#the commonwealth hasn’t had a similar result in hundreds of years

[kantkid]

Italian Team Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli just won the sailing Prada Cup, defeating UK team Ineos with a record score of 7-1 🏆

Italy is officially the challenger of records for the 36th America’s Cup in New Zeland. Forza Luna Rossa!!!! 🇮🇹

[vinayv224]

Former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s 428 pardons are upsetting both Democrats and Republicans

Former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s 428 pardons are upsetting both Democrats and Republicans

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin speaking to President Donald Trump in 2018 during a roundtable on prison reform. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Before leaving office, Bevin pardoned a number of people incarcerated for violent crimes, a decision Democrats slammed and Mitch McConnell called “completely inappropriate.”

Before handing over power to Gov. Andy Beshear (D) last week, former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) used his final days in office to issue hundreds of pardons, including people convicted of sexual assault and murder.

The decision has drawn criticism from both the left and the right, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling the pardons “completely inappropriate” and Beshear calling the pardon of Dayton Jones, who was convicted of raping a child, “wrong.”

Overall, the former governor issued 428 pardons, including Jones; a man who was convicted of killing his parents at age 16; and Patrick Brian Baker, who was convicted of homicide and other crimes, and whose family has raised thousands of dollars to retire debt from Bevin’s 2015 gubernatorial campaign, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

On Twitter, Bevin pushed back against “suggestions that financial or political considerations played a part in the decision making process,” calling such allegations “both highly offensive and entirely false.” He also wrote he issued the pardons because “America is a nation that was established with an understanding and support for redemption and second chances.”

But party leaders in the state do not agree. McConnell, who has represented Kentucky in the US Senate since 1985, told media at a press conference following his decision to file for re-election, “I expect he had the power to do it, but looking at the examples of people who were incarcerated as a result of heinous crimes — no, I don’t approve of it.”

And Beshear told NPR’s Here & Now that although he would not comment on all of the pardons, he was particularly bothered by the pardoning of Jones, whose case he worked on during his time as Kentucky’s attorney general. He said Jones had committed one of the “worst crimes” his office had ever seen.

“It was an awful case where a young man in high school was attacked, was violated. It was filmed. It was sent out to different people at his school,” he said. “I fully disagree with that pardon. ... It is a shame. And it’s wrong.”

Republican state officials had similar worries. Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers has advocated for the US attorney in Kentucky to investigate the pardons, and Republican Commonwealth’s Attorney Jackie Steele called into question why Bevin didn’t pardon Baker’s co-conspirators in robbery and homicide, arguing that choice seemed to suggest the donations of Baker’s family may have played a role in Bevin’s calculus.

Some Democrats have joined Stivers’ call for an independent investigation, and Senate Minority Floor Leader Morgan McGarvey (D) told journalists “Gov. Bevin’s pardons show what is a shocking lack of judgment and potentially an abuse of our system of justice.”

Bevin obviously disagrees, writing on Twitter, “The criminal justice system is intended to find the proper balance between justice for the victims and rehabilitation for the offenders ... When it is not possible to guarantee more of either being accomplished by further incarceration, it is reasonable for a person to be considered for either a commutation or a pardon.”

Bevin’s pardons further muddle an already complex criminal justice legacy

What frustrates his critics, however, is that Bevin found that balance he referred to on Twitter himself, and sometimes did so by ignoring the concerns of judges, like in the case of his commutation of Paul Donel Hurt’s sentence. As Vox’s Anna North has explained, Hurt was convicted of sexually abusing his 6-year-old stepdaughter in 2001; several judges refused to overturn Hurt’s conviction despite his stepdaughter retracting her allegations due to what was believed to be a judge’s meddling in the case.

For Bevin, the pardons have become a controversial capstone to a complex criminal justice legacy.

In many ways, Bevin made criminal justice issues a priority during his governorship. In 2018, Bevin attended a White House prison reform roundtable and was present when President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act, which eliminates three-strike mandatory life sentencing minimums and gives some offenders the ability to petition courts for a review of their sentences, into law.

