San Francisco Mayoral Candidate Says 4/20 Festival Violates the Law

Every year on April 20, thousands of people gather in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to hold a marijuana festival. A San Francisco mayoral candidate has expressed her firm stance against this festival. “This event is a violation of [the] Constitution,” Ellen Lee Zhou, said. “It’s a violation of people’s peace and people’s health.” Zhou, who is a social worker, said she has received complaints from many residents of San Francisco.

This year, now that recreational marijuana has become legal in San Francisco, over 19,000 people attended the event, which includes food trucks and music, and the smell of pot hovered in the air. Although cannabis is legal in California now, selling it at the festival is prohibited. However, that didn’t stop people from selling it in the park. Last year, some people ate fentanyl-laced marijuana edibles and had to be sent to the hospital to be treated with Narcan.

Zhou said that this event is not healthy, especially for families and children. “The 4/20 event in Golden Gate Park destroys family values and gives the wrong message to children and youth,” she said. Many people have misconceptions about the marijuana law. Zhou said that San Francisco passed a law allowing cannabis, but there are restrictions. “It’s for people who are sick, but it has to be indoors at home. Golden Gate Park is not indoors, and it is not at home, so it is illegal,” she said. She also said that taking marijuana is one of the reasons homeless people die on the street. “I work in downtown SF; I work with public health. Every morning, I pass by homeless people,” she said.

Zhou believes that more than 400 people died on the streets in the past two years according to the public health department. She said that the main causes are overdoses of illegal drugs, sickness, cold, and hunger. “Sixty percent of the homeless people have substance abuse. A lot of them start with cannabis,” she said. Substance abuse refers to the harmful or hazardous use of psychoactive substances, including alcohol and illicit drugs, according to the World Health Organization. Zhou is fighting against the cannabis industry in the city. She is especially opposed to having cannabis stores near schools, preschools, and daycare centers.

She is very worried about the future situation of cannabis stores in San Francisco. “Approximately two months ago, I went to the cannabis office in City Hall. Approximately 50 stores [were] in operation, and there are only 11 districts in San Francisco,” she said. “They have more than 300 applications on permits waiting; they have more than 400 applications and 300 permits pending, which means there will be more and more cannabis stores.” She said she will keep fighting against it and protecting children. “I went to the office and [told] the officer, ‘Every time you open one next to the kids, you do not respect the kids and children, I will call the federal government, and I will complain and have you guys bust it,’ because it is illegal,” she said.

As an employee of the government, Zhou said she is very disappointed that the city officials know the laws but are not enforcing them. “They purposefully open it in the corner next to [a] preschool, next to [a] daycare. They wouldn’t care. The law says it’s illegal!” she said. She said that no matter what, she will continue to fight for the rights of children. “San Francisco is out of control, is sick and demonic,” she said.

In order to protect children, she suggested that parents educate their children and ask them to stay away from strange food, because now there is food and drink with cannabis in it. “Call the police, call the federal government, make reports, complain to their supervisors. We have 11 districts, and each district has a supervisor. Complain to the mayor’s office,” she said. She also suggested that residents use their phones to take pictures or videos when people are using marijuana outside. “You cannot smoke [marijuana] everywhere, like next to the kids and in large quantity,” she said. Zhou said there are many things the government chooses not to enforce. “If they like it, they won’t care. If they don’t like it, then they will do something. Me, as a government employee, I am absolutely opposing it. What we’re seeing, what we’re experiencing, it’s just killing our quality of life,” she said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/san-francisco-mayoral-candidate-says-4-20-festival-violates-the-law_2896404.html

Breaking: Amazon's digital freight brokerage platform goes live

Today, freight brokers’ and carriers’ worst nightmare has come true: Amazon has quietly taken its digital freight brokerage platform live at freight.amazon.com, and it is undercutting market prices from 26 to 33 percent. Early this morning, in a client note responding to Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) announcement that it would begin offering free one-day shipping to Prime members, Morgan Stanley equities analyst Brian Nowak made a cryptic prediction. “We see AMZN’s 1-day Prime shipping raising consumer expectations and increasing the cost to compete in e-commerce. Over the long term, we also see this as a Trojan horse for Amazon to grow its next disruptive business… a third party logistics network,” Nowak wrote.

Amazon already moves an enormous amount of freight through its distribution and sortation centers and has an extensive network of trucking carriers. For many industry observers, it was only a matter of time before Amazon leveraged the implicit network effect — the total number of shippers and carriers who do business with Amazon — and connected both sides of its business. Part of this business may be to hedge against the volatile price of trucking capacity: by building a large freight brokerage business, AMZN is turning part of its cost into revenue. After all, Amazon is already a top ten international freight forwarder for Asian ocean freight inbound to North America.

