Tobacco.org

There's the Rube Goldberg-style cigarette lighter that the Deutsche Grammophon company gave Leonard Bernstein because, in the words of daughter Jamie Bernstein Thomas, "they figured it would take so long to perform its task it would help him cut down on his smoking." . . Those are some of the more offbeat items . . . from the apartment of the late composer-conductor that will be auctioned Dec. 10 and 11 by Sotheby's in Manhattan.

Senate investigators have pieced together evidence of a web of nonprofit groups, political consultants and wealthy conservatives who secretly intervened to help dozens of Republicans in last year's elections. . . Groups involved in last year's GOP network included Americans for Tax Reform, the National Right to Life Committee, Citizens for Reform, Citizens for the Republic Education Fund and the Coalition for Our Children's Future. Evidence suggests the groups were in close touch with each other and the Republican Party. Some of the groups were connected through Triad Management . . . In an interview, Thompson said the use of nonprofits is "very troubling. We have no campaign-finance system. We have no limitations when all you have to do is run it through a straw man. ... It is a sham deal." . . The [Coalition for Our Children's Future] was formed May 30, 1995, at the behest of Haley Barbour, then chairman of the Republican National Committee. Barbour and top aide Don Fierce recruited the staff, who began soliciting mostly corporate executives. . . A memo produced from RNC files outlined plans for a June 6 fund-raising meeting convened by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco lobbyist Tommy Payne at the City Club, a lobbyist hangout in downtown Washington. . . The documents show the coalition also sought money from the Better America Foundation, a nonprofit Dole organization criticized by some as an undercover way of promoting Dole's candidacy. Dole closed the foundation in June 1995, and coalition documents suggest contributions from the tobacco industry and others were contingent on how Dole disposed of foundation assets.

The higher tax, which is expected to raise $30 million annually, was passed by the Legislature in June. Prices vary from store to store, but name-brand cigarettes sold for between $2.25 and $2.50 before the tax. Now, the price will edge up toward $3.

Taxes on a pack of cigarettes will go up from 44 cents to 59 cents.

Bowman is co-founder with Jeffrey Brooke of the firm of Bowman & Brooke, a 75-lawyer outfit that is gaining a national reputation for its product-liability defense work around the country. . . What kinds of cases won't he take? Well, he had a chance to defend Big Tobacco and turned it down, to the annoyance of some of his partners. But it wasn't necessarily a moral decision -- he believes the public has been adequately warned about the dangers of smoking -- but rather a personal one. "For 20 years of flying, I would always get off the planes with terrible headaches," he said. "Then they banned smoking on the aircraft and the headaches disappeared. It was easy to say no to the tobacco companies' bid for his services."

 Sioeng--who holds the lucrative rights to sell China's best-selling cigarette overseas--has known Feng for many years, acquaintances say. They met in the Yunnan tobacco-growing region where Feng was a local official and Sioeng manufactured cigarettes. Their friendship continued in the United States, where Sioeng had become such an influential figure in the Chinese emigre community that there was speculation that he helped Feng get his post nearly two years ago. Sioeng has appeared frequently with consulate officials at public events, and he helped form and bankroll an alliance of more than 100 organizations based on hometown and professional affiliations, according to friends of Sioeng. The Alliance of Chinese American Groups in the U.S.A. has provided numerous opportunities for consulate officials to mingle with the community and local politicians. It is run by Kent La, whose company distributes Sioeng's Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes.

Following is a list of agents considered this week by a panel of scientists recommending changes in the federal government's list of substances known or thought to cause cancer. Each agent considered for inclusion on the list is nominated as either known to be a human carcinogen (KHC) or reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen (RAHC). . . TOBACCO SMOKING -- determined to cause cancer of the lung, urinary bladder and renal pelvis, oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, lip and pancreas. SMOKELESS TOBACCO -- determined to cause cancers of the oral cavity.

A Subcommittee of the National Toxicology Program's Board of Scientific Counselors will review data at its Oct.30 and 31 public meeting that could result in a recommendation to "de-list" saccharin from the federal government's official report of cancer-causing substances, The Report on Carcinogens, ninth edition, and could add ultraviolet radiation, smokeless tobacco (such as snuff and chewing tobacco), tobacco smoke as an entity, all in the strongest category of "known" human carcinogen, and other drugs and chemicals.

