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New Zealand Facing a Youth Vaping Crisis As Youth Targeted

New Zealand Facing a Youth Vaping Crisis As Youth Targeted

New Zealand is on track to achieve smoke-free status by 2025. This includes abstaining from cigarettes and tobacco, which is where vaping comes in. Long-term adult smokers regard it as a less dangerous alternative, but the downside is the exponential rise and accessibility of vaping to teenagers and, in some cases, younger children.

According to data released last year, the number of New Zealand youths who vape on a regular basis increased between 2019 and 2021.

The government has defended vaping, claiming that there is mounting evidence that it can help people stop smoking. However, it has recognised the dramatic increase in young vaping and has introduced new measures.

The new restrictions prohibit the sale of most disposable vapes, prohibit the establishment of new vape shops within 300m (900ft) of any schools, and require generic taste descriptions. However, there are no standards in place to govern the huge array of flavours themselves.

According to high school head Vaughan Couillault, vape pens have become a trend among pupils.

Vaughan Couillault, head of South Auckland’s Papatoetoe High School and president of the Secondary Principals’ Association of New Zealand, keeps a number of confiscated vape pens in his office.

“Strawberry ice cream,” one of the labels on a disposable vape that resembles red lipstick reads. “Pineapple ice” is another flavour that appears to be a bright yellow lighter. “‘Pineapple ice’ does not target someone who has been smoking for 30 years,” Mr. Couillault explained.

He has seen firsthand how schools have become the hub of vaping, most of it geared at children.

“It’s a lifestyle item.” They’ll keep their phone in one pocket and their vape in the other. It’s stylish. It appears to be modern. “Some brilliant work has been done in terms of product and marketing,” he remarked.

“However, it is not assisting young people. It may be helping individuals quit smoking, but far too many young people who would never have picked up or considered picking up a cigarette now have two or three vapes,” he added.

This is currently the preferred habit of millions of young people all over the world.

“At school, there are probably more teens who vape than do not, and they crowd the bathrooms,” Coco added. “And when the colourful vape juice flavours came out, that just got every kid on it.”

Marni Wilton noted that many vape shops have lately opened in her Auckland area near her sons’ schools.

“Whichever gates the kids come out of, there’s a vape shop,” she explained, pointing to an establishment about 60 metres from a primary school.

Vaping New Zealand

Marnie Wilton, co-founder of Vape Free Kids NZ, told the BBC, that the new laws do not go far enough to assist children. Ms Wilton, like many mothers, is concerned about the prevalence of vaping. She co-founded Vape Free Kids with other concerned parents.

“This absolutely does not go far enough to help our children,” Ms Wilton said of the new government laws.

“There are now over 7,500 vape shops in New Zealand.” The new laws have no effect on current stores. “So many are near our schools and playgrounds – they’re in those safe spaces,” she adds.

Australia has adopted a tough stance, moving to prohibit recreational vaping and restrict it to prescription only.

Ben Youdan, who has worked in tobacco control and lobbying for nearly 20 years in both the UK and New Zealand, believes that prohibiting vaping sends it to the underground market rather than getting young children off it.

“Whether you ban it or not, it’s a phenomenon that happens,” he remarked.
According to experts, the vaping industry is targeting young people with colourful vape pens and a variety of flavours.

Mr. Youdan is currently the director of Ash NZ, a lobbying organisation that advocates for a smoke-free New Zealand. He stated that when considering vaping, one should keep the overall picture in mind.

“There’s no doubt that tens of thousands of people switching from smoking to vaping have had a significant impact on our smoking rates.” In the previous two or three years, smoking rates in this area have dropped by a third. “It’s truly unprecedented,” he says.

Mr. Youdan stated that the “explosion of the vape market” was a byproduct of this.

“We’ve seen a lot of vape shops that are more concerned with’making money quick’ than with responsibly assisting adult smokers to quit smoking.” “We allowed it to happen because we were far too slow to regulate the vaping market,” he claimed.

He went on to say that while some teenagers have become vape-dependent and need to be treated, there is a wide range of teens who are also experimenting. “Not all kids are addicted,” he pointed out.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a compromise between parents and families who want to see fewer children vaping and governments that want to see fewer people smoking.

One thing is certain: what began as a substitute for cigarettes has now become its own problem.

Police Officer Demands 60K From Chinese Tourist for Vaping

Police Officer Demands 60K From Chinese Tourist for Vaping

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

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Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.

According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.

Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.

google

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.

Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.

Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.

To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.

On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.

Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

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Pixa Bay

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.

TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.

When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.

And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.

Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.

A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

google

Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.

But today, it feels more like reality.

Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.

Could we remember Google in the same way that we remember Yahoo or Ask Jeeves in decades? These next few years could be significant.

SOURCE | CNN

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2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

trump

Washington — Trump Media,  The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.

The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.

The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.

The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.

trump

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.

Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.

trump

Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.

The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.

musk trump

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.

The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.

He also welcomed back a vast list of previously banned users, including Trump, and endorsed him for the 2024 presidential election.

SOURCE | AP

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The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

Supreme Court

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.

The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.

Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.

This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.

In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.

The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.

This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.

The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.

In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.

According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.

Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.

The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.

For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.

Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.

As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.

As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.

The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.

SOURCE: AP

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