And during a gubernatorial debate this year, Bevin said the state’s prison population hasn’t increased while he has been governor. “We have expanded our prison population not one lick, I’ve made clear I’m not building more prisons,” he said.

As WFPL pointed out, that claim was not quite true, with there now being more people in Kentucky prisons than when Bevin took office in 2015, and more people incarcerated there than at any point in the state’s history. His efforts to reduce the number of incarcerated people — in part by reclassifying certain felonies as misdemeanors — failed.

He was more successful in expanding work release programs and in rolling back voting rights for the formerly incarcerated.

Beshear has reversed Bevin’s restrictions on voting, but will not be able to counteract the pardons. And those remain of deep concern to officials across party lines, although whether enough of a concern to merit an inquiry remains to be seen.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2rO5u8T from Blogger https://ift.tt/38Hox5m via IFTTT

[nancygduarteus]

Some E-Cigarette Flavors May Be More Harmful Than Others

In the 1990s, several employees of a Missouri popcorn factory began reporting mysterious symptoms. They were always tired, wheezing, and out of breath. After doctors found scar tissue inside the factory workers’ lungs, they diagnosed the workers with an irreversible lung disease: bronchiolitis obliterans, which would later be nicknamed “popcorn lung.” Its cause was traced back to the chemical behind popcorn’s buttery flavor.

While the FDA recognizes this chemical, diacetyl, as “generally safe to eat,” the case of the factory workers revealed that inhaling heated diacetyl particles day in and day out takes a harsh toll. What was safe to swallow wasn’t safe to inhale.

Years later, reports of diacetyl in e-cigarette vapors led to panicky headlines about vapers, too, being at risk of “popcorn lung.” Vaping advocates were quick to object, pointing out that spending years breathing in buttery-flavored factory air is very different from taking a few quick puffs from an e-cig. But the incident underscored the motley assortment of chemicals that go into different vape flavors. There can be hundreds of flavor additives in any given vape juice, with concentrations that range from trace amounts to large fractions of the whole e-liquid. Their toxicity profiles vary widely as well.

Many of these chemicals have never been tested on whether they’re safe to breathe in. And that makes vaping’s already unclear effects on health even murkier, because different flavors could be more or less dangerous. “Just because vanilla flavor or crème flavor is okay in your cookies doesn’t mean it’s okay when you heat it and then inhale it,” says Amanda Dickinson, a developmental biologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It seems that it’s a roll of the dice.”

A recent study coauthored by Dickinson investigated the effects of six different e-cig vapors on tadpoles, as a proxy test for how vaping while pregnant might affect human embryos. Some of the exposed tadpoles developed “clefts” in the bone behind the upper lip, somewhat similar to cleft palate in humans. These clefts only appeared in tadpoles exposed to two particular flavors out of six tested. When the researchers exposed tadpoles to nicotine-free versions of the same flavors, those tadpoles still developed clefts in the same ratios.

The flavors that correlated with the tadpoles’ facial defects weren’t “tobacco” and “menthol,” but rather flavors with fruit and cream overtones. These two flavors also had the most complex flavor descriptions: About 20 percent of tadpoles exposed to a flavor of “strawberry, almond, caramel, vanilla, biscuit, Vienna cream” and 70 percent of those exposed to a flavor of “cereal, berries, cream, citrus” developed clefts.

Dickinson and her colleagues pointed out that it may not be the fruity or creamy flavor additives per se, but the complexity of the flavor—or the number of chemical components in the vapor—that correlates with the cleft formation.

The tadpole study isn’t the first to note e-liquid flavors vary in toxicity. Robert Tarran, a cell biologist at University of North Carolina, has analyzed the composition of more than 100 e-liquids and tested their toxicity against human kidney cells in petri dishes by diluting the e-liquids and then slowly increasing their concentrations. The concentration needed to kill half the cells ranged from 5.997 percent for some flavors down to .002 percent for others, and could vary by as much as an order of magnitude between flavors mixed by the same vape shop. So far, Tarran hasn’t singled out any specific flavor ingredients as uniquely dangerous, but he has noticed a pattern. “The more chemicals there tended to be in the e-liquid, the more toxic it tended to be,” he says.