The projected land sales were, as always, a bit iffy. But the tobacco money? That was just too speculative for Nassau lawmakers. So the legislature stripped $16 million in anticipated revenues from a proposed federal tobacco settlement out of County Executive Thomas Gulotta's 1998 budget

District Judge M. Michael Monahan ruled this week that Robins attorneys Lisa Heller and Charles Lentz, on behalf of Harris Waste Management Inc., pursued a misappropriation of trade secrets claim involving waste disposal equipment against three former Harris executives without any factual basis. . . The Robins firm is representing the state of Minnesota in its legal battle against the tobacco industry. Dorsey & Whitney also is involved in the tobacco litigation, providing local legal services for the tobacco companies.

ith less than 24 hours to go before a 15-cent-a-pack cigarette tax hike kicked in, Delores Thompson was getting ready to shell out some cash for a carton of Salem Lights 100's. . . As of today, the cigarette tax will be 59 cents a pack.

"The actions of individual smokers are irrelevant" to the case, said Superior Court Judge Paul Alvarado. The suit [was] filed by San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and 13 California counties . . Alvarado rejected the companies' argument that their liability, if any, should be reduced based on the voluntary behavior of smokers who have been warned of possible damage. Those legal defenses do not apply to this case because the local governments are not seeking damages for harm to individuals, but rather a return of ill-gotten gains, the judge said.

But for modern office workers, tired of having their careers interrupted by endless cigarette breaks in the rain, snuff is becoming the latest fashion item. . . "Happily there is no such thing as passive snuff-taking," says Andy, a PR Consultant who has recently swapped his 20 cigarettes-a-day habit for around 30 pinches of SP Number One snuff. "It does make your handkerchiefs somewhat disgusting, but it's better than risking pneumonia . . ." The result is that snuff manufacturers, who recently seemed doomed as their elderly clientele slowly died off, are enjoying a boom

"I think people began to realize it wasn't on the verge of bankruptcy, which was the perception until then," said Joel Luton, an analyst with APS Financial Corp in Austin, Texas. "In the last [few weeks], there's been additional fuel to move the stock." In August, Brooke Group shares languished at around $3 a share. Last week the shares traded as high as $10 before the stock market correction pulled them down a bit. Brooke Group shares closed on Friday at $8.75, up 93.8 cents from Thursday's close.

The low-tar cigarettes and the pager-sized device that will envelop the cigarette as it is smoked will be distributed to about 100 selected consumers in the United States and Japan in about a month, the company said. The company plans to decide after the preliminary test whether to market its electronically controlled Accord lighter.

THE CAMPAIGN FOR TOBACCO-FREE KIDS has criticized highly inaccurate statements attributed to Mr. Max Mosley, President of the International Automobile Federation (FIA). Mosley, making his statements to a European journalist, who asserted that increases in youth tobacco consumption in "modern industrial countries" are a direct result of bans on tobacco advertising in such nations.

If Thompson and his colleagues had truly wanted to expose the flaws in the system, they would have taken a cue from tobacco hearings. The only congressional hearing on tobacco that everyone remembers was the one in 1994 when the top executives of the seven largest American tobacco companies stood in a row, raised their right hands and swore that they did not believe that cigarettes were addictive. Imagine if Thompson had subpoenaed the seven largest donors in the 1996 election campaign and asked them under oath why they gave so much of their money -- or their shareholders' or their union members' money -- to politicians and political parties. You can bet that the television networks would have covered that hearing.

According to a brief letter in Catheterization and Cardiovascular Diagnosis, a 62-year-old man fainted at least three times while watching "Seinfeld." The proximate cause was the behavior of George Costanza, played by Jason Alexander, whose antics caused the patient to laugh so hard that he lost consciousness. "During one event, he fell face first into his evening meal and was rescued by his wife," wrote Dr. Stephen V. Cox and two colleagues from Lahey Hitchcock Medical Center in Burlington, Mass. The real culprits were that the man smoked, had high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels, and had already had a coronary bypass. It turned out that blood flow to his brain was diminished by blockages in several arteries, and when George made him laugh hysterically, it produced a phenomenon called the Valsalva maneuver -- pressure in the chest pushing on the heart and reducing blood flow.

