During his tenure as New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg (I) has had no qualms about cracking down on products that pose a public health risk, tackling everything from sugary sodas, to salt in snack foods, to illegal guns. Now, the three-term executive has his sights set on the tobacco industry, pushing legislation that would raise cigarette pack prices in the city to at least $10.50 and end tobacco companies’ ability to offer coupons or special discounts on their products.

The recently-announced initiative comes at the heels of another Bloomberg-endorsed plan to limit cigarette makers’ ability to publicly advertise their products in city store fronts. Combined, the two proposals would constitute something of a public health coup for Bloomberg, targeting smokers’ bad habit where it hurts the most: their wallets. And as the New York Times reports, the effort is targeted at teens and low-income Americans:

“This is kind of a landmark set of proposals here,” said Kurt Ribisl, a professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, whose research on tobacco control influenced Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal. “For someone like me, who’s spent 18 years studying point-of-sale issues, this is kind of big.”

Dr. Ribisl studies what happens at the retail counter, where a customer at a typical convenience store sees a colorful array of signs, packaging and “shelf talkers” — the small tags that flutter from shelves — promoting two-for-one, dollar-off and other types of deals. According to a Federal Trade Commission report issued last year, the tobacco industry spent $6.5 billion on discounts in 2010, and Dr. Ribisl said they are one of the major ways cigarette makers encourage price-conscious customers like teenagers and low-income smokers to buy.

New York’s price-regulation bill would, in effect, close off the remaining means of access to cheap cigarettes and little cigars, which make it easier for teenagers to experiment with smoking, and progress to smoking regularly, said Brett Loomis, a researcher at RTI International, a nonprofit institute that offers research and technical services to governments and businesses.

Poor Americans are more likely to smoke, but less likely to be able to afford the habit and its associated health care costs. In fact, one study showed that low-income New York City smokers spend as much as a quarter of their income purchasing cigarettes — Bloomberg’s initiatives have the potential to price them out of the deadly habit altogether. While encouraging poor people to stop smoking is undoubtedly good from a public health standpoint, doing so through a commodity-based financial regulation has the potential to further drain their disposable incomes.

And Bloomberg’s legislative push won’t address all aspects of the problem. As cigarette prices rise nationwide and smoking rates plummet in the aggregate, studies have shown that low-income Americans — particularly, low-income women — are still smoking at higher rates than average, and turning to less costly alternatives such as loose leaf tobacco to get their fix on the cheap. Raising cigarette prices even further could propagate even more of that kind of behavior.

A 10th grade science teacher in Idaho is being investigated by his school after parents complained that he included the word “vagina” in his lessons, taught the class about the female orgasm, and showed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Some of the allegations are more serious, including that “he shared confidential student files with an individual other than their parents,” and “told inappropriate jokes in class,” but science teacher Tim McDaniel suspects that the complaints originated because of his discussions about issues considered controversial in the largely Mormon community where he teaches:

“I teach straight out of the textbook, I don’t include anything that the textbook doesn’t mention,” McDaniel said. “But I give every student the option not attend this class when I teach on the reproductive system if they don’t feel comfortable with the material.”

The science teacher said he has taught Dietrich’s science classes for the past 18 years without receiving a complaint from parents or students.

According to McDaniel, the commission is also investigating a complaint that accuses him of using school property to promote a political candidate. The complaint was because he showed the climate change film “An Inconvenient Truth,” also in his science class.

McDaniel said he includes the film to spark a discussion on climate change among the students. After watching the film, he asks students to write a response paper explaining their thoughts on climate change.

Idaho is a state that has no requirement for sex education and no mandated HIV education. It does have a requirement that students be allowed to opt out of sex ed classes, to which McDaniel says he adhered.

(HT: Raw Story )

Last month, Indiana Republicans proposed a measure intended to shut down a Planned Parenthood clinic in the state. The original SB 371 legislation also contained a clause that would have required women taking the RU-486 abortion pill to undergo two invasive transvaginal probes — one before taking the pill, and one after. But ever since the transvaginal ultrasound provision first erupted into controversy, the state’s GOP has been working to scale it back, hoping to assuage public outrage and quietly shepard the rest of the anti-choice legislation’s passage into law.

At first, the Indiana Senate removed the bill’s second ultrasound requirement to ensure its passage. And now, a House committee has removed the first ultrasound requirement too, dropping that aspect of the legislation altogether. According to an Associated Press report, “Indiana Right to Life president Mike Fichter says the group agreed with the decision to drop the ultrasound requirement because debate over it in the state Senate had taken focus away from its goal of tightening regulations on clinics that provide abortions.”

Now that abortion opponents have conceded to public pressure on the invasive forced ultrasound measures, the rest of SB 371 could seem moderate in comparison. But the anti-choice legislation would still have far-reaching consequences for women’s reproductive rights in the state.

Indiana lawmakers are pursuing a popular right-wing strategy for limiting abortion access: Indirectly restricting abortion by imposing costly, unnecessary requirements on abortion clinics with the intention of forcing them to close their doors. SB 371 would force health clinics that prescribe the abortion pill to adhere to the same standards as surgical clinics, even though medication abortions are not actually surgical procedures. It’s a direct attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides the RU-486 to patients seeking to terminate a pregnancy during the first trimester, since that clinic would likely not be able to comply with the new restrictions.

Women’s health advocates consider these type of abortion restrictions to be some of the most dangerous assaults to women’s health — because they can take effect fairly quickly, they effectively limit women’s abortion access, and they often fly under the radar without inspiring the same kind of outrage that other laws, like transvaginal ultrasound requirements, do. That’s exactly why Indiana Republicans are willing to sacrifice mandatory ultrasounds to focus on their real “goal.”