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Over the past several months, seven people have died and nearly 400 others have gotten sick after using vape pens containing either nicotine or THC, the chemical in cannabis that makes you high. It’s causing a nationwide moral panic: Michigan’s governor enacted regulations that could result in 17-year-olds being hit with six-month jail sentences for every Juul pod in their possession. President Donald Trump has called for a similar nationwide ban on all flavored e-cigarettes. The demand for cannabis vapes has exploded over the past few years, and the illicit market has kept up with the trend. Consumers like vaping because it is more discreet and convenient than rolling a joint or carrying around a bong. Sellers like vapes too because the profit margins tend to be higher — especially on the illicit market, where sellers can save on costs by heavily diluting the THC oil. This haphazard “do something” approach ignores the fact that several of the people who got sick from vaping used pens filled with THC oil, which is already illegal in most states and under federal law. “Banning things — have we not learned that doesn’t curb use?” asked Jeffrey Raber, a chemist who founded a cannabis lab-testing facility in Los Angeles. Public health officials have not yet specified how many deaths and illnesses are linked to cannabis vape products — but there is only one known case involving a person who purchased a THC vape pen from a legal cannabis dispensary. Several of the other cases appear to involve people who bought illicit vapes, which are not subject to any regulations or testing.

California now has the most rigorous testing requirements: Every cannabis product sold in a licensed dispensary is tested for 66 types of pesticides, heavy metals, microbial pathogens and potency. A more effective way to prevent people from using marijuana vape pens that could kill them or make them sick would be to legalize weed so that consumers could have the option to buy regulated, lab-tested products. The public health benefit of legalizing and regulating marijuana is not hypothetical — it’s already happened in states that have done it. Back in 2017, before California’s testing requirements went into effect, around 70% of clients that submitted their product to cannabis-testing lab Cannasafe failed to meet standards the lab was using at the time, according to Antonio Frazier, the lab’s vice president of operations. These days, only 3-6% of Cannasafe’s clients fail to meet the state’s testing regulations. that’s because failing these testing requirements is a huge pain for cannabis companies. Products have to be quarantined. The manufacturer can either destroy the entire batch or submit a “corrective action plan” to the California Department of Public Health, which decides whether or not to approve the plan. “Our fail rate was much higher when no one was required to do it the right way,” Frazier said. “Without regulation, people aren’t going to do what’s right. This has been true in almost all industries.” Legalization and regulation isn’t a perfect solution. There is still a thriving illicit market in California for consumers who don’t want to pay dispensary prices or who live far away from licensed stores.

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At least 32 innocent people are dead. Two shooters were killed and one is in custody. A food festival in Gilroy, California. A busy Walmart in El Paso, Texas. A popular entertainment district in Dayton, Ohio. All three were sites of deadly mass shootings in the past week. The carnage never seems to end and it’s left many in America grappling with how to react, how to heal and how to change things for the better. Celebrities and other public figures echoed many of these sentiments on social media. ✔@lizzo Just got off the phone w/ fam in Dayton… it was a close call for them but that’s not the case for 9 other families, between this & the terrorist attack in El Paso & recent other shootings I feel completely helpless.. make noise & bring awareness.. vote.. don’t normalize this. ✔@jelani9 Fell asleep watching news reports about 20 people killed in #elpaso. Slept for four hours. Awoke to find that the news was talking about 9 killed #dayton Ohio — exactly half a night’s sleep between 29 lost lives. #America. ✔@RepSeanMaloney. Only a week after a mass shooting in California, we’re seeing yet another in Texas. This is an epidemic in America & it needs to end. I stand with El Paso & all the folks in America who want their government to act to keep families safe. ✔@ABC ABC NEWS SPECIAL REPORT: At least 18 people killed during mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. https://www.pscp.tv/w/cBXSgjM3Mzg2fDF5Tnhhdk5kT2dFS2oKcwFzowKEN_amw0qidkEBMzG6XH2T2j80jwV-cLyPGg== … ✔@blink182. Following today’s terrible tragedy in El Paso we are postponing our Sunday, August 4th show at the UTEP Don Haskins Arena in solidarity with the community. Please stay tuned for further updates coming soon. Sending our love to the entire community of El Paso. ✔@jfreewright From online terrorist manifesto described by El Paso Police Chief as the “nexus to a potential hate crime”: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas…I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” ✔@tim_cook I’m heartbroken about what’s happening in my country. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. It’s time for good people with different views to stop finger pointing and come together to address this violence for the good of our country.