But Congress is far from agreement on who should pay to cut teen smoking rates, now 50.2 percent and rising. Many join public health advocates in supporting the legal settlement, which would fine retailers $25,000 or more and permanently revoke their licenses if they sell tobacco products to minors. Others support a bill backed by convenience store owners that would divert much of the burden away from small retailers and place it on the underage smokers themselves. That bill, called the Tobacco Use by Minors Deterrence Act of 1997, was co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of at least 20 House members, who got thousands of dollars in campaign funds from store owners or from the tobacco industry. Convenience stores sell half the cigarette packs bought by Americans and reap a quarter of their revenue from tobacco. They say the solution lies in slapping smoking kids with stiffer sanctions, such as community service or loss of driver's licenses. . . Teen-smoking experts, however, say the bill could gut key parts of the smoking deal, as well as many state and local programs.

Many farms have already been sold to make way for developments, and with the future of tobacco at least a little shaky, more of those farms are liable to become suburban neighborhoods.

The billboard, and a radio commercial with a similar theme, are part of a $138,000 advertising campaign by Kentucky Action, an anti-smoking group that wants to cut teen access to tobacco products. The group plans to lobby the 1998 General Assembly to repeal a law that prohibits communities from enacting local ordinances that are tougher than state laws on teen access to tobacco products. Kentucky Action wants communities to be able to require retailers to get a tobacco-selling license, which they could lose if they sell to minors.

In 1993, the town of Plymouth, Mass., fired a policewoman from the town's police force for smoking in a police cruiser. Officer Lynne Rossborough went through a smoking cessation program and kicked the habit. She then appealed her firing to the state's Civil Service Commission and was reinstated. But the town appealed that decision. Last week, in a 7-0 decision, the state's high court upheld the 1987 law.

Tired of hearing the same old back-and-forth on smoking and tobacco issues? A forum in Richmond this week promises to take a fresh look at the complex issues swirling around Philip Morris USA and other cigarette-makers. "Ethics, Law and the Tobacco Industry" is the title of the 12:30 p.m. Friday conference at Virginia Commonwealth University. The free event is open to the public in the Forum Room of VCU's Student Commons at 907 Floyd Ave. . . 'The issues are very complex and it's not at all clear what the rights and wrongs are," Ellis said. "What we're hoping to achieve is clarification of issues." A focus will be the legal issues raised by states trying to recoup billions of dollars in health-related expenses from smoking. The panel will consist of Dr. Robert Balster, director of the Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies at VCU's Medical College of Virginia; Dr. John Christman, a Virginia Tech philosophy professor; Paul J. Zwier, a University of Richmond law professor; and Dr. John Hasnas, a Washington lawyer who has taught at Georgetown University.

Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and a corporate watchdog group are taking aim at tobacco companies by asking a mammoth pension and insurance provider for educators to dump its tobacco investments. Koop and the advocacy group Infact have mailed ballots to 1.8 million shareholders in the $200 billion Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association - College Retirement Equities Fund, asking them to back the sale of TIAA-CREF's $1.79 billion stake in tobacco companies.

Former US Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop has called on faculty and staff at US colleges and universities to "get out of the tobacco business," in which TIAA CREF-Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association/College Retirement Equities Fund-is heavily invested. It is "unconscionable," Koop said, that TIAA-CREF has $1.79 billion invested in 24 tobacco corporations-$1.45 billion in Philip Morris. One of Philip Morris' board members, Professor Elizabeth Bailey of The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania also sits on TIAA-CREF's board.

Why does all this matter? Why shouldn't an advertiser be free to pick its editorial environment? It should. But there is a big difference between, say, preferring People over Harper's and seeking direct influence at People or Harper's. Requesting a "sneak preview" amounts to a kind of insidious prior restraint. Because when a sponsor sees something it doesn't like, publishers, under pressure to maximize profits and not lose a single page of advertising, will be inclined to steer clear of the offending material.

