This week, a ban on the sale of flavored nicotine products in suburban Cook County is enacted, expanding efforts to curb vaping, particularly among young people.

Commissioner Donna Miller plans to implement the ban at a Cook County Council meeting on Thursday. It prohibits retailers—except those located in unincorporated areas of the county—from selling “any flavored nicotine product,” including menthol, fruit, candy, dessert or alcohol flavors, but “not the taste or flavor of tobacco.” according to the draft resolution.

If passed, the proposal would go into effect immediately and give the sheriff the power to conduct unannounced inspections of retailers or vending machine operators selling nicotine products. Violators will be subject to a “fine of not less than $1,000 and not more than $5,000 for each violation.”

Displaying any flavored nicotine products incurs a $500 fine for the first violation and may result in the loss of the retailer’s license for more than three violations within a 12-month period.

The Illinois Retailers Association, which usually waives such restrictions, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although Miller said Thursday she expects resistance.

“This will help Cook County join other jurisdictions such as the City of Chicago, Los Angeles County, and the states of Massachusetts, California, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island, which have introduced statewide bans on flavored tobacco and vapes in the fight against with an attack on our youth and youth,” Miller said at a press conference on Wednesday. Flavored e-cigarettes are “addicting an entire new generation to nicotine, putting millions of children and young people at risk and threatening decades of progress in reducing youth tobacco use.”

Federal officials banned the sale of most flavored e-cigarettes in an effort to reverse the wave of youth vaping in 2020, but there were loopholes in the measure that allowed companies to sell disposable, pre-charged and flavored e-cigarettes or vape “tanks” and considered ineffective.

Since 2014, e-cigarettes have been the most common tobacco product used by middle school and high school youth, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A youth survey released by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration in October found that 14% of high school students and more than 3% of high school kids reported using e-cigarettes in the previous 30 days.

Dr. Lamar Hasbrouck, COO of the Cook County Department of Public Health, said he supported the proposal, in part because e-cigarette use among youth “remains an ongoing public health problem.” Nicotine exposure during adolescence can harm brain development, Hasbrouck continued, affecting learning, attention, mood and impulse control. According to him, in black and brown communities, people are “predatory victims of the tobacco industry due to marketing (and) price promotions.”

Chicago banned the sale of flavored e-cigarettes in September 2020, in addition to other restrictions on nicotine and tobacco products such as a ban on indoor vaping and a tax on e-cigarettes of $1.50 per unit and $1.20 per liquid milliliter of liquid. In November, suburban retailers and shoppers told the Tribune that the city’s ban had nudged shoppers towards them. The ruling was considered by some to be relaxed because it did not cover the sale of traditional menthol-flavored cigarettes.

Sheriff Tom Dart said vaping is “literally the number one thing” his high school girls talk about.

“They talk about the kids who are in the stalls, they vape, they think that not only is it easier for them to get off than smoking cigarettes, but they don’t understand what this is leading to,” he said. The county must “stop this and do it now, before we have another generation hopelessly addicted” to nicotine.

Dart said the sheriff’s office already has a division that looks for unlabeled cigarettes and liquor, and selling flavored vapes will be another item on the watch list if the ruling is passed. “There won’t be a lot of hard work on our end and we hope those in charge just stop doing it,” he said. “Usually they get a note.”

Miller could not say how this would affect county revenues. Taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products are one of the county’s largest sources of revenue, in addition to sales taxes and property taxes. Cook County averaged about $125 million a year in taxes on cigarettes and “other tobacco products” between 2019 and 2021, according to its latest budget. Officials predict that these revenues will continue to fall in the coming years. “We’re going to take a look at it,” Miller said.

Last month, Juul Labs agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the City of Chicago over allegations that the company violated the city’s municipal code by “advertising Juul products to youth” and “engaging in inadequate age verification,” among other complaints. This month, the state of Illinois announced a $67 million settlement to Juul as part of a settlement.

