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close video Actor Cheech Marin launches cannabis company: ‘It will always be good’

Actor and comedian Cheech Marin shares why he launched his own cannabis company with longtime friend Tommy Chong and curated an exhibit of Chicano art on ‘Kennedy.’

Georgia’s first medical marijuana dispensaries finally opened last week after years of the drug being legal for medical reasons but illegal to purchase.

Trulieve Cannabis Corp. opened stores in Macon and Marietta on Friday, with the grand opening at the Macon location complete with a ribbon cutting, food trucks and merchandise giveaway.

A state commission issued licenses to dispense medical marijuana following years of arguments at the state Capitol and lawsuits, according to FOX 5 Atlanta.

Georgia has permitted the use of low-THC cannabis oil to treat a variety of diseases since 2015, but legal sales have been delayed for years by regulatory challenges. More than 27,000 Georgia residents have registered to use the oil. 

AMERICANS SPENT MORE ON LEGAL CANNABIS IN 2022 THAN CHOCOLATE, BEER: REPORT

Medical marijuana dispensaries opened in Georgia on Friday. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit / AP Newsroom)

"Thousands of Georgians will be able to have improved quality of life through access to medical cannabis here in our state," Allen Peake, a former Republican state representative from Macon who advocated for the legalization of medical marijuana, told The Associated Press. "The sky is not going to fall if medical cannabis is provided to Georgia citizens."

The Georgia Access to Medical Cannabis Commission approved licenses to Trulieve and Botanical Sciences on Wednesday to sell low THC oil to registered patients who suffer from severe seizures, Parkinson's and terminal cancer. 

Botanical Sciences plans to open its first dispensary next month in Savannah, and Trulieve said it expects to open additional locations across the state. The companies can each have up to six licenses.

Several companies that were denied licenses have filed lawsuits. Four other production licenses are tied up in the courts.

LEGAL MARIJUANA GROWERS ALONG THE WEST COAST STRUGGLE WITH OVERSUPPLY, SEEK INTERSTATE SALES

Trulieve Cannabis Corp. opened stores in Macon and Marietta. (Getty)

Nearly 40 states already have medical marijuana programs.

One customer in Marietta told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that his 19-year-old daughter uses cannabis oil to treat her epilepsy. He said he can now purchase the product legally instead of violating federal law by importing it across state lines.

"We just hit the lottery. We finally got to a point where we could actually walk in instead of having to meet in a parking lot and pick up our oil," Jim Wages said. "It's such a relief."

Medical marijuana will be sold as cannabis oil packaged as liquid tinctures, topical creams or capsules.

Medical marijuana will be sold as cannabis oil packaged as liquid tinctures, topical creams or capsules. ((AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File) / AP Newsroom)

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"This is a great move," Peake told FOX 5 Atlanta. "We are at the end of this journey, finally, hopefully going to have access to medical cannabis oil in the boundaries of our state."

Marijuana that can be smoked is still prohibited, and recreational use remains illegal in the state. Medical products sold in Georgia are required to contain less than 5% THC.

More than 20 states plus Washington, D.C., have fully legalized marijuana while nearly 20 other states allow it for medical use. The drug remains illegal in 12 states.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Sports

If college football’s playoff system ain’t broke, why fix it?

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If college football's playoff system ain't broke, why fix it?

During college football’s Bowl Championship Series era, the sport’s opposition to an expanded, let alone expansive, playoff could be summarized in one colorful quote by then-Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee.

“They will wrench a playoff system out of my cold, dead hands,” Gee said in 2007.

We are happy to report that while college football does, indeed, have a playoff, Gee is still very much alive. The 81-year-old retired just this week after a second stint leading West Virginia University.

What is dead and buried, though, is college football’s staunch resistance to extending its postseason field. After decades of ignoring complaints and the promise of additional revenue to claim that just two teams was more than enough, plans to move from 12 participants to 16 were underway before last season’s inaugural 12-teamer even took place.

A once-static sport now moves at light speed, future implications be damned.

Fire. Ready. Aim.

So maybe the best bit of current news is that college football’s two ruling parties — the SEC and Big Ten — can’t agree on how the new 16-team field would be selected. It has led to a pause on playoff expansion.

Maybe, just maybe, it means no expansion will occur by 2026, as first planned, and college football can let the 12-team model cook a little to accurately assess what changes — if any — are even needed.

“We have a 12-team playoff, five conference champions,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said this week. “That could stay if we can’t agree.”

Good. After all, what’s the rush?

The 2025 season will play out with a 12-team format featuring automatic bids for five conference champions and seven at-large spots. Gone is last year’s clunky requirement that the top four seeds could go only to conference champs — elevating Boise State and Arizona State and unbalancing the field.

That alone was progress built on real-world experience. It should be instructive.

The SEC wants a 16-team model but with, as is currently the case, automatic bids going to the champions in the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, SEC and the best of the so-called Group of 6. The rest of the field would be at-large selections.

The Big Ten says it will not back such a proposal until the SEC agrees to play nine conference games (up from its current eight). Instead, it wants a 16-team system that gives four automatic bids apiece to the Big Ten and SEC, two each to the ACC and Big 12, one to the Group of 6 and then three at-large spots.

It’s been dubbed the “4-4-2-2-1-3” because college athletic leaders love ridiculous parlances almost as much as they love money.

While the ACC, Big 12 and others have offered opinions — mostly siding with the SEC — legislatively, the decision rests with the sport’s two big-dog conferences.

Right now, neither side is budging. A compromise might still be made, of course. The supposed deadline to set the 2026 system is Nov. 30. And Sankey actually says he prefers the nine-game SEC schedule, even if his coaches oppose it.

However, the possibility of the status quo standing for a bit longer remains.