When the state of Arizona began a multimillion-dollar anti-smoking campaign, officials decided to target youths by appealing to them in their own language. The slogan "Tobacco. Tumor causing, teeth staining, smelly puking habit," appeared almost everywhere beginning in 1996, emblazoned on T-shirts, billboards, caps, pens, key chains, boxer shorts and more across the state. It was the most visible part of a $30 million tobacco education and cessation program. It was tough. It was in your face. And with some kids, at least, it backfired. Just ask Ashley Lane, 16, whose friends donned the T-shirts so that they could be seen wearing them while smoking. Some even burned cigarette holes in the shirts. "We all thought it was a joke, basically. . . .

"Drug Use by Younger Teen-Agers Is Found Up" (news article, Oct. 29) focused on teen-age use of illicit drugs while downplaying the most significant factor of the study: the use of two legal drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, showed the strongest increases of any drug categories and were the only two drugs in which increases of two percentage points or more were registered. Monthly cigarette smoking rose to 35 percent among senior high school students, while monthly use of hard liquor rose to 29 percent. Alcohol and tobacco remain the drugs that teen-agers most widely abuse, yet we never hear Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the drug czar, talk about waging war on Bud.

Hager, 61, has tried to play down his career as a tobacco executive, in which he was involved in controversial nicotine research. He was hit by a hail of criticism early in his campaign after indicating that he did not believe nicotine was addictive. But the potential for sparks over Hager's work in the tobacco industry has not been realized. Payne, who represented thousands of tobacco growers in Southside while in Congress, has had close ties to the industry, which has contributed to his campaigns, including this one. Both candidates opposed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's efforts to regulate nicotine. And both reject any tobacco settlement that doesn't compensate growers for the economic hardship it might impose.

The tax proposal blunted issues that Democrats thought would be Beyer's big weapons -- his support for education and abortion rights -- and drowned out Beyer's efforts to portray Gilmore as a pawn of polluters, cigarette makers and the religious right.

The two sides are squabbling over what information the state has to give the companies so they can defend themselves. The state is balking, and the tobacco lawyers are telling Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Roger Kaufman why they need the information before next fall's trial. The industry also plans to argue that Arizona officials have known for years that youngsters were smoking and did nothing about it. That is designed to undermine the state's claim that tobacco companies should pay millions because they illegally targeted teens. But it is the state's financial interest in tobacco sales that is likely to form the heart of the industry's defense. Maledon said the state collected "substantial amounts" from its original 18-cent per pack tax and a special 40-cent levy approved by voters in 1994. "We want to know the extent to which the state has been involved in promoting cigarette consumption," Maledon told the judge. . . At the very least, Maledon said, the state acquiesced to tobacco consumption because it wanted the taxes.

With Christmas only seven weeks off, retailers are beseeching Santa to induce a giddy 1980s' deja vu, one that gets a greater range of consumers to behave like the yuppies of yore, shamelessly splurging on cashmere, diamonds, and $400 ballpoint pens from Italy. Neiman Marcus is ready for this crew. For the right price, the retailer can arrange for a cigar lover to spend time at a villa on a tobacco plantation in the Dominican Republic. As he lolls about, hundreds of cigars will be hand-rolled on the premises, each graced with his personalized cigar band. Such luxury retailers, which were dealt the hot hand in last year's season, expect to have another good holiday.

The Republicans, meanwhile, tapped a rich vein of corporate donors, with tobacco companies supplying more than $5 million. Republicans, too, found novel ways to exploit the generosity of big donors.

Tobacco has long fomented controversy -- as evidenced by an almost forgotten tobacco war fought in Kentucky and Tennessee just after the turn of the century. . . The shape ultimately taken by the proposed tobacco settlement remains to be seen, but it will require the wisdom of Solomon.

A talented deal-maker, Carlton chafes at being thought of as a villain. "We're trying to work the damn thing out. I'm trying to play a role in making peace here." . . During the tobacco talks, Carlton was "primarily a facilitator," said Stan Chesley, a negotiator for the class-action plaintiffs. Carlton was there to "break up the fights." . . He told a Senate panel in September that cigarette makers can't pony up more than the $368 billion they agreed to. "A billion dollars just isn't what it used to be," he said, eliciting laughter.