At least nine people were killed and 27 injured in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday morning, officials said ― the second horrific slaughter in America in less than 24 hours. At least 22 people were killed in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, and police are investigating whether the suspected gunman, who was arrested at the scene, posted a racist manifesto on social media. The two shootings occurred less than a week after a gunman opened fire at a garlic festival in Northern California, killing three people, including two children. CNN’s Brooke Baldwin became visibly emotional as she processed last weekend’s mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “This has been a horrible week for America,” Baldwin said on Friday’s broadcast of “Newsroom.” “I never thought in my 20 years in journalism that I would get a call last Sunday morning from my boss asking me to go cover a mass shooting and I actually had to ask the question, ‘Which one?’” Baldwin recalled standing in Dayton for three days “on a street where blood was still splattered on the sidewalk” while co-anchoring with colleagues in El Paso. “That was a first for me,” she noted. “And I am worried that it might not be the last unless there is real change in Washington. Pope Francis, during his Sunday message and blessing at St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City in Italy, condemned the attacks on “defenseless people” in three U.S. states. He offered a “Hail Mary” prayer for the victims.

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Not a day goes by, either, without something in the news questioning the honesty of certain Americans or Russians. Now it seems that UFOs have been added to that media storm. Whenever a story comes out claiming to show real pictures or video of UFOs, hope springs eternal that maybe, just maybe, this might be that elusive smoking-gun evidence of alien technology. The image is from a collection called Pixabay, which offers many free stock photos to use for practically anything you’d like. This one shows our sun with a circular black dot, reportedly the planet Mercury, making a transit across our home star. Still, how would Pixabay feel if a Russian news site, Pravda.ru ― ironically, the name means “truth” ― took that same picture, added two more black dots, called them all UFOs and claimed this was, in fact, a picture captured by a NASA “STEREO spacecraft”? Wow.! Dateline:
Pravda.ru “NASA spacecraft captures three huge UFOs silhouetted against the Sun.” That deserves another “Wow!” If you compare the two images, it doesn’t take long to figure out that the sun in the two pictures is identical and all that Pravda.ru did was finish it off with two more “UFOs” and added the headline.

HuffPost reached out to a NASA spokesman to comment about all of this, “I’m not aware of this photo being released. Certainly not from NASA. There is no official or unofficial NASA posting of the image,” he said. NASA generally has well thought-out explanations for these types of “UFO” incursions into our solar system. For what it’s worth, this isn’t the first time that UFO charlatans have tried to convince the public that extraterrestrial ships are getting a little too close to our sun. For its part, Pravda.ru, which is separate from the Communist Party paper, has a history of extremely creative “journalism.” But the truth is out there. Just not Pravda.ru’s truth. Here’s a video http://youtube.com/channel/UCVTomc35agH1SM6kCKzwW_g of an alleged alien ship refueling, according to a source that is definitely not NASA.

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Mark Anthony Jones, 46, an unlicensed gun owner in Indiana is recovering in a hospital after accidentally shooting himself in the penis. Jones told police in Marion that he was taking a morning walk when the Hi-Point 9mm handgun he was carrying in his waistband “began to slip,” according to The Smoking Gun. According to a Marion Police Department news release on Facebook: Jones told police that when he “reached down to adjust” the unholstered gun, it discharged, shooting a bullet that “entered just above his penis and exited his scrotum.” Here is the Marion Police Department’s news release posted on Facebook:

Investigators have forwarded the case to the Grant County prosecuting attorney, the release notes that Jones doesn’t have a license to carry a handgun in Indiana. Investigators will determine if Jones will face any criminal charges for the self-inflicted wound.

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The whale, believed to be a calf, was found on Friday on the Brazilian island of Marajo. It was about 50 feet from the ocean, according to Newsweek. Researchers are having a whale of a time trying to figure out how the humpback whale wound up in the Amazon rain forest. Darlene Silva, a spokeswoman for Brazil’s Department of Health, Sanitation and Environment, told reporters the animal was found in a mangrove swamp only after researchers noticed vultures circling in the sky, according to the Express. A team from the Municipal Secretariat of Health, Sanitation and Environment found the carcass had no visible injuries and theorized that the whale died at sea. Biologists from the Bicho D’água Institute said the animal was about 26 feet long, though local officials said it was closer to 36 feet long, according to Storyful.

