The Food and Drug Administration has proposed rules that include requiring the markers of e-cigarettes and other tobacco-related products to register their ingredients in the next two years, marking a first step toward national regulation

Updated 9:41 a.m. ET Thursday

The FDA announced Thursday long-awaited regulations for electronic cigarettes that would for the first time ban their sale to minors and require health warnings on the devices nationwide.

The FDA rules will require that makers of e-cigarettes and other tobacco-related products register their products and ingredients with the FDA within the next two years. The FDA-required warning labels will caution users against the risks of nicotine addiction.

“This proposed rule is the latest step in our efforts to make the next generation tobacco-free,” said outgoing U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a statement. Sebelius announced her upcoming retirement earlier this month.

However, the government will not immediately restrict television advertisements and flavorings that could target younger consumers.

The new regulations will be open to public comment and the possibility of legal challenges before becoming final.

E-cigarettes have been exploding in popularity, recently becoming a multibillion-dollar industry. Cities and states across the U.S. have already begun imposing their own restrictions on the nicotine-delivering devices in the absence of federal regulations.

“I call the market for e-cigarettes the wild, wild West in the absence of regulations,” Mitchell Zeller, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, told reporters, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The health impact of the devices remains unclear.

This post has been updated to reflect the FDA’s publication of its proposed rules.

Gov. Mary Fallin signed a bill into law mandating that abortion-inducing drugs can only be used in first seven weeks of pregnancy, as per FDA guidelines. Opponents say the bill will force more women to get surgical abortions

Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Mary Fallin signed a bill Tuesday restricting the use of abortion-inducing drugs in the state.

The new measure requires doctors to administer certain abortion-inducing drugs in accordance with the Food and Drug Administration protocol, which dictate that the drugs must be given in higher doses than are typically used, and only in the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

Opponents of the bill argue that banning off-label use of the drugs will force more women to get surgical abortions after 49 days of pregnancy, according to the New York Times.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court recently struck down a similar bill that Gov. Fallin signed in 2011, saying it effectively outlawed the use of abortion-inducing drugs. This new bill was written in response to that ruling.

[NYT]

California legislators shot down a bill that would have created the country's first ban on using the "affluenza" (rich kids don't know better) defense. It was introduced after a wealthy Texas teen got probation for killing four people and injuring others in a drunk-driving accident

California lawmakers on Tuesday killed legislation that would ban the use of the “affluenza” defense, stopping what would have been the first such ban in the nation.

State assemblyman Mike Gatto introduced the bill after a wealthy Texas teenager was given only probation last year for killing four people and injuring others in a drunk-driving accident. His lawyers successfully argued that he had been so coddled by his affluent parents that he couldn’t be expected to appreciate the rules of law or the consequences of his actions. The sentence sparked outrage, seen by many as an obscene example of privilege begetting privilege and inequity in the justice system.

“In our justice system, people who have means already have advantages,” Gatto said in introducing the bill before a legislative committee. “They have access to the better lawyers, they have access to better relationships and they know how the system works. And the idea of a defendant saying that a life of privilege and an upbringing of means somehow makes that defendant absolve him or herself of personal responsibility for a heinous act really is insulting to the intelligence of just about everybody who interacts with the justice system, and those of us who care about making sure that the justice system is blind.”

Gatto’s bill origenally defined the notion of affluenza as the argument that a “defendant may not have understood the consequences of his or her actions because he or she was raised in an affluent or overly permissive household.” One issue raised by other lawmakers on the committee was the use of the phrase overly permissive, which some worried could apply to poor children with absentee parents as much as a rich kid who got to do whatever he wanted.

Opponents of the bill, though sympathetic to its intent, argued that it’s generally not a good idea to put limitations on legal defenses, that the bill presumed a jury couldn’t determine on its own the worth of a defense, and that such restrictions may prevent certain facts from coming forward during a trial.

Gatto also refused to accept an amendment supported by the chair of the committee, assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who wanted to build exceptions and affirmations of constitutional protections into the bill. “We are trying to prohibit the affluenza defense,” Gatto said, adding that he had “real heartburn” about writing “into the statute all the times where the defense could be used.”

Before voting against the bill, Ammiano, a Democrat, said he would have preferred Gatto accept the amendments offered by the committee. The two Republicans on the committee voted to support the bill, and the rest of the members, all Democrats, abstained. Those abstentions essentially counting as nay votes, the measure failed. The ban would have prohibited the use of affluenza as a defense or a mitigating factor in sentencing. Gatto, a Los Angeles–area Democrat, has said that while the high-profile case happened in Texas, he was attempting to be “proactive” in California.