Tarran points out that these toxicity assays in kidney cells don’t necessarily predict overall health effects in humans, and that at this point, direct comparisons to the toxicity of conventional cigarettes aren’t feasible. It’s also possible that the effects of e-cigarettes in lungs could predispose people to a different set of ailments than tobacco smoke.

If a vaper wanted to avoid a particular chemical, they’d have a hard time figuring out which flavors contain certain chemicals and which ones don’t. E-cig manufacturers are required to file their full ingredients list for each e-liquid on the market with the FDA, and they list the amounts of three chemicals that make up the bulk of most e-liquids—nicotine, glycerin, and propylene glycol—on the label. But they stop short of listing out all the chemicals that contribute to flavor. “The commercial success of a product is in its formulation (that is, its taste) and this is preciously hidden by the manufacturer,” Emanuele Ferri, the scientific director of a Milan-based vaping R&D company called TRUSTiCERT, said in an email.

Ferri says that his team has studied toxicology profiles for more than 1,000 e-liquid ingredients and that no two chemicals’ effects are completely identical. They’ve posted toxicology data online from some e-liquids made by the company FlavourArt that tested as safe.

Still, this lack of transparency frustrates many researchers. “If you look at a bottle of e-liquid or the websites where they sell these things, the descriptions of the ingredients are like, ‘cookies,’” says Allyson Kennedy, a policy fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a coauthor on the tadpole paper. “You didn’t crush up cookies and put them in there. What are the chemicals that you used to create that flavor? That information I can’t seem to find anywhere.”

These initial studies are “just small steps,” says René Olivares-Navarrete, a bioengineering assistant professor at VCU and another coauthor on the tadpole study. As with Tarran’s cell lines, results in tadpoles and mice may or may not translate to humans. Olivares-Navarette says he hopes that e-cigarettes are as safe as vaping advocates claim, but first, “people need to have the information about what is possible.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/e-cigarette-flavors/546914/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

Some E-Cigarette Flavors May Be More Harmful Than Others

In the 1990s, several employees of a Missouri popcorn factory began reporting mysterious symptoms. They were always tired, wheezing, and out of breath. After doctors found scar tissue inside the factory workers’ lungs, they diagnosed the workers with an irreversible lung disease: bronchiolitis obliterans, which would later be nicknamed “popcorn lung.” Its cause was traced back to the chemical behind popcorn’s buttery flavor.

While the FDA recognizes this chemical, diacetyl, as “generally safe to eat,” the case of the factory workers revealed that inhaling heated diacetyl particles day in and day out takes a harsh toll. What was safe to swallow wasn’t safe to inhale.

Years later, reports of diacetyl in e-cigarette vapors led to panicky headlines about vapers, too, being at risk of “popcorn lung.” Vaping advocates were quick to object, pointing out that spending years breathing in buttery-flavored factory air is very different from taking a few quick puffs from an e-cig. But the incident underscored the motley assortment of chemicals that go into different vape flavors. There can be hundreds of flavor additives in any given vape juice, with concentrations that range from trace amounts to large fractions of the whole e-liquid. Their toxicity profiles vary widely as well.

Many of these chemicals have never been tested on whether they’re safe to breathe in. And that makes vaping’s already unclear effects on health even murkier, because different flavors could be more or less dangerous. “Just because vanilla flavor or crème flavor is okay in your cookies doesn’t mean it’s okay when you heat it and then inhale it,” says Amanda Dickinson, a developmental biologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It seems that it’s a roll of the dice.”

A recent study coauthored by Dickinson investigated the effects of six different e-cig vapors on tadpoles, as a proxy test for how vaping while pregnant might affect human embryos. Some of the exposed tadpoles developed “clefts” in the bone behind the upper lip, somewhat similar to cleft palate in humans. These clefts only appeared in tadpoles exposed to two particular flavors out of six tested. When the researchers exposed tadpoles to nicotine-free versions of the same flavors, those tadpoles still developed clefts in the same ratios.