HuffPost reached out to the Bicho D’água Institute, which did not immediately respond but said in a Facebook post that the animal was “not as big as it looks in the images.” Renata Emin, the institute’s project leader, told reporters that researchers don’t know how the animal washed up so far from the beach, but they guessed that the creature was floating close to the shore and was carried inland by a storm, according to the Independent Researchers are collecting carcass samples, but Silva said there will be no attempts to remove it from its final resting spot.
“It’s very difficult to get there and there’s no way we can send a bulldozer because it would not get through,” she said, according to the Independent. “There is no way to remove it. To get there, we need to cross the swamp.”

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A man in Arlington, Texas, Steven Shrout, 25, who came in last in his Fantasy Football League had to do a very nutty thing as punishment, walk around a dog park covered head to toe in peanut butter. He had never played fantasy football before this year, but decided to join a league with some high school friends who had been playing together since 2009. according to WFAA-TV.. I just kind of jumped in, Shrout told the station. “It was my first year, and I didn’t do any kind of studying at first.” He was dogged by bad luck from the beginning when his top draft choice, Pittsburgh Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell, ended up sitting out the entire season. “I will [play fantasy football again], but probably not with the same guys,” Shrout told WFAA-TV with a laugh.

As a result, Shrout was given the choice of paying $250 to the winning person or perform a humiliating stunt. Shrout chose to do the stunt: ” No one believed me, they’re like, ‘No way is he going to do it,” Shrout told the station. But Shrout went through with it last Wednesday, hoping to get out of the sticky situation without a hitch. Standing in a Dallas dog park for 10 minutes clad only in a gold speedo and ― oh yeah! ― covered in peanut butter. “My strategy was to do it as fast as possible, and hope that not many people would see me,” Shrout said, according to Fox 8 News. “A lot of (the dog owners) just wondered what I was doing, and then when I said I lost a bet, they all laughed.” Although Shrout hoped to fulfill the terms of the bet without being seen too much, video of his experience has gone viral. You can see video of Shrout’s nutty adventure on YouTube.com. Still, Shrout told WFAA-TV laughly, I”ve learned a valuable lesson, be prepared to win or lose.

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The renowned theoretical physicists hosts “Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places,” a new short film available on the streaming service Curiosity Stream. The film follows Hawking around the universe as he “travels” in a computer-generated imagery spacecraft, giving the audience a peek into simulations of a black hole and Gliese 832c, an earth-like planet outside our solar system that scientists believe may be able to support life. Stephen Hawking has said it before and he’ll say it again: If extraterrestrials call, do not answer ― at least, not without careful consideration. And Gliese 832c isn’t even the closet possible second-Earth. In August, scientists announced that Proxima b, a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri — the nearest known star to our sun — has a temperature that could allow liquid water and is possibly habitable.

But if we ever get a signal from any of these places, Hawking warns that we shouldn’t be too eager to say hello. It’s an idea Hawking has expressed numerous times before — typically using human beings as an example of why we shouldn’t trust other intelligent life. “We should be wary of answering back,” he says in the film, according to USAToday. “Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus — that didn’t turn out so well.” “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.” It’s an idea Hawking has expressed numerous times before — typically using human beings as an example of why we shouldn’t trust other intelligent life. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he told The Times of London in 2010. Well, we’re convinced. NASA, we really hope you’re listening.

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Congress is on the verge of officially legalizing industrial hemp, with a measure that would create a legal distinction between the popular crop and other, intoxicating strains of marijuana. In a statement Thursday, leaders of the U.S. Senate and House agricultural committees reported that they’d reached a tentative agreement on the 2018 Farm Bill. Included in that larger piece of legislation are a number of provisions that would allow for the commercial cultivation, research and development of industrial hemp. A vote is expected by the end of the year. Under the new farm bill, hemp would be defined as any part of a marijuana plant with a THC concentration of 0.3 percent or less. Hemp is a variety of cannabis that contains very low amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the primary psychoactive compound in marijuana. While strains of cannabis with higher THC can get people high, hemp does not. There are a few remaining procedural hurdles that could threaten the legislation, but for the moment, the broader farm bill and its hemp measures look likely to pass, said Eric Steenstra, president of Vote Hemp, an advocacy group. “We’ve had five years and what we’ve seen is that there are a lot of people who are wanting to grow this crop..

