Bhinneka News Online: Tuesday Morning Briefing: How Juul created a new generation of nicotine addicts

Tuesday, 5 November 2019

Tuesday Morning Briefing: How Juul created a new generation of nicotine addicts

Top Stories

While U.S. investigators have focused on whether Juul’s marketing targeted teens, a Reuters investigation finds that, from the startup’s earliest days, insiders debated concerns over more fundamental attributes of the product: its potency and addictiveness.

Testimony by two of the “three amigos” charged with running Ukraine policy for President Donald Trump will be made public, as Democratic-led congressional committees release more transcripts from their impeachment investigation.

The Trump administration said it filed paperwork to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the first formal step in a one-year process to exit the global pact to fight climate change. The move is part of a broader strategy by President Donald Trump to reduce red tape on American industry, but comes at a time scientists and many world governments urge rapid action to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.

Domestic governments and local actors engaged in online interference in efforts to influence 26 of 30 national elections studied by a democracy watchdog over the past year, according to a report released. Disinformation and propaganda were the most popular tools used, the group said in its annual report.

Gunmen have killed up to nine members of a U.S. Mormon family, believed to be mainly children, in the latest massacre to afflict Mexico, family members said. The victims belonged to the LeBaron family from a breakaway Mormon community that settled in the hills and plains of northern Mexico decades ago. Two relatives Alex and Julian LeBaron told Reuters nine people had died, though a government source only confirmed five.

World

The Chinese Communist Party said it would “perfect” the system for choosing the leader of Hong Kong after months of anti-government protests, as police in the ex-British colony fired water cannon to break up a Guy Fawkes-themed march.

A view from the bridge: Ali says he has seen more than 50 people killed in front of him since anti-government protests began in Iraq last month.
“The first one was shocking - he was someone I knew, and they shot him in the chest,” said Ali, in his early 20s and from Baghdad’s low-income Sadr City district. Since the start of October, more than 250 Iraqis have been killed protesting against a government they see as corrupt and beholden to foreign interests, according to eyewitnesses and medical and security sources.

'Mailbox 200': Hidden in a remote Central Asian gorge, thousands of tonnes of radioactive waste are one landslide away from contaminating the water supply for the whole Ferghana valley, home to millions of people, environmentalists say. Neglected for decades by the Soviet Union and then Kyrgyzstan, uranium ore dumps near the town of Mailuu-Suu must be urgently reinforced to prevent disaster, according to the European Commission and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development which are raising funds for the project.

Sascha Moellering witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate on Nov. 9, 1989. But it took about another 10 years for the border between the communist East and capitalist West to come down in his mind. His mother was watching television at home and saw images of people shaking fences at the border after Guenter Schabowski, a senior East German communist official, accidentally announced the opening of the wall at a news conference.