Tag: news

• The value of a bitcoin topped
  $1,000 at Mt. Gox for the first time today.
• To ease tension between China and other Asian nations over
  disputed ownership of some South China Seas Islands, the United
  States will be sending …
  Joe Biden.
• A judge has ordered a
  Sriracha chili sauce factory in California to stop whatever
  operations are causing neighbors to complain about the smell, but
  stopped short of ordering the whole thing shut down.
• A British couple has lost its fight with the UK Supreme Court
  to
  deny a room to a gay couple at their bed and breakfast because
  of their religious objections to sex outside of marriage. They were
  ordered to pay damages.
• Three have been killed in Sao Paoli, Brazil, after a
  crane collapsed at one of the stadiums being built for next
  summer’s World Cup.
• A Democratic Colorado state senator targeted for recall over
  her vote for the passage of gun control laws has
  announced her resignation. If she fought the recall and lost,
  Democrats would have lost control of the state senate. This method
  will allow Democrats to choose her replacement until the next
  election.

Get Reason.com and Reason 24/7
content widgets for your
websites.

Follow us on Facebook
and Twitter,
and don’t forget to sign
up for Reason’s daily updates for more
content.

J.D. Tuccille reviews Floating City: A Rogue
Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy.
The book is a memoir of sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh’s years
spent penetrating New York City’s vast underground economy, with an
emphasis on cocaine and sex. Black markets have always existed to
provide goods and services that people want and that governments
don’t want them to have, says Tuccille. Floating City is a
fascinating glimpse at just how adaptable and real those markets
are.

View this article.

On December 2, Vice President Joe
Biden will head to Asia. The news of the visit comes amid rising
tensions between China and Japan regarding sovereignty over a group
of small uninhabited islands. The ongoing dispute over the islands,
referred to in China as the Diaoyu Islands and in Japan as the
Senkaku Islands, recently intensified when China announced the
introduction of an air defense zone that covers the islands.
According the
BBC, the Chinese government has said that any planes within the
zone “must obey its rules or face “emergency defensive
measures.”

Since the introduction of the zone two unarmed American B-52
bombers have flown over the disputed islands. The
Chinese defense ministry has said that the planes were
monitored.

Commercial Japanese planes
defied the rules relating to the newly introduced zone,
ignoring Chinese authorities while flying through it.

The BBC has a map outlining the extent of the new Chinese
defense zone, shown below (the Chinese Defense Ministry and
the EIA are credited):

Yes, the islands that are the cause of all the recent fuss are
so small they cannot be seen on the map. Put together, the islands
have an area of less than three square miles. 

More from Reason.com on China here. 

It’s too soon to see if there’s
anything for Illinois taxpayers to be thankful about, but lawmakers
on both sides of the aisle in Democrat-controlled Illinois have
announced a deal to manage the state’s massive unfunded pension
liabilities.
From the Chicago Tribune:

Top Illinois legislators said today they’ve reached agreement on
a plan to deal with the state’s worst-in-the-nation unfunded public
pension liability and expect to vote on it next week.

Details of the measure were unclear today and its prospects of
passing remained  uncertain. But both Democratic and
Republican leaders said they agreed on a proposal, the first such
sign of progress in more than two years of discussions spurred by a
continued downgrading of the state’s credit rating.

The debate has centered on how to reduce costs while balancing
the legal protections to public employee retiree benefits laid out
in the state constitution. The public employee unions have
repeatedly threatened to challenge in court any pension proposal
that lacked their support, and they were quick to criticize today’s
announcement.

Though the Tribune doesn’t have full access of the
deal’s contents, here’s what they were told:

[Senate Republican leader Christine] Radogno said the proposal
would save about $160 billion and the goal is to fully fund the
pension system over the next 30 years.

The proposal would raise retirement ages, create an optional
401(k)-styled plan and scale back the cost-of-living increases.

Increasing the retirement age, now set at various levels based
on the type of work, would impact the youngest workers the most.
Younger workers could see up to five years added to their
retirement ages, Radogno said.

The cost-of-living adjustments would be altered “to be sure that
the lower-paid, longest-serving employees have the biggest
protection,” said Radogno.  It would be largely patterned
after a provision she pushed and was included in a bill that
Speaker Michael Madigan passed in the House.

Union officials, despite not knowing what’s in the full plan
yet, put out a statement that the proposal was unfair and
unconstitutional. Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn supports the plan.

There will be a special one-day session on Dec. 3 to vote on the
proposal. The Tribune notes that the date of the vote
comes the day after the filing deadline for the March 2014 primary.
Suggested, but not stated outright: Democrats will know if they’re
going to face union-funded primary challengers before they
vote.

Chicago is on its way to becoming the first major
U.S. city to ban electronic cigarette use in public and to place
other regulations on the product.

In December, the city council will vote on a proposal to amend
and expand a current tobacco ordinance. Backed by Mayor Rahm
Emanuel and aldermen Will Burns and Ed Burke, this measure would
ban the sale of e-cigarettes to minors, require retailers to gain a
license to sell e-cigarette products, force them to sell these
products behind the counter, and – despite the fact that
e-cigarettes contain no tobacco – apply the same public
prohibitions to them as tobacco products. The Chicago
Sun-Times
explains that this means “adults would be prohibited from that
smoking e-cigarettes in virtually all of indoor Chicago except
private homes and vehicles, hotel rooms designated for smoking and
at least 10 feet away from building entrances.” If it passes, the
ordinance will take effect in January 2014.

All of this, city officials assure, is aimed at protecting
children. Chicago Health Commissioner Dr. Bechara Choucair told the
Sun-Times that it’s not enough that “we’ve seen a decrease
[in youth smoking], then a plateau. We really need to break that
plateau.” Choucair hopes to stamp out youth use of both cigarettes
and e-cigarettes.

Erika Sward, vice president of the American Lung Association,

voiced approval for Chicago’s planned ban, saying, “We don’t
want to have people now exposed to e-cigarette second-hand
emissions until we know more about them.”

But can government officials actually convince people to stop
smoking cigarettes while also preventing them from utilizing
alternatives? Reason‘s Jacob Sullum has extensively
covered e-cigarette issues and has noted
that e-cigarettes are
not a gateway to tobacco use, rather, “because e-cigarettes
more closely simulate the experience of smoking than nicotine gum,
patches, or inhalers do, they may be more
effective in helping smokers quit.” Likewise, addressing
concerns about safety, he has
pointed out that “the health hazards of vaping pale beside
those of smoking,” so the decrease in tobacco use that has
coincided with the
rise of e-cigarette use in young people “might signal
successful harm reduction.”

Other cities considering e-cigarette restrictions include

New York City,
Oklahoma City, and
Beverly Hills.

ReasonTV’s Tracy Oppenheimer addressed a number of e-cigarette
issues in the video below: