future mass atrocities. An estimated 2 million Armenians were deported and 1.5 million were killed in the events known as Metz Yeghern.

“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said in a statement. “We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu immediately criticized Biden’s statement.

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White House COVID Team Struggles to Explain Why We Need Masks Outside

As the nation passes President Joe Biden’s ambitious goal of 200 million vaccinations in his first hundred days in office with more than a week to spare, and as the “dark winter” the president forewarned gives way to summer, more and more vaccinated Americans are itching to get back to some imitation of normalcy. And for many of them, “normal” looks like being able to go outside without wearing a mask.

But despite a growing scientific consensus that the risk of infection outdoors is negligible in most realistic settings, the White House’s COVID-19 task force has remained publicly adamant that the public keep wearing masks outside—at least for now.

“Let’s get to the 100 days,” Andy Slavitt, the White House’s senior advisor for COVID-19 response, told reporters on Monday when asked whether the president’s call for 100 days of mask-wearing might be reconsidered anytime soon. “You know one thing about President Biden: He follows the science, he listens to his scientists, and we’ve got 12 more days to go until we get there. So please mask up, everybody, because it does save lives.”

At this point, nearly all of us have thought it. It’s first thing in the morning or late in the evening. After a brutal winter and an unending March 2020, you’re enjoying a break from the inside of your home by taking a stroll outside, enjoying the increasingly tempting spring weather by walking your dog or sipping a “walktail.” Slowly, you realize two things: there’s hardly a person in sight, much less within six feet of you, and that you’re still, somehow, wearing a mask.

Twenty-six states require people to wear masks in public to one degree or another, as well as the District of Columbia, where the National Park Service has recently erected all-caps signs in public parks tut-tutting residents for gathering outside without masking up. But the public health consensus has shifted around how and where a person is most likely to contract the not-so-novel coronavirus—the days of spraying takeout pizza boxes with Everclear are mercifully behind us—and outdoor spread is extremely unlikely.

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How Biden’s climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH, cost $3.5K a year per person in taxes, force you to spend $55K on an electric car and ‘crush’ American jobs

President Joe Biden‘s ambitious plan to slash greenhouse emissions by 50 to 52 percent over the next decade could prompt sweeping changes that could affect how Americans eat, drive and heat their homes. 

Biden announced the goal to cut emissions by 2030, compared with 2005 levels, at the start of a two-day climate summit on Thursday. 

He vowed the plan, which would set the US on a path of a zero emissions economy by no later than 2050, would create jobs and boost economies. 

But he is yet to release any firm details on exactly how such a plan will affect the daily lives of ordinary Americans. 

He also hasn’t set out the price for reducing emissions.  

The plan immediately sparked criticism from Republicans and industry experts who argue it isn’t sustainable in the long run, will put jobs at risk and cause tax hikes for Americans.   

While Biden hasn’t released details on what life could look like for Americans, experts and recent studies have laid out what would need to change by 2030 to reach the goal. 

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“Hypocritical and Dangerous” – Texas AG Ken Paxton Sues Biden Admin For Releasing Covid-Infected Illegal Aliens Into US

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday sued the Biden Administration for releasing Covid-infected illegal aliens into the United States.

“President Biden’s outright disregard of the public health crisis in Texas by welcoming and encouraging mass gatherings of illegal aliens is hypocritical and dangerous. This reckless policy change stifles the reopening of the Texas economy at a time when businesses need it the most and when our children need to get back to in-person learning as soon as possible,” Paxton said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

“Instead of using the CDC’s authority to prevent the introduction of covered aliens into the United States during a pandemic, Defendants have chosen to take courses of action that have resulted in the release of tens of thousands of aliens into Texas and the United States,” the lawsuit says. “Absent this Court’s intervention, such releases will continue for the foreseeable future.”

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