It is typically grown for use in food, fuel, textiles and other applications. Since 1970, however, federal law has classified all cannabis plants as Schedule I substances, alongside drugs like heroin, LSD and a number of deadly synthetic opioids. “The hemp part of the bill has never really been in dispute,” said Steenstra. “I feel very optimistic about this.” In 2014, Congress passed a farm bill renewal that allowed for pilot programs and research on hemp. Over the past few years, hemp has begun to develop into its own thriving industry. Cultivation operations quickly sprouted up across the U.S., and in 2018, more than 3,500 licenses were issued in 23 states, leading to over 77,000 acres of hemp being planted, according to Vote Hemp. In 2015, just 9,650 acres of hemp had been planted in 15 states, Steenstra added. That explosive growth has helped convince skeptical lawmakers that the longstanding prohibition on hemp is no longer defensible. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), once a vocal opponent of hemp legalization, has since become a leading advocate for the initiative.

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“We had an unexpected visitor last night at the facility,” California Highway Patrol’s Donner Pass division wrote on Facebook on Nov. 18. Police in California got a surprise when a bear stood up on two legs, opened the door to a facility and then wandered in as if it worked there. The footage shows the bear step into the commercial vehicle enforcement facility in Truckee, near Lake Tahoe, then drop down to all fours. It wanders past some vending machines and out of camera range. A few moments later, the bear casually strolls back out. Two police officers follow.  “Our bear friend made a return visit,” the department wrote. On Saturday, the bear was back, caught on camera in the facility’s parking lot. Bears will seek to avoid confrontation with humans. If encountered, always leave them an escape route.

 Bears in the area are searching for food for up to 20 hours per day as they prepare for hibernation, the United States Forest Service noted on its website. Bears often hibernate in large hollow trees 40 to 50 feet off the ground. Because bears (and other animals) are attracted to anything edible or scented, improper storage of human food and other scented items and improper disposal of refuse is a leading cause of human-bear conflict. Store food in bear-proof canisters or bear-proof lockers if provided. Bears are omnivores. A typical wild bear diet consists of berries, plants, nuts, roots, honey, honeycomb, insects, larvae, carrion and small mammals. As winter approaches, bears will forage for food storing enough fat to sustain them through hibernation. Bears that are accustomed to people can become too bold and lose their fear of humans. To avoid this behavior, do not let bears become habituated to human sources of food. U.S. Forest Service
Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit
Forest Supervisor’s Office
35 College Drive
South Lake Tahoe, CA 96150

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Cannabis industry insiders are predicting a sales “high” as pot smokers stock up on supplies before the Thanksgiving holiday. Thursday is supposed to be all about turkey, but Wednesday is apparently all about THC. “We expect this year’s holiday week to be awesome since so many Americans are becoming more open to cannabis consumption across the USA, particularly in California since legalization in January.” “Last year, Eaze saw a 98 percent increase in deliveries on Green Wednesday compared to a typical Wednesday in 2017,” Shriavi told HuffPost. Shiran Shiravi, the director of consumer communications at Eaze, a company that delivers cannabis products in California, expects to handle nearly double the doobie deliveries of a typical Wednesday, based on past results. That spike comes with a risk of shortages in states like Massachusetts, which on Tuesday will become the first state east of the Mississippi where pot is legal, according to the Boston Globe. “Obviously there is an immense demand, and we’ve been preparing for a while to help meet this. Sam Barber of Cultivate, a dispensary in Leicester, told WCVB TV it’s possible that demand will initially outpace the supply. We can’t make any guarantees about how long our supplies will last.

Jessie Gibson, the co-founder and VP of Marketing for Greenery Map, a cannabis search engine and app, says shortages are a fact of life in his business for the short term. Some industry insiders say shortages and long lines at dispensaries are possible even in states like California where marijuana has been legally available since the first of the year.  “I think that the extent of the shortages will continue, but it will be market specific. Somewhere that is recently legal doesn’t have the same supply as let’s say California, but the demand will be very high. “We are seeing shortages every day these days as the interest continues to grow, and as cannabis sheds its stigma.” Others like Hannah Davis of Mammoth Distribution, which distributes cannabis products all over California, believes retailers are prepared for the lift in sales. “We expect sales to double this week, but we’re seeing our retailers stocking up so, hopefully, it’s not an issue,” she said. “I imagine that we will see these shortages for a number of years while the producers catch up with the ever-growing demand.” “I do expect people to make larger purchases to share with friends.” And The real question is, with a rise in cannabis sales for Thanksgiving, will we see a decrease in leftovers?”

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