Law

The FDA is cracking down on a number of companies selling cannabidiol (CBD) products accompanied by unsubstantiated health claims. The latest target is a company called Curaleaf, which sells CBD products claimed to treat everything from cancer and Alzheimer’s, to anxiety and inflammation in dogs.

Are there any animal products in that veggie burger? To avoid confusion several states in America have passed new food labeling laws to make sure only animal products can be called meat, burgers or sausages. But a torrent of lawsuits are pushing back arguing these regulations are unconstitutional.

In one of the biggest studies of its kind to date, researchers have found no evidence to suggest the legalization of marijuana results in an increase in youth use. In fact, the study points to a strange potential decrease in teen marijuana use following the implementation of recreational use laws.

A unanimous vote by San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has effectively banned the sale of e-cigarettes in the city. Pending approval by the mayor, the prohibition is the first of its kind in the United States and will commence in early 2020.

Following last month’s historic ballot initiative in Denver that decriminalized psilocybin magic mushrooms, Oakland City Council has passed a resolution decriminalizing the adult use of all entheogenic plants, including magic mushrooms, cactus and any natural materials used to produce ayahuasca.

For well over a decade Huawei has been accused by governments around the world of working with Chinese national spy agencies. But what evidence is there to back up these serious claims, and what are the global repercussions of this new US Huawei ban recently announced by US President Donald Trump?​

Web forum OGUsers, popular with individuals who seek to access other people's online accounts, has itself been hacked, exposing the details and messages of some 113,000 users.

San Francisco has become the first city in the US to entirely ban local government and law enforcement uses of facial recognition technology. Although the ordinance is currently limited in its reach, it does strictly regulate the future deployment of all kinds of surveillance technology.

After a tense 24 hours of vote counting it seems a Denver city initiative to essentially decriminalize personal use and possession of psilocybin magic mushrooms has been passed. With a margin of less than 2,000 votes Denver becomes the first city in the United States pass such a measure.

The Australian government yesterday passed a bill allowing law enforcement agencies to compel tech companies to hand over encrypted messaging data. The legislation has been broadly condemned with suggestions it could not only harm the Australian tech industry, but undermine encryption worldwide.

As Canada becomes only the second country in the world to legalize recreational marijuana, the world is closely watching. The country will offer the grandest social experiment we have ever seen in drug legalization and may help answer some questions that have been divisively debated for decades.

In an expansive submission to the Australian Parliament, Apple has strongly condemned the government’s prospective anti-encryption legislation, arguing “this is no time to weaken encryption,” and calling the draft outline “extraordinarily broad” and “dangerously ambitious.”