A few weeks ago, a former Amazon executive reached out to FreightWaves to explain the e-commerce giant’s disintermediation strategy. “The advantages that then come from disintermediation and the monetization of those capabilities are secondary to the immediate need of self-preservation, but then serve to feed very critical needs of Amazon’s ability to continue to succeed,” the Amazon veteran wrote. “This innovation and growth then manifests as continuously evolving towards the ability to sell everything and anything that is or can be sold. That’s the true Amazon flywheel: disintermediate to survive; monetize to fund innovation; innovate to grow; disintermediate to survive…” The entry of Amazon into freight brokerage is the ‘disintermediate to survive’ phase of the flywheel. AMZN is under pressure to re-accelerate its top line revenue, which has slowed from upward of 30 percent annually three years ago to less than 15 percent projected for this year. Amazon cannot allow trucking capacity to constrain its growth and is entering freight brokerage to lock that capacity up.

Notice how ‘monetize’ comes after ‘disintermediate’. From a cursory review of four lanes in Amazon Freight’s current offering, it’s clear that Amazon is not trying to realize fat gross margins on its brokerage. Instead, it is massively undercutting market prices. Amazon’s new portal is intended for shippers who want Amazon’s rates for full truckload dry van freight in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Monetization will come later, but this is the digital freight brokerage startup model on ‘Georgia overdrive’: massive capital deployed to rapidly scale a network on thin or negative margins and take share. There is no telling how big Amazon wants this business to grow, but at a certain point, prices will creep up as Amazon monetizes the brokerage service to fund further innovation.

That day may be some time away. In the first quarter of 2019, Amazon spent $7.3 billion on transportation, which it lumps together with sortation and delivery centers for the line item “shipping costs.” Approximately annualized, AMZN’s “shipping costs” are $87.6 billion per year, and, crucially, purchased transportation is not formally broken out on its P&L. Amazon could grow its brokerage into a $10 billion operation — effectively a shadow C.H. Robinson — selling capacity at cost, add it to ‘shipping costs’, and it could be years before investors begin asking about margins. We think that building a third-party logistics network will allow Amazon to blow out retail peak season. By taking no margin during soft freight seasons and keeping trucks running, AMZN will have capacity locked up and ready to move truly staggering e-commerce volumes in November and December.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/breaking-amazons-digital-freight-brokerage-platform-goes-live

>>6353778

Indeed…almost nothing left they don't have a hand in.

5 Men Trapped Inside Virginia Cave

Five men exploring a cave in southwest Virginia are stuck, and emergency crews are attempting to rescue them. Six men entered Cyclops Cave on Friday around 7 p.m. and planned to stay until Sunday, according to CNN. The cave has a bubble-like formation, the eye of the Cyclops, in which the men were planning to camp, the county’s emergency management coordinator said. They are not lost, but they do not have extra food or water. A heavy rainfall Saturday trapped five of the men in the cave, CNN reported. One of the six men escaped around 2 a.m. Sunday and told authorities about the plight of the others.

The entrapped men are between the ages of 34 and 59, and the man who escaped was 22, Russell County EMA Director Jess Powers told CNN. American Red Cross from Bristol, Cleveland Life Saving Crew, Lebanon Fire Department and Cleveland Fire Department are at the scene to assist in the rescue.

“Right now they are trying to make contact with them again. They had made contact with them about two hours ago,” Smith told News Channel 11. “They said they’ve made eye contact with two of them. The position they’re in, I can’t understand, I don’t know if they’re gonna have to have more people help them get over the ledges.”

https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/04/28/men-trapped-virginia-caves/

CNN’s Jake Tapper Admits: Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis ‘Very Fine People’ in Charlottesville

CNN anchor Jake Tapper admitted Friday that President Donald Trump did not refer to neo-Nazis or white supremacists as “very fine people” in his remarks about the Charlottesville, Virginia, riots in 2017.

The admission came as Tapper and his CNN panel discussed former vice president Joe Biden’s campaign launch video, released Thursday, in which Biden explicitly claimed that Trump had referred to the neo-Nazis as “very fine people.” Tapper played a clip of Trump’s remarks — though not the portion in which Trump made it clear to reporters that he was ” not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” Instead, Tapper described that portion of the press conference: “Now, elsewhere in those remarks, Trump did condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists. So he’s not saying that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are very fine people.”

Tapper’s admission is a major concession by CNN, which has refused thus far to correct or retract its repeated claims in recent weeks that Trump was, in fact, referring to the neo-Nazis as “very fine people.” The network even aired deceptively edited video of Trump’s remarks to create the impression that he said something that he had not. CNN contributor Steve Cortes took his own network to task, noting that CNNs’ own reporting at the time made clear that Trump had been referring to people in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue — not neo-Nazis. In the Friday broadcast, Tapper went on to question the notion that anyone “protesting alongside” the neo-Nazis could be “very fine people.” As the New York Times reported at the time, some protesters who were present in Charlottesville had nothing to do with the neo-Nazis or white supremacists.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/04/27/cnn-jake-tapper-admits-trump-did-not-call-neo-nazis-very-fine-people-in-charlottesville/