• 11/01/97 S. CAROLINA Top Court Rules Viable Fetus Due Protection as "Person" The New York Times/San Diego Union-Tribune
  
  Lawyers for Whitner, who plan to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, say that giving a fetus the same legal status as a child will have dire consequences: If women who use drugs during pregnancy can be prosecuted for child abuse, they say, what about women who drink or smoke while pregnant, or fail to get prenatal care? "If fetus is a person, everything a pregnant women does is potentially child abuse, abortion is murder, and women lose the right to make medical decisions on their own behalf during pregnancy," said Lynn Paltrow, a reproductive-rights lawyer from New York who represented Whitner. "The effect of declaring fetal personhood is to declare the pregnant woman's non-personhood."
• 10/31/97 FLORIDA Court Says Hurting One's Fetus Isn't a Crime The New York Times
  
  In 1992, for example, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that a pregnant woman who used cocaine could not be held criminally liable for passing drugs to her fetus. In that decision, and in Ms. Ashley's case, the court cited the American Medical Association's position opposing criminal sanctions against pregnant women for behavior that harms the fetus, and favoring rehabilitation, rather than imprisonment, for such women.
• 10/31/97 CALIFORNIA: Employers May be Sued over Injury to Fetus, Court Says LA Times
  
  Ruling by the state Supreme Court means that for the first time, children harmed by mothers' exposure to workplace hazards can seek damage awards.

U.S. government scientists said on Tuesday they had found a new function for a brain receptor that could link smoking, Alzheimer's and epilepsy. They found the receptor, known as the nicotinic receptor, on a brain cell in rats and said this shed light on the function of chemicals in the brain. The brain cells are known as interneurons and are found in the hippocampus, the part of the brain linked with learning and memory, Susan Jones and Jerrel Yakel of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, reported. . . This particular receptor is designed to let acetylcholine -- a neurotransmitter or message-carrying chemical -- deliver its information into the cell. It is also the receptor that nicotine acts on -- thus its name and its role in smoking. Yakel said the receptor could shed light on studies that show nicotine can sometimes help the memories of people with Alzheimer's.

Even low-level exposure from such sources as automobile emissions and cigarette smoke can cause long-term, permanent damage, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. Scientists have known for some time about a link between smoking and artereosclerosis, commonly known as hardening of the arteries. The new research suggests that there may be other diseases that could have their roots in the cumulative effects of low-level exposure to carbon monoxide. These findings come from a better understanding on how the deadly gas affects the body's blood cells. . . The researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center exposed cultured cow cells to carbon monoxide concentrations that could be encountered in everyday situations. Then they studied the chemical reactions within the cells and discovered that carbon monoxide quickly interferes with the normal functions of another gaseous molecule in the bloodstream: nitric oxide.

Doctors are more likely to counsel well-to-do patients than poor ones to lose weight and exercise, and they more frequently tell poor patients to quit smoking, according to a study. Regardless of the advice, poor patients are much more likely to heed it than wealthier ones, said the study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. Overall, doctors varied a lot in counseling patients to change unhealthy behaviors, though such counseling can lead to change. The study is based on a survey of 6,549 Massachusetts state employees in 12 health plans last year. Only 73 percent of doctors discussed exercise, 70 percent discussed diet, 61 percent discussed stress, 53 percent discussed smoking . . .

Nutraceutix Inc. (NUTX) said initial shipments of its proprietary calcium D-glucarate product, intended for ex-smokers, will begin this month. The nutritional supplement, to be marketed by Weider Nutrition International Inc. (WNI) under an agreement disclosed last month, is believed to offer some protection from the cancer-causing agents found in tobacco products.

John Brier Jr. has seen firsthand the influence of money, he said, and what big companies can do with their profits. While in Russia last summer he saw a "mobile disco," huge tents containing a dance club paid for by a giant tobacco company, that was moved from city to city by big trucks painted with cigarette advertising. To get in, you had to show that you had bought five packs of their cigarettes -- no money allowed. "That's clearly drug-dealer mentality," Brier said. "Move into the neighborhood, get 'em hooked, move on." . . . He doesn't feel like he has time to wait for the Legislature to act: It's a public health crisis, he said, so he has to act fast. "It's so hard to get things done when you've got special intersts, lobbies. . . . I'll bring it to the people." But bringing it to the people isn't so easy if you're working full time, he said; he is coordinator of a program at the University of Maine at Augusta. He started the petition last year, but now "it's at a standstill.