The flavors that correlated with the tadpoles’ facial defects weren’t “tobacco” and “menthol,” but rather flavors with fruit and cream overtones. These two flavors also had the most complex flavor descriptions: About 20 percent of tadpoles exposed to a flavor of “strawberry, almond, caramel, vanilla, biscuit, Vienna cream” and 70 percent of those exposed to a flavor of “cereal, berries, cream, citrus” developed clefts.

Dickinson and her colleagues pointed out that it may not be the fruity or creamy flavor additives per se, but the complexity of the flavor—or the number of chemical components in the vapor—that correlates with the cleft formation.

The tadpole study isn’t the first to note e-liquid flavors vary in toxicity. Robert Tarran, a cell biologist at University of North Carolina, has analyzed the composition of more than 100 e-liquids and tested their toxicity against human kidney cells in petri dishes by diluting the e-liquids and then slowly increasing their concentrations. The concentration needed to kill half the cells ranged from 5.997 percent for some flavors down to .002 percent for others, and could vary by as much as an order of magnitude between flavors mixed by the same vape shop. So far, Tarran hasn’t singled out any specific flavor ingredients as uniquely dangerous, but he has noticed a pattern. “The more chemicals there tended to be in the e-liquid, the more toxic it tended to be,” he says.

Tarran points out that these toxicity assays in kidney cells don’t necessarily predict overall health effects in humans, and that at this point, direct comparisons to the toxicity of conventional cigarettes aren’t feasible. It’s also possible that the effects of e-cigarettes in lungs could predispose people to a different set of ailments than tobacco smoke.

If a vaper wanted to avoid a particular chemical, they’d have a hard time figuring out which flavors contain certain chemicals and which ones don’t. E-cig manufacturers are required to file their full ingredients list for each e-liquid on the market with the FDA, and they list the amounts of three chemicals that make up the bulk of most e-liquids—nicotine, glycerin, and propylene glycol—on the label. But they stop short of listing out all the chemicals that contribute to flavor. “The commercial success of a product is in its formulation (that is, its taste) and this is preciously hidden by the manufacturer,” Emanuele Ferri, the scientific director of a Milan-based vaping R&D company called TRUSTiCERT, said in an email.

Ferri says that his team has studied toxicology profiles for more than 1,000 e-liquid ingredients and that no two chemicals’ effects are completely identical. They’ve posted toxicology data online from some e-liquids made by the company FlavourArt that tested as safe.

Still, this lack of transparency frustrates many researchers. “If you look at a bottle of e-liquid or the websites where they sell these things, the descriptions of the ingredients are like, ‘cookies,’” says Allyson Kennedy, a policy fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a coauthor on the tadpole paper. “You didn’t crush up cookies and put them in there. What are the chemicals that you used to create that flavor? That information I can’t seem to find anywhere.”

These initial studies are “just small steps,” says René Olivares-Navarrete, a bioengineering assistant professor at VCU and another coauthor on the tadpole study. As with Tarran’s cell lines, results in tadpoles and mice may or may not translate to humans. Olivares-Navarette says he hopes that e-cigarettes are as safe as vaping advocates claim, but first, “people need to have the information about what is possible.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

[vinayv224]

Former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s 428 pardons are upsetting both Democrats and Republicans

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin speaking to President Donald Trump in 2018 during a roundtable on prison reform. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Before leaving office, Bevin pardoned a number of people incarcerated for violent crimes, a decision Democrats slammed and Mitch McConnell called “completely inappropriate.”

Before handing over power to Gov. Andy Beshear (D) last week, former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) used his final days in office to issue hundreds of pardons, including people convicted of sexual assault and murder.

The decision has drawn criticism from both the left and the right, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling the pardons “completely inappropriate” and Beshear calling the pardon of Dayton Jones, who was convicted of raping a child, “wrong.”