When Chicago’s $23.8 million payout was announced, a Juul spokesperson said the company was targeting adults who want to move away from traditional cigarettes by “fighting underage use of our products.”

aquig@chicagotribune.com

Few things are more satisfying than a bang that radiates the essential vibes of a Frenchwoman and then finds herself still in the same position hours later. The “glue” hack with 69.1 million views on tik takpromises exactly the same results every time – even on a windy day or after dancing on the tables until 2 am.

They say bangs are like framing your face, and it’s hard not to lust after them when celebs like Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, and Jenna Ortega wear them so well.

When we fast forward to summer, they definitely quench your thirst for a cool cut, but they’re not as easy to style. Bangs take time and effort to style every morning, and few are able to keep their shape all day. So this shot might look a little, well, disheveled after encountering a gust of wind. So what’s the bangs glue hack answer?

TikTokers say yes. The idea is that you use a small amount of lash glue to secure the ends of your bangs to your forehead. In her tutorial on glue bangs, the creator @ravioli_nicoli she can be seen curling her regrown bangs with a separate roller, then applying a thin line of clear lash glue to her brows and styling her brow hair over the top.

In another video, Emily Elizabeth, aka @eggdressesupshows how she applies a few drops of lash glue to the center of her forehead and along the brow bone, and then glues the front hair of the bangs exactly to these places, leaving the sides free.

She then uses a hair dryer to test the method and states “I’m honestly impressed” and that “I don’t feel anything out of the ordinary other than my normal hair sitting on my face.” Emily, however, cautioned her comments, saying, “I think it definitely works better for people who have thinner bangs or less hair in their bangs than I do.”

TueWhen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his presidential campaign on April 19 in Boston, he highlighted his family’s political pedigree and his history of advocating for “numerous environmental issues”, saying he was running to “end the corrupt merging of state and corporate power.” Notable is the lack of any direct recognition of the multi-year crusade that made the 69-year-old the most well-known face of the anti-vaccine movement in the country.

This contrasted sharply with the speeches he had given the previous year. In January 2022, Kennedy gathered thousands from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to a massive anti-vaccination mandate demonstration in which he shared discredited COVID-19 conspiracies and compared the actions of U.S. public health officials to those of Nazi Germany.

As the pandemic fades from public view, the anti-vaccination movement is in a state of flux. Kennedy’s decision not to even use the word “vaccine” in his speech likely reflects his desire to gain support in the Democratic primary among voters seeking an alternative to President Joe Biden. It’s a different story on the other side of the aisle, where some candidates appear to be actively courting a right-wing contingent of anti-vaccine and vaccine skeptics, opponents of public health mandates and conspiracy theorists who have grown up during the pandemic. The extent to which presidential candidates share these sentiments may indicate that the movement and its associated larger anti-science conspiracies and anti-government views maintain their grip on the American electorate.

Prior to 2020, the idea that anti-vaccine players had any influence in national politics was considered unthinkable. However, now a significant number of vaccine skeptics have “made it part of their identity, and interacting with them will actually increase their resistance,” says the doctor. Tom Frieden, who headed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 to 2017.

After years of involvement in anti-vaccine activism, Kennedy further increased his following during the pandemic, capitalizing on many Americans undermining public health officials, their fears of the virus and widespread misinformation. He became one of the “Disinformation Dozen,” a group of twelve people that the Centers for Digital Hate Control says are responsible for 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter. Last year, Facebook and Instagram removed pages from his non-profit organization Children’s Health Defense for spreading medical misinformation. But to a growing audience of hundreds of thousands of supporters and online fans, he was a hero who spoke out against dangerous schemes by government officials and drug companies. Despite being a Democrat, he remains popular on right-wing anti-vaccine channels, where his candidacy was greeted with “Trump/RFC 2024!” stickers.

Although Kennedy did not explicitly mention vaccines in his statement, it was clear that there was no need for his most enthusiastic supporters. “This is a candidate for vaccine truth that promises to destroy the underlying state of the vaccine!” On April 16, one of the popular right-wing anti-vaccine Telegram channels made the announcement to its 81,000 subscribers, urging them to visit its announcement in Boston. “RFK may not be perfect, but we know it will hit the pharmaceutical industry and vaccines,” wrote one poster on a popular Trump supporter forum. “Even Trump can’t do that.”

