Topic: Tobacco

New Tennessee laws are in effect

July 7, 2009 |

Despite tight revenues, state finishes fiscal year on schedule, lawmakers save jobs, education programs. (See complete text below of newly published Public Chapters of the Tennessee Code Annotated.)

NASHVILLE – While several other states struggle to close out the fiscal year ending Wednesday, Tennessee has already published new laws passed during its recently completed legislative session.

“We didn’t have a $24 billion shortfall in revenue like the legislators in California are struggling with, but it was still a tight budget year in Tennessee,” Senator Lowe Finney of Jackson, incoming chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, said.

Still, we were able to protect our better schools program – pre-K in particular – and we can move ahead with projects that will put Tennesseans back to work.

That’s good for our families, our hometown economies and our state revenue. As more jobs begin to open up – thanks to projects like the West Tennessee industrial megasite – we can build a stable tomorrow for Tennesseans.

Among the laws now in effect:

• Increased energy efficiency is now required in state buildings and vehicles.
• Sex offenders are prohibited from being within 1,000 feet of certain places where children are likely to gather.
• Tennessee driver’s licenses now print birthdates larger to make them easier for retailers to read.
• Vending machines installed on state property after July 1 must use energy efficient lighting, and the new lighting must be installed on any that are repaired.

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Sections: Politics | No Comments

What were they thinking? An UZI in the hands of a child leads to tragedy

October 28, 2008 |

Even though this tragic story happened in New England, its subject gives parents, all those who work or connect with our children, and all those who see guns as a game rather than a weapon of war, something to think about. This could happen anywhere. This could happen here.

What were they thinking?

Every time I think I’ve heard it all, I find that I haven’t. This newest jolt came in the form tragedy as an eight-year-old Connecticut boy died Sunday afternoon while participating in a machine gun shoot. You read that right: a machine gun shoot. A game. A contest of sorts. Supervised by gun instructors. At a sportsman’s club. The child “lost control” of the 9 mm Micro Uzi machine gun he was shooting; the force of the gun caused it to travel up and back, resulting in a single fatal gunshot wound to the boy’s head even as his father was recording the event on camera. The boy’s father accompanied his son in the ambulance; the boy later died at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. Charles Bizilj, the father, is  director of emergency medicine at Johnson Memorial Hospital in Stafford, Connecticut.

I repeat: What were they thinking? «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: News, Opinion | 4 Comments

End of summer reflection; ‘Welcome Fall!’

By Beth Britton | September 1, 2008 |

Tobacco leaves ready to cure

Here in Montgomery County, our tiny community has a special signal of sorts they send out for the arrival of Autumn. I like to think of it like this:

About every mile and a half here in this area you will find a tobacco barn. Tobacco is the largest seasonal crop here, other than soybeans. So you figure the Farmers being outside all summer, working with the earth, would naturally be the first to sense the changing of the season. What these farmers here do is, about early September, they go into their tobacco barns and dig a little hole in the earth, start a small fire: the smoke rises up through the barn, through their tobacco crop that has been cut and is drying out, and travels up into the sky. Well, if you’ve ever seen a tobacco barn smoking you’d know you can smell it for miles before you see it! Then the next farmer on down the road receives the message, if you will, and does the same in his barn, and so on and so on. Before long, every area within a ten mile radius of this place is perfumed with the smell of cut tobacco. This smell is comparable to a pep rally bonfire, or a warm log on the fire in winter, only much richer. «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: Arts and Leisure, News, Politics | 1 Comment »

Singing Cowboy

By Bill Larson | February 4, 2007 |

There are over 8.5 million Americans including my own mother who are living with tobacco-related illnesses. With this in mind “The Truth” saddled up a horse, found a cowboy with a hole in his neck as a result of smoking, and asked him to sing a little ditty…

Part of the “Truth” anti-smoking ads, a singin’ cowboy rides through the streets of NYC, mechanically intoning a cowpoke song through his tracheotomy voicebox.

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Sections: News | No Comments

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