Overall, the former governor issued 428 pardons, including Jones; a man who was convicted of killing his parents at age 16; and Patrick Brian Baker, who was convicted of homicide and other crimes, and whose family has raised thousands of dollars to retire debt from Bevin’s 2015 gubernatorial campaign, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

On Twitter, Bevin pushed back against “suggestions that financial or political considerations played a part in the decision making process,” calling such allegations “both highly offensive and entirely false.” He also wrote he issued the pardons because “America is a nation that was established with an understanding and support for redemption and second chances.”

But party leaders in the state do not agree. McConnell, who has represented Kentucky in the US Senate since 1985, told media at a press conference following his decision to file for re-election, “I expect he had the power to do it, but looking at the examples of people who were incarcerated as a result of heinous crimes — no, I don’t approve of it.”

And Beshear told NPR’s Here & Now that although he would not comment on all of the pardons, he was particularly bothered by the pardoning of Jones, whose case he worked on during his time as Kentucky’s attorney general. He said Jones had committed one of the “worst crimes” his office had ever seen.

“It was an awful case where a young man in high school was attacked, was violated. It was filmed. It was sent out to different people at his school,” he said. “I fully disagree with that pardon. ... It is a shame. And it’s wrong.”

Republican state officials had similar worries. Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers has advocated for the US attorney in Kentucky to investigate the pardons, and Republican Commonwealth’s Attorney Jackie Steele called into question why Bevin didn’t pardon Baker’s co-conspirators in robbery and homicide, arguing that choice seemed to suggest the donations of Baker’s family may have played a role in Bevin’s calculus.

Some Democrats have joined Stivers’ call for an independent investigation, and Senate Minority Floor Leader Morgan McGarvey (D) told journalists “Gov. Bevin’s pardons show what is a shocking lack of judgment and potentially an abuse of our system of justice.”

Bevin obviously disagrees, writing on Twitter, “The criminal justice system is intended to find the proper balance between justice for the victims and rehabilitation for the offenders ... When it is not possible to guarantee more of either being accomplished by further incarceration, it is reasonable for a person to be considered for either a commutation or a pardon.”

Bevin’s pardons further muddle an already complex criminal justice legacy

What frustrates his critics, however, is that Bevin found that balance he referred to on Twitter himself, and sometimes did so by ignoring the concerns of judges, like in the case of his commutation of Paul Donel Hurt’s sentence. As Vox’s Anna North has explained, Hurt was convicted of sexually abusing his 6-year-old stepdaughter in 2001; several judges refused to overturn Hurt’s conviction despite his stepdaughter retracting her allegations due to what was believed to be a judge’s meddling in the case.

For Bevin, the pardons have become a controversial capstone to a complex criminal justice legacy.

In many ways, Bevin made criminal justice issues a priority during his governorship. In 2018, Bevin attended a White House prison reform roundtable and was present when President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act, which eliminates three-strike mandatory life sentencing minimums and gives some offenders the ability to petition courts for a review of their sentences, into law.

And during a gubernatorial debate this year, Bevin said the state’s prison population hasn’t increased while he has been governor. “We have expanded our prison population not one lick, I’ve made clear I’m not building more prisons,” he said.

As WFPL pointed out, that claim was not quite true, with there now being more people in Kentucky prisons than when Bevin took office in 2015, and more people incarcerated there than at any point in the state’s history. His efforts to reduce the number of incarcerated people — in part by reclassifying certain felonies as misdemeanors — failed.

He was more successful in expanding work release programs and in rolling back voting rights for the formerly incarcerated.

Beshear has reversed Bevin’s restrictions on voting, but will not be able to counteract the pardons. And those remain of deep concern to officials across party lines, although whether enough of a concern to merit an inquiry remains to be seen.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2rO5u8T

[vinayv224]

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin speaking to President Donald Trump in 2018 during a roundtable on prison reform. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Before leaving office, Bevin pardoned a number of people incarcerated for violent crimes, a decision Democrats slammed and Mitch McConnell called “completely inappropriate.”

Before handing over power to Gov. Andy Beshear (D) last week, former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) used his final days in office to issue hundreds of pardons, including people convicted of sexual assault and murder.

