U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross discusses the effects that tariffs on Chinese goods have on future trade talks.
‘I'm not going to worry about people that their only worry in life is to be re-elected,’ says Enrique Tarrio
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Lawmakers due to attend conservative conference where crowds booed hosts for asking guests to wear masks
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Holland's Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, the youngest author to win the International Booker Prize, stepped down from the role on Friday.
"I would bet my house. My personal house. Don't tell my wife, but I will bet it," McCarthy said on Saturday to a CPAC crowd.
After video of the surgeon went viral, a medical and licensing agency in California said it would investigate the circumstances.
"We were all very flattered," a residence staffer said. "Usually we meet them in the first days or first weeks, but never in the first minutes."
The Nebraska Republican Party on Saturday formally "rebuked" Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) for his vote to impeach former President Trump earlier this year, though it stopped short of a formal censure, CNN reports.Why it matters: Sasse is the latest among a slate of Republicans who have faced some sort of punishment from their state party apparatus after voting to impeach the former president. The senator responded statement Saturday, per the Omaha World-Herald, saying "most Nebraskans don't think politics should be about the weird worship of one dude."Stay on top of the latest market trends and economic insights with Axios Markets. Subscribe for freeThe bottom line: "Senator Sasse's condemnation of President Trump and his support for President Trump's impeachment have been liberally used multiple times by Democrats as justification for a truncated impeachment process that denied the President due process," said the resolution, according to CNN.The party expressed "deep disappointment and sadness with respect to the service of Senator Ben Sasse and calls for an immediate readjustment whereby he represents the people of Nebraska to Washington and not Washington to the people of Nebraska."Sasse was first rebuked by the party in 2016, but was reelected last fall with 63% of the vote, which is around 5 more points than Trump won in Nebraska.Go deeper ... Trump’s blunt weapon: State GOP leadersMore from Axios: Sign up to get the latest market trends with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was applauded at the conservative conference when she rebuked his Covid guidance.
Florida GOP Rep. Gaetz claimed at CPAC that the news media is more worried about Ted Cruz's vacation than migrant 'caravans going through Mexico.'
Justice Department attorneys on Saturday said they would appeal a Trump-appointed judge's ruling that the federal eviction moratorium is unlawful.
Trump, who lives at his private Mar-a-Lago club, has already stolen the show at CPAC and will deliver his own speech on the last day of the conference.
Trump is expected to use his Florida speech to talk about the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Senator Bill Cassidy points to seats lost in House and Senate during Trump presidency and says ‘if we idolize one person, we will lose’ Senator Bill Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump at his impeachment trial. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican senator, predicted on Sunday morning that Donald Trump will not be the party’s nominee for president in 2024, pointing to the number of seats lost by Republicans in the House and Senate over the four years Trump was in office. Cassidy was asked on CNN’s State of the Union show whether he would support Trump if the former president runs for another term in 2024, or if he would support him if he did run and won the Republican nomination to challenge Joe Biden. “That’s a theoretical that I don’t think will come to pass,” Cassidy said. He added: “I don’t mean to duck, but the truth is … I don’t think he’ll be our nominee.” Cassidy also warned his party against revolving around a single dominant figure. “If we idolize one person, we will lose,” he said. Sen. Bill Cassidy says he doesn’t think fmr. Pres. Trump will be the GOP nominee for president in 2024. "Over the last four years, we lost the House... the Senate and the presidency" which has not happened since Herbert Hoover. "If we idolize one person, we will lose" #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/AJvH2MkDSM— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) February 28, 2021 “Political campaigns are about winning,” the senator added. In the 2020 election, Trump and his party lost control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. “That has not happened in a single four years under a president since [former President] Herbert Hoover,” Cassidy said. Trump was then impeached for a historic second time, for inciting the 6 January deadly insurrection at the US Capitol after his supporters charged Congress and invaded both chambers after being riled up over the election result by Trump at a rally near the White House moments before. Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump at his impeachment trial. Trump also presided over management of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, claiming the virus would “just disappear”, deliberately playing down the full dangers early on and floating bogus treatments, while more than 500,000 perished, by far the highest death toll in the world. Asked about Trump’s strength in the GOP, as the rightwing conservative conference CPAC has lined up speaker after speaker lauding the former president over the last three days, with some repeating his lies that he really won the 2020 election, Cassidy rejected the notion that Trump controls the party. “CPAC is not the entirety of the Republican party,” he said. He argued that the GOP should focus on those voters who switched from Trump to Biden in the November election. “If we speak to those issues, to those families, to those individuals, that’s when we win,” he said.
Cuomo, who has been accused of sexual harassment by two former aides, has resisted calls to refer the matter directly to the state attorney general.
Charlotte Bennett told The New York Times she was repeatedly made to feel uncomfortable by Cuomo after she was hired in 2019 in the governor's office.
After the Daily Mail posted photos of a shirtless Jonah Hill, the actor clapped back at "public mockery of his body" and said it "doesn't phase" him.