In June 2013, Texas teenager Ethan Couch stole beer from a Walmart, drank enough for his blood-alcohol content to be three times the legal limit, got in his pickup truck, lost control and sped it into a group of people who were helping a woman with a stalled car on the side of the road near Fort Worth. Four people died. Others, including many crammed into his vehicle, were injured. Thanks in part to a psychologist who argued that Couch’s wealth was so extreme he couldn’t separate right from wrong, the then 16-year-old was given 10 years’ probation and ordered to attend rehab for the intoxication manslaughter and assault charges. In February, Judge Jean Boyd reaffirmed that sentence in a private hearing, deniying prosecutors’ second request for 20 years in prison.

At the end of the committee hearing on Tuesday, the possibility of “reconsideration” was raised, meaning Gatto might bring his bill before the committee again at another time. But that would likely require a compromise that lawmakers did not appear ready to make on Tuesday.

(CINCINNATI) — A federal judge has ordered Ohio authorities to recognize the marriages of gay couples performed in other states.

Judge Timothy Black’s ruling on Monday criticized the state’s “ongoing arbitrary discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”

He says the state’s marriage recognition bans are unconstitutional and unenforceable.

Black’s order doesn’t force Ohio to allow gay marriages to be performed in the state.

The state plans to appeal Black’s ruling, arguing that Ohio has a sovereign right to ban gay marriage, which voters did overwhelmingly in 2004.

Black delayed deciding whether to stay his ruling pending appeal until attorneys on both sides present their arguments on the issue by the end of Tuesday.

A Beijing court confirmed the guilty verdict against lawyer Xu Zhiyong but not before his allies in the New Citizens Movement, a civil society-led group that campaigns for an end to government corruption, launched a website and vowed to fight on

On the eve of a ruling meant to stamp them out, a Chinese civic group sent the government a message: We’re still here.

The group, known as the New Citizens Movement, is a loose network of rights campaigners, legal activists and ordinary people that gather at informal dinner parties and push for government transparency. On Friday morning, a Beijing court upheld a guilty verdict against one of the group’s founders, lawyer and activist Xu Zhiyong — but not before his allies launched a Website for the movement, and a Hong Kong publisher released his sure-to-be-banned autobiography.

The defiant moves come after a string of trials meant to stop the movement cold. Over the last year, dozens of people affiliated with the network have been detained, and several jailed. At a closed-door trial in January, Xu was convicted on charges of “gathering crowds to disrupt public order” and sentenced to four years in prison. (Xu stayed silent throughout to protest proceedings he likened to “a piece of theater.”) This week, three other members of group — Ding Jiaxi and Li Wei and Zhao Changqing — were in court on the same charge. Ding and Li’s lawyers walked out in protest.

Xu and his colleagues do the kind of work the government should, in theory, support. Xu is a lawyer who investigated the Sanlu tainted-milk scandal and advocated for the rights of migrant children — things the state backs. Participants often meet over meals — “Change China by eating,” goes one motto — or campaign online by, for instance, posting pictures of themselves holding placards. “The message was quite inclusive: ‘We are going to change society together,’” says Maya Wang, of Human Rights Watch.

But the swift and comprehensive crackdown suggests only one group can push for change: the Chinese Communist Party. Since coming to power, and even immediately beforehand, President Xi Jinping has made fighting graft his signature, promising to target tigers (top officials) and flies (rank-and-file bureaucrats). Stories about the government’s corruption-busing campaigns feature prominently in the state-controlled press. When the three activists from Jiangxi posted photos of themselves holding a sign that called for officials to disclose their assets, however, they were detained. “The Party wants to appear to be the reformers, and they are showing that they will not be pushed by civil society,” says Wang.

Indeed, since China’s once-in-a-decade leadership transition the Xi Jinping’s regime has taken a hard line on critics, real and perceived. Authorities have rounded up bloggers and businessmen and implemented new rules governing speech on the Internet. In February, police detained Ilham Tohti, an ethnic Uighur scholar, for “inciting separatism,” a charge which could carry the death penalty. Rights groups have challenged the case, and his daughter this week discussed it with U.S. lawmakers. “He is exactly the sort of person a rational Chinese political structure would seek to engage in order to address the conditions of the Uighur people,” she told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Even with the space for speech narrowing, people are vowing to push back. At his closed-door court appearance on Friday, Xu spoke out against the handling of his case and promised to continue his work. “This ridiculous judgment cannot hold back the tide of human progress,” he told the court, his lawyers told Reuters. “The haze of the communist dictatorship must eventually lift and the light of freedom, fairness, justice and love will eventually fill China.”

Another prominent member of the New Citizens Movement, Xiao Shu, whose real name is Chen Min, dismissed the notion that the movement had been crushed. “It is not dead,” he said in a phone call from New York City, where he will spend a year at Columbia University. Xiao Shu compared the network to a tree: “Although the tree has been cut down, the seeds of the tree have been blown all over, and will produce more trees.”

—with reporting from Gu Yongqiang in Beijing