The decision has drawn criticism from both the left and the right, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling the pardons “completely inappropriate” and Beshear calling the pardon of Dayton Jones, who was convicted of raping a child, “wrong.”

Overall, the former governor issued 428 pardons, including Jones; a man who was convicted of killing his parents at age 16; and Patrick Brian Baker, who was convicted of homicide and other crimes, and whose family has raised thousands of dollars to retire debt from Bevin’s 2015 gubernatorial campaign, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

On Twitter, Bevin pushed back against “suggestions that financial or political considerations played a part in the decision making process,” calling such allegations “both highly offensive and entirely false.” He also wrote he issued the pardons because “America is a nation that was established with an understanding and support for redemption and second chances.”

But party leaders in the state do not agree. McConnell, who has represented Kentucky in the US Senate since 1985, told media at a press conference following his decision to file for re-election, “I expect he had the power to do it, but looking at the examples of people who were incarcerated as a result of heinous crimes — no, I don’t approve of it.”

And Beshear told NPR’s Here & Now that although he would not comment on all of the pardons, he was particularly bothered by the pardoning of Jones, whose case he worked on during his time as Kentucky’s attorney general. He said Jones had committed one of the “worst crimes” his office had ever seen.

“It was an awful case where a young man in high school was attacked, was violated. It was filmed. It was sent out to different people at his school,” he said. “I fully disagree with that pardon. ... It is a shame. And it’s wrong.”

Republican state officials had similar worries. Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers has advocated for the US attorney in Kentucky to investigate the pardons, and Republican Commonwealth’s Attorney Jackie Steele called into question why Bevin didn’t pardon Baker’s co-conspirators in robbery and homicide, arguing that choice seemed to suggest the donations of Baker’s family may have played a role in Bevin’s calculus.

Some Democrats have joined Stivers’ call for an independent investigation, and Senate Minority Floor Leader Morgan McGarvey (D) told journalists “Gov. Bevin’s pardons show what is a shocking lack of judgment and potentially an abuse of our system of justice.”

Bevin obviously disagrees, writing on Twitter, “The criminal justice system is intended to find the proper balance between justice for the victims and rehabilitation for the offenders ... When it is not possible to guarantee more of either being accomplished by further incarceration, it is reasonable for a person to be considered for either a commutation or a pardon.”

Bevin’s pardons further muddle an already complex criminal justice legacy

What frustrates his critics, however, is that Bevin found that balance he referred to on Twitter himself, and sometimes did so by ignoring the concerns of judges, like in the case of his commutation of Paul Donel Hurt’s sentence. As Vox’s Anna North has explained, Hurt was convicted of sexually abusing his 6-year-old stepdaughter in 2001; several judges refused to overturn Hurt’s conviction despite his stepdaughter retracting her allegations due to what was believed to be a judge’s meddling in the case.

For Bevin, the pardons have become a controversial capstone to a complex criminal justice legacy.

In many ways, Bevin made criminal justice issues a priority during his governorship. In 2018, Bevin attended a White House prison reform roundtable and was present when President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act, which eliminates three-strike mandatory life sentencing minimums and gives some offenders the ability to petition courts for a review of their sentences, into law.

And during a gubernatorial debate this year, Bevin said the state’s prison population hasn’t increased while he has been governor. “We have expanded our prison population not one lick, I’ve made clear I’m not building more prisons,” he said.

As WFPL pointed out, that claim was not quite true, with there now being more people in Kentucky prisons than when Bevin took office in 2015, and more people incarcerated there than at any point in the state’s history. His efforts to reduce the number of incarcerated people — in part by reclassifying certain felonies as misdemeanors — failed.

He was more successful in expanding work release programs and in rolling back voting rights for the formerly incarcerated.

Beshear has reversed Bevin’s restrictions on voting, but will not be able to counteract the pardons. And those remain of deep concern to officials across party lines, although whether enough of a concern to merit an inquiry remains to be seen.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2rO5u8T