Texas has one of the most restrictive medical marijuana laws in the country, with sales allowed only by prescription for a handful of conditions. That has not stopped Lukas Gilkey, chief executive of Hometown Hero CBD, based in Austin. His company sells joints, blunts, gummy bears, vaping devices and tinctures that offer a recreational high. In fact, business is booming online as well, where he sells to many people in other states with strict marijuana laws. But Gilkey said that he is no outlaw and that he is not selling marijuana, just a close relation. He is offering products with a chemical compound — Delta-8-THC — extracted from hemp. It is only slightly chemically different from Delta 9, which is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times And that small distinction, it turns out, may make a big difference in the eyes of the law. Under federal law, psychoactive Delta 9 is explicitly outlawed. But Delta-8-THC from hemp is not, a loophole that some entrepreneurs say allows them to sell it in many states where hemp possession is legal. The number of customers “coming into Delta 8 is staggering,” Gilkey said. “You have a drug that essentially gets you high but is fully legal,” he added. “The whole thing is comical.” The rise of Delta 8 is a case study in how industrious cannabis entrepreneurs are pulling apart hemp and marijuana to create myriad new product lines with different marketing angles. They are building brands from a variety of potencies, flavors and strains of THC, the intoxicating substance in cannabis, and of CBD, the nonintoxicating compound that is often sold as a health product. With Delta 8, entrepreneurs also believe they have found a way to take advantage of the country’s fractured and convoluted laws on recreational marijuana use. It is not quite that simple, though. Federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, are still considering their options for enforcement and regulation. “Dealing in any way with Delta-8-THC is not without significant legal risk,” said Alex Buscher, a Colorado lawyer who specializes in cannabis law. Still, experts in the cannabis industry said Delta 8 sales had indeed exploded. Delta 8 is “the fastest-growing segment” of products derived from hemp, said Ian Laird, chief financial officer of New Leaf Data Services, which tracks the hemp and cannabis markets. He estimated consumer sales of at least $10 million, adding, “Delta 8 has really come out of nowhere over the past year.” Marijuana and hemp are essentially the same plant, but marijuana has higher concentrations of Delta-9-THC — and, as a source of intoxication, it has been a main focus of entrepreneurs as well as state and federal lawmakers. Delta 8, if discussed at all, was an esoteric, less potent byproduct of both plants. That changed with the 2018 Farm Bill, an enormous piece of federal legislation that, among other things, legalized widespread hemp farming and distribution. The law also specifically allowed the sale of the plant’s byproducts; the only exception was Delta 9 with a high-enough level of THC to define it as marijuana. Because the legislation made no mention of Delta 8, entrepreneurs leapt into the void and began extracting and packaging it as a legal edible and smokable alternative. Precisely what kind of high Delta 8 produces depends on whom you ask. Some think of it as “marijuana light,” while others “are pitching it as pain relief with less psychoactivity,” said David Downs, senior content editor for Leafly.com, a popular source of news and information about cannabis. Either way, Delta 8 has become “extremely ascendant,” Downs said, reflecting what he calls “prohibition downfall interregnum,” where consumer demand and entrepreneurial activity are exploiting the holes in rapidly evolving and fractured law. “We’re getting reports that you can walk into a truck stop in prohibition states like Georgia where you’re looking at what looks like a cannabis bud in a jar,” Downs said. The bud is hemp sprayed with high-concentration Delta 8 oil. Joe Salome owns the Georgia Hemp Co., which in October started selling Delta 8 locally and shipping nationally — about 25 orders a day, he said. “It’s taken off tremendously,” Salome said. His website heralds Delta 8 as “very similar to its psychoactive brother THC,” giving users the same relief from stress and inflammation, “without the same anxiety-producing high that some can experience with THC.” Salome said that he did not need to buy an expensive state license to sell medical marijuana because he felt protected by the farm bill. “It’s all right there,” he said, explaining it is now legal to “sell all parts of the plant.” The legal landscape is contradictory at best. Many states are more permissive than the federal government, which under the Controlled Substances Act considers marijuana an illegal and highly dangerous drug. In 36 states, marijuana is legal for medicinal use. In 14 states, it is legal for recreational use. But in a flip, under the farm bill, the federal government opened the door for the sale of hemp products even in states that have not legalized the recreational use of marijuana. Only a few states, like Idaho, ban hemp altogether, but in others, entrepreneurs of Delta 8 are finding a receptive market. Lawyers for Gilkey believe the farm bill is on their side. “Delta 8, if it is derived from hemp or extracted from hemp, that is considered hemp,” said Andrea Steel, co-chair of the cannabis business group at Coats Rose, a Houston law firm. She emphasized that the legality also depends on whether Delta 9 exceeds legal limits. Steel noted that when making a Delta 8 product, it can be hard, if not impossible, to filter out all the Delta 9 from hemp. “Adding another wrinkle,” she said, “a lot of labs do not have the capability of delineating between Delta 8 and Delta 9.” Lisa Pittman, the other co-chair of the cannabis business group at Coats Rose, said that in her reading of the issue, the authors of the farm bill may not have contemplated the consequences of the law. Pittman said that the ultimate question of a product’s legality may be dependent on other factors, including how the Delta 8 is produced and sourced. Specifically, the lawyers said, the DEA’s rule on the issue seems to suggest that Delta 8 could be illegal if it is made “synthetically” rather than derived organically. There are currently lawsuits pending over interpretation of the DEA rule. Gilkey said he had paid upward of $50,000 in legal fees to make sure that he will not run afoul of the law. A veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, Gilkey worked in a counternarcotics unit on boats out of San Diego. He “saw some really tough stuff,” he said, and “wasn’t happy about the war on drugs.” He wound up running a business in Austin that sold e-liquid for vaping devices. Then in 2019, he started his current business focused on selling CBD. Late last spring, he said, he started getting calls from customers about Delta 8. “I said, please explain to me what that is,” he recalled. Gilkey, whose company supplies other retail shops around the country with products, saw a huge opportunity. After checking with the lawyers, he started full-scale packaging gummies and vape pens and other products using Delta 8 he said he got from a major hemp supplier. “It’s about to go mainstream,” he said. And it is just the beginning. “There’s a Delta 10 in the works,” Gilkey said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
Top political leaders promised support and tougher action against racially-motivated attacks on Asian Americans.