Carlson made the demand in a confidential letter to state Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III last month. Now Humphrey's office is charging that Carlson is trying to undercut the state's case. . . If settlement talks begin in Minnesota's case, "we will be at the table," said the governor's spokeswoman, Jackie Renner. "Not a chance," replied Eric Johnson, chief aide for Humphrey.

Gov. Arne Carlson, a bystander for three years in the state's lawsuit against cigarette makers, is demanding a seat at the bargaining table if tobacco companies seek a last-minute settlement with Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III. The demand, made in a confidential letter to Humphrey last month, has provoked charges by Humphrey's office that Carlson is trying to undercut the state's consumer-fraud case against Big Tobacco.

Fairfax and Arlington counties plan to ask legislators in Richmond next year for the right to raise their local cigarette taxes by as much as 15 cents a pack, an effort that local board members say will discourage smoking while bringing in some much-needed cash. The two jurisdictions currently have a 5-cent-a-pack tax on cigarettes, compared with neighboring cities such as Falls Church and Alexandria, which have a 25-cent tax.

"THEY HAVE YOUR KIDS." I can remember covering the Lexington tobacco market as a reporter in 1967 -- and people _brought_ their kids. . . Opening day on the market was like a holiday back then. It wasn't called "golden burley" just for its color. It meant money -- a steady influx of cash into Lexington from Thanksgiving to February, with most of it coming before the Christmas holiday.

"Legislators and government officials can enact health and safety regulations to protect patrons and employees in restaurants and in bars from the toxins in secondhand tobacco smoke without fear of adverse economic consequences," Glantz and Smith wrote.

"People go to bars to drink, not to smoke," Glantz says. National Smokers Alliance president Thomas Humber says the research is "garbage" and riddled with errors. "The subject that he is attempting to study cannot be studied the way (Glantz) tries to do it," Humber says. One major problem, he says, is that the study does not take into account whether smoke-free ordinances are enforced.

Following the release of Evans' report, a Smokers Alliance-backed organization called Californians for Scientific Integrity sued UCSF and the University of California, charging scientific misconduct and misuse of public funds. The suit demanded access to data used to support Glantz's findings. Although a Sacramento Superior Court judge initially rebuffed the lawsuit in July, on Friday he issued an order barring Glantz from erasing e-mail in his computer pending a hearing on several motions related to the case. According to Jeffrey Speich, the Sacramento attorney representing Californians for Scientific Integrity, Glantz last week acknowledged erasing e-mail despite the plaintiff's demand for records. Glantz could not be reached yesterday for comment on the court order.

Sales tax revenues from seven California cities and counties suggest that banning smoking in bars is not bad for business, says a study in the American Journal of Public Health. Previous studies had concluded bans did not hurt restaurant business. The new study, in Tuesday's issue of the American Public Health Association's journal, argues bars aren't hurt, either. The tobacco industry-funded National Smokers Alliance denounced the study as containing "a myriad of factual errors and misrepresentations." . . . After re-examining Glantz's earlier study, the public health association issued a scathing attack on the smokers' group. The NSA's arguments were "a melange of scientifically inadmissible manipulations of data," wrote journal editor Dr. Mervyn Susser of Columbia University. He said the smokers' group's "aim is to destroy his (Glantz's) career."

Some nations, such as Britain, impose taxes on liquor and tobacco that are many times higher than their neighbors. As a result, many Britons ride the ferries so that they can stock up on cheaper alcohol and tobacco in France, with savings more than the price of passage.

CONDE NAST SPORTS FOR WOMEN . . . launched its first issue last month. Time Warner Inc. came out this fall with its second quarterly issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED WOMEN/SPORTS . . . The two magazines take somewhat different approaches . . . but both say they are after the same market: sports-minded young women. Both are thick with ads from car, cosmetics, cigarette, shoe and financial services companies.

Martin Feldman, a tobacco analyst with Smith Barney & Co., said tobacco contributed so little to ShopKo's revenue that it was not worth the potential embarrassment should sales inadvertently be made to underage youths. But "the more stores that cut the sales of cigarettes, the more valuable it is for the remaining stores," Feldman said.