Five days into his campaign, Kennedy claimed on Twitter that Fox News had fired Tucker Carlson because a right-wing anchor claimed “TV networks promoted a deadly and ineffective vaccine to please their Pharma advertisers…Fox had just demonstrated the terrifying power of big pharma” .

But Kennedy is not the only presidential candidate to use anti-vaccine rhetoric. The pandemic and the vaccine resistance that followed gave momentum to the movement and provoked a partisan split that turned vaccine support into a political litmus test. While vaccine skepticism has been limited to forward-thinking ones like Kennedy on the left—President Joe Biden is widely expected to run for the Democratic nomination—more prominent challengers on the right appear to be pushing it.

“I think Robert Kennedy Jr. is learning on his own because a huge part of what he’s working on is anti-vaccination,” says Joshua Scharfstein, professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University. “I don’t think he’s credible in his own family, let alone you know, as a national speaker on the subject … More concerned about Florida’s governor.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently fell in the polls but is still expected to challenge former President Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, has raised questions about vaccine safety in Florida. In December, DeSantis asked the Florida Supreme Court to form a grand jury to investigate “offences” related to COVID-19 vaccines. “I think people want the truth, and I think people want accountability,” DeSantis said at the time. “You need to conduct a thorough investigation into what happened to the shots.”

Read more: How the anti-vaccine movement is taking over the law

The acceptance by many on the right of vaccine skepticism, and often anti-vaccination conspiracies, has turned the public health campaign into a partisan issue. A Washington Post-ABC Poll conducted in June 2021 found that 47% of Republicans said they were unlikely to get vaccinated against COVID-19, compared with 6% of Democrats. According to a November 2021 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, unvaccinated adults are three times more likely to lean Republican than Democrat.

“According to the data, there is a pretty strong correlation between vaccine biases and mortality rates,” says Frieden. “Politicians react to what their potential voters think, and some of those who will vote in the primaries have very strong beliefs about vaccines. … So that’s about it.”

The politicization of COVID-19 vaccines has often led to strange spectacles as Republican lawmakers have become reluctant to reveal their own vaccination status. In 2021, nearly half of Republicans in the House of Representatives declined to answer CNN’s question about whether they had been vaccinated. In New York City, a GOP city council member refused to reveal her vaccination status, although it prevented her from entering the cell.

DeSantis has staffed his administration with notorious vaccine skeptics. In 2021, at the height of a nationwide public health effort to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19, he appointed vocal vaccine critic Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s Surgeon General. Since then, Ladapo has become the hero of online anti-vaccination communities that follow his lead rather than that of the US health authorities.

Last year, guidance issued by Ladapo warned against vaccinating men aged 18 to 39, claiming an 84% increase in deaths from cardiovascular disease associated with the COVID vaccine. He also recommended that healthy children not be vaccinated, contrary to US public health advice. This led to CDC and FDA executives sending a letter to Ladapo last month. “The job of public health officials across the country is to protect the lives of the population they serve, especially the vulnerable,” the statement said. federal letters said. “Fueling vaccine hesitancy is undermining these efforts.”

Trump, on the other hand, has a more complicated history with vaccine misinformation. In 2017, Kennedy said Trump asked him chair the vaccine safety committee in his administration. But since the pandemic, Trump has vacillated between taking credit for his COVID-19 vaccine rollout and seemingly acknowledging that anti-vaccine sentiment has taken root among MAGA supporters. After initially denouncing politicians who refused to disclose their vaccination status as “weak-willed,” the former president appeared to remain silent on the matter. But many in his orbit were still happy to participate: His son Eric spoke at a conference of anti-vaccination activists in Nashville last fall, and some of his most prominent supporters, including former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and strategist Steve Bannon, raised questions. on the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

If DeSantis or Trump walks out of the Republican primary stoking anti-vax fervor, they may regret it when the time comes for the general election, when they have to appeal to a wider constituency.

“The vast majority of Americans understand the value of vaccines and the importance of getting enough vaccinations to keep infectious diseases from threatening us all,” Scharfstein says.

Write Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@time.com and Mini Racker at mini.racker@time.com.