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Online vape retailers ignore rules meant to protect minors, UCSD study finds

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Online vape retailers ignore rules meant to protect minors, UCSD study finds

Public health researchers at UC San Diego tested whether 78 online retailers complied with federal and local rules on flavored vaping products. For most, the answer was no.

To try to keep young people from becoming addicted to tobacco, Congress took two steps in 2020 to keep minors from posing as adults to buy vaping products online: It barred e-cigarette sites from delivering through the U.S. Postal Service, and it required whatever delivery service they did use to check the recipient’s ID.

The state of California added its own twist that year, banning most flavored tobacco products. That prohibition did not explicitly cover online sales, but the city of San Diego is one of a number of local governments that adopted laws to eliminate any potential loophole.

Researchers at UC San Diego, Cal State San Marcos and Stanford decided to test how well those protections were working. If the results in San Diego are any indication, they’re hardly working at all.

The team lined up eight pairs of adults to try to buy flavored nicotine vaping products from 78 online retailers in October 2023. Each team made two identical orders from each retailer, with one buyer ordering from within the city of San Diego and the other in a different city in San Diego County with no explicit restrictions on online delivery of flavored vapes. In each order, they asked for delivery by the Postal Service if it was offered.

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Ideally, the researchers would have struck out completely — none of the 156 orders delivered, given the state’s ban on the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, and certainly none delivered by the Postal Service. Failing that, at least the purchasers within the city of San Diego should have come up empty, considering the city’s explicit ban on online sales of flavored vapes.

And even if those measures failed, at the very least, each buyer’s ID should have been checked upon delivery to make sure they weren’t minors.

The results of the study, which were published online Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., showed that more than two-thirds of the buyers successfully obtained flavored vapes, including almost 70% of the buyers in the city of San Diego — again, where those sales are explicitly prohibited, the study said.

Of the successful deliveries, 80% were handled by the Postal Service, which shouldn’t have carried any of them, the study found. An additional 9% came from services such as UPS and FedEx that have policies against delivering tobacco products.

Finally, 93% of the deliveries were completed with no attempt to verify the buyer’s age. In the vast majority of cases, the products were dropped off without any interaction between the buyer and the delivery person, according to the study. And in only one case did the delivery person scan the buyer’s ID, as required by federal law.

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“These results demonstrated pervasive nonadherence to age verification, shipping, and flavored tobacco restrictions among online tobacco retailers,” the study’s authors wrote.

The authors also acknowledged that they examined sales in just one county. But that county has some of the toughest anti-tobacco measures in the country.

Eric Leas, an assistant professor at UCSD and director of the Tobacco E-commerce Lab, said in a statement that online sales of e-cigarettes are the largest and fastest growing sector of the tobacco industry.

“There are longstanding surveillance systems in place that help implement laws at brick-and-mortar stores, but we do not have a system in place for online retailers,” Leas said, adding, “The results of this study highlight the need for greater oversight and enforcement of online tobacco retailers.”

A top official at the Vapor Technology Assn., a trade group for the e-cigarette industry, said the study raised “an academic issue that is interesting, but not particularly relevant to what is really happening in this country with respect to youth and vaping products.”

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Tony Abboud, the association’s executive director, said vaping by youth has plummeted since the age to purchase these products was raised to 21 in 2019. “The daily use of vaping products by youth is almost negligible,” he said, especially compared to other products that are banned for minors, such as alcohol and marijuana.

Abboud also said the UCSD research didn’t examine the age-verification systems used by online retailers. “There is no reason to believe youth are accessing vaping products online,” he said.

The latest survey by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration found that although vaping remains the most popular form of tobacco use among minors, the number of middle- and high-school students who said they were currently vaping dropped sharply from 2023 to 2024.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “No tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are safe, especially for children, teens, and young adults.”

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Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

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Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.

In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”

“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”

Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.

In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.

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The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.

“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.

Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.

The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.

Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.

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Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.

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Senate committee kills bill mandating insurance coverage for wildfire safe homes

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Senate committee kills bill mandating insurance coverage for wildfire safe homes

A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.

The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.

The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.

The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.

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It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.

However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.

Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.

Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.

“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.

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In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”

The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.

“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.

Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.

Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.

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Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.

The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.

But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.

Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.

A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.

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“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .

Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.

Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.

Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.

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How We Cover the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

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How We Cover the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.

But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.

While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.

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“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.

It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”

Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.

“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.

The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.

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Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.

Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”

Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.

Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.

“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”

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For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.

“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”

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