What the Big Ten has proposed is a dramatic shift for a sport that has been bombarded with dramatic shifts — conference realignment, the transfer portal, NIL, revenue sharing, etc.

The league wants to stage multiple “play-in” games on conference championship weekend. The top two teams in the league would meet for the league title (as is currently the case), but the third- and fourth-place teams would play the fifth- and sixth-place teams to determine the other automatic bids.

Extend this out among all the conferences and you have up to a 26-team College Football Playoff (with 22 teams in a play-in situation). This would dramatically change the way the sport works — devaluing the stakes for nonconference games, for example. And some mediocre teams would essentially get a playoff bid — in the Big Ten’s case, the sixth seed last year was an Iowa team that finished 8-5.

Each conference would have more high-value inventory to sell to broadcast partners, but it’s not some enormous windfall. Likewise, four more first-round playoff games would need to find television slots and relevance.

Is anyone sure this is necessary? Do we need 16 at all, let alone with multibids?

In the 12-team format, the first round wasn’t particularly competitive — with a 19.3-point average margin of victory. It’s much like the first round of the NFL playoffs, designed mostly to make sure no true contender is left out.

Perhaps last year was an outlier. And maybe future games will be close. Or maybe they’ll be even more lopsided. Wouldn’t it be prudent to find out?

While there were complaints about the selection committee picking SMU and/or Indiana over Alabama, it wasn’t some egregious slight. Arguments will happen no matter how big the field. Besides, the Crimson Tide lost to two 6-6 teams last year. Expansion means a team with a similar résumé can cruise in.

Is that a good thing?

Whatever the decision, it is being made with little to no real-world data — pro or con. Letting a few 12-team fields play out, providing context and potentially unexpected consequences, sure wouldn’t hurt.

You don’t have to be Gordon Gee circa 2007 to favor letting this simmer and be studied before leaping toward another round of expansion.

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Arch to victory? Texas preseason pick to win SEC

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Arch to victory? Texas preseason pick to win SEC

Texas, with Heisman Trophy candidate Arch Manning set to take over as starting quarterback, is the preseason pick to win the Southeastern Conference championship.

The Longhorns received 96 of the 204 votes cast from media members covering the SEC media days this week to be crowned SEC champion on Dec. 6 in Atlanta at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Georgia, with 44 votes, received the second-most votes.

If that scenario plays out, it would mean a rematch of the 2024 SEC championship game, which Georgia won in an overtime thriller. The SEC championship game pits the two teams with the best regular-season conference record against one another.

Alabama was third with 29 votes, while LSU got 20. South Carolina was next with five, while Oklahoma received three and Vanderbilt and Florida each got two votes. Tennessee, Ole Miss and Auburn each received one vote.

Since 1992, only 10 times has the predicted champion in the preseason poll gone on to win the SEC championship.

The 2024 SEC title game averaged 16.6 million viewers across ABC and ESPN, the fourth-largest audience on record for the game. The overtime win for Georgia, which peaked with 19.7 million viewers, delivered the largest audience of the college football season.

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World

Every shop and home burned or ransacked: The Syrian city engulfed in tribal violence

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Every shop and home burned or ransacked: The Syrian city engulfed in tribal violence

The Syrian presidency has announced it’s assembling a special taskforce to try to stop nearly a week of sectarian clashes in the southern Druze city of Sweida.

The presidency called for restraint on all sides and said it is making strenuous efforts to “stop the fighting and curb the violations that threaten the security of the citizens and the safety of society”.

By early Saturday morning, a ceasefire had been confirmed by the US special envoy for Syria, Tom Barrack, who posted on X that Syrian President Ahmed al Sharaa and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to a ceasefire supported by US secretary of state Marco Rubio.

The post went on to state that this agreement had the support of “Turkey, Jordan and its neighbours” and called upon the Druze, Bedouins, and Sunni factions to put down their arms.

Sky News special correspondent Alex Crawford reports from the road leading to Sweida, the city that has become the epicentre of Syria’s sectarian violence.

For the past 24 hours, we’ve watched as Syria‘s multiple Arab tribes began mobilising in the Sweida province to help defend their Bedouin brethren.

A fighter aims a gun
A body is wrapped in a blanket

Thousands travelled from multiple different Syrian areas and had reached the edge of Sweida city by Friday nightfall after a day of almost non-stop violent clashes and killings.

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“We have come to protect the [Arab] Bedouin women and children who are being terrorised by the Druze,” they told us.

A fighter in Syria
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Arab fighters said they had come to protect the Bedouin women and children

Fighters at a gas station
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Fighters at a petrol station

Every shop and every home in the streets leading up to Sweida city has been burned or ransacked, the contents destroyed or looted.

We saw tribal fighters loading the back of pickup trucks and driving away from the city with vehicles packed with looted goods from Druze homes.

A burning building
Image:
Shops and homes leading up to Sweida city have been burned or ransacked

A burned out car

Several videos posted online showed violence against the Druze, including one where tribal fighters force three men to throw themselves off a high-rise balcony and are seen being shot as they do so.

Doctors at the nearby community hospital in Buser al Harir said there had been a constant stream of casualties being brought in. As we watched, another dead fighter was carried out of an ambulance.

The medics estimated there had been more than 600 dead in their area alone. “The youngest child who was killed was a one-and-a-half-year-old baby,” one doctor told us.

A doctor talks to Sky's Alex Crawford
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Doctors said there had been a constant stream of casualties due to violence

The violence is the most dangerous outbreak of sectarian clashes since the fall of the Bashar al Assad regime last December – and the most serious challenge for the new leader to navigate.

The newly brokered deal is aimed at ending the sectarian killings and restoring some sort of stability in a country which is emerging from more than a decade of civil war.

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