In the U.S., flavored cigarettes have been banned since 2009, with one glaring exception: menthols. That exception was supposed to go away in 2023, but the Biden administration quietly delayed the ban on menthols. Why? Well, an estimated 85 percent of Black smokers smoke menthols — and some (potentially suspect) polls have indicated that a ban on menthols would chill Biden's support among Black people. Of course, it's more complicated than that. The story of menthol cigarettes is tied up in policing, advertising, influencer-culture, and the weaponization of race and gender studies. Oh, and a real-life Black superhero named Mandrake the Magician.
Donald Trump owes legal penalties totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in two civil cases recently decided in New York, raising questions about how he'll pay the amount.
In business, the million-dollar question is how to get people to buy stuff. But in wildlife conservation, the challenge is: how do we get people to not buy stuff? How do we bring down demand for fur, ivory and rhino horns? Today on the show, the story of a business trying to make lab-grown rhino horns and the backlash that followed.
Check out more of Juliana Kim's reporting for NPR here.
What's ahead for the TV industry in 2024? Original series are down 14% but it still feels like too much TV. Executives and streaming services are feeling the squeeze post strikes. Race issues persist.
Home Depot's sales continued to weaken in its fiscal fourth quarter, as the country's largest home improvement retailer deals with Americans who remain concerned about high mortgage rates and inflation. While its quarterly results topped analysts' expectations, it provided a soft sales forecast for fiscal 2024. Shares slipped before the market open on Tuesday.
The companies are teaming up, in part, to expand their payment network. Discover is the smallest of the four U.S.-based payment networks, which also include Visa, American Express and Mastercard.
Xolair is considered the first medication approved by the FDA that can help protect against severe allergic reactions brought on by accidental exposure to certain foods.
About two years ago, New Jersey's Democratic Governor Phil Murphy said that the state would be partnering with the Danish company Orsted, the largest developer of offshore wind projects in the world.
The company had agreed to build Ocean Wind 1, the state's first offshore wind farm, powering half a million homes and creating thousands of jobs in the process.
The following year, Orsted inked another deal with the state for Ocean Wind 2, a second offshore wind farm with similar capacity. After years of review, the projects were approved in summer 2023. Construction of the first turbines was slated to begin in the fall.
And then Orsted backed out, cancelling the contracts full stop.
Despite the setbacks, Murphy is still all-in on wind. A month after Orsted dropped out, Murphy directed the state's Board of Public Utilities to seek new bids from offshore wind developers. And the state just approved two new offshore wind contracts.
After several setbacks, could this mean a second wind for offshore wind?
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Chinese automakers are winning over European consumers as part of a big push to enter markets abroad. Their success has sparked alarm among rival companies and lawmakers.
Health officials reported 10 cases of E. coli infection, adding that the number of people sick is likely "much higher." Those cases were from California, Colorado, Texas and Utah.
The United Auto Workers union said Friday that nearly 9,000 workers at the Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville will strike on Feb. 23 if a local contract dispute is not resolved.
It's Indicators of the Week — our weekly look under the hood of our global economy. Today we look at why cocoa prices are soaring, whether India's electoral bonds are bad for democracy and how a typo sent Lyft shares (briefly) soaring.
The Genco Picardy is not an American ship. It doesn't pay U.S. taxes, none of its crew are U.S. nationals, and when it sailed through the Red Sea last month, it wasn't carrying cargo to or from an American port.
But when the Houthis, a tribal militant group from Yemen, attacked the ship, the crew called the U.S. Navy. That same day, the Navy fired missiles at Houthi sites.
On today's show: How did protecting the safe passage of other countries' ships in the Red Sea become a job for the U.S. military? It goes back to an idea called Freedom of the Seas, an idea that started out as an abstract pipe dream when it was coined in the early 1600s – but has become a pillar of the global economy.
This episode was hosted by Alex Mayyasi and Nick Fountain. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, edited by Molly Messick, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez, with help from Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