"Bravo," said Taku Ronsman, coordinator of the Brown County Tobacco-Free Coalition. "ShopKo is setting a good example for other family stores and we hope some of the other stores like Kmart and Wal-Mart will follow their lead. "Hopefully, someday, the only place you'll be able to buy tobacco is basically an adult place like a liquor or tobacco store."

ShopKo Stores Inc. (SKO) ended the sale of tobacco products in its 130 specialty discount retail stores, effective Nov. 3. In a press release Monday, ShopKo said the reasons for the discontinuation were declining sales and profitability and changing consumer lifestyles.

In 1994, ShopKo's 15 Utah stores eliminated tobacco products from their inventories with no negative feedback from consumers. Since 1994, selected ShopKo stores have stopped selling tobacco products, in part due to local ordinances regulating the merchandising of cigarettes in retail stores.

Standard Commercial Corporation (NYSE:STW) today reported September 30 second quarter earnings of $5.3 million, up 81.3% from $2.9 million a year earlier.

[H]ow do you make money off the Internet? For Lawrence Amoruso, the answer has been simple: sell cigars, and lots of them. . . As his Web site points out, the businessman "proudly" accepts Diners Club, American Express, Visa, and MasterCard. And therein lies the rub. Amoruso is a convicted felon--a credit card cheat, no less--who launched his cigar business only months after completing a federal prison term.

3. You have a smoke-free workplace and the rule is well-posted. No smoking anywhere in the building. You catch an employee sneaking a few puffs in the restroom during work hours. He says you cannot fire him because you often offer counseling to employees who come to you for help with drug or alcohol problems and nicotine is no different. . . ANSWERS 3. False. You have only offered counseling to employees who confess to a problem and ask for assistance. This worker did neither. So long as your policies are applied consistently and you have never offered counseling in lieu of termination in a similar circumstance, you can terminate the worker.

If Sen. Dorothy Rupert's draft of a bill that would ban smoking in cars carrying children younger than 16 makes it out of committee, Colorado's smokers are going to be fuming. . . The senator says she expects to get some serious flak from smokers. She's already been labeled a Nazi by one caller, and discussed slippery slopes with another. But maybe it'll be like the seat-belt legislation, she says, and even if the bill doesn't pass right away, people will at least start to think about the risk to their children's health.

Wilner's case, on behalf of ailing John Keegan against Reynolds and Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp, a unit of B.A.T Industries Plc (BATS.L), was postponed to Feb. 2 in Duval County Court, a Reynolds spokeswoman said. . . An ally of Wilner, attorney Howard Acosta, was also scheduled to go to trial on Monday on a smoker's claim against Brown & Williamson and Reynolds in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Fla. But an assistant to Acosta said that trial had been pushed back to an undetermined date later this month or in December because of court conflicts with scheduled criminal trials.

Cigarette smoking among teen-agers is once again on the rise, particularly among girls, despite overwhelming evidence that smoking can cause their skin to wrinkle prematurely, impair their breathing capacity and ruin their health, not to mention making them smell like an ashtray. In the new survey, 14 percent of high school girls said they smoked several cigarettes to a pack or more a week. Two-thirds of the smokers said they used cigarettes to relieve stress; half said they were influenced by other smokers. . . All told, 39 percent of girls in grades 5 through 12 reported either smoking , drinking or using drugs in the past month.

A study of adult diabetics in Italy found that smokers had double the risk of premature death than nonsmoking diabetics. Researchers at Mario Negri Institute of Pharmacological Research in Bergamo, Italy, examined medical and death records of 3,385 patients with adult-onset (Type 2) diabetes during an 18-month period ending June 31. The annual death rate among smokers was 1.3 percent, compared to 0.6 percent for the nonsmokers. "It was an enormous difference," said Dr. Giuseppe Remuzzi, one of the researchers. The results were presented Monday at the American Society of Nephrology's 30th annual meeting in San Antonio.

The number of active lawsuits against the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. has almost doubled since a year ago, according to a regulatory document. As of Oct. 25, there were 506 cases pending against the company, the U.S. tobacco unit of RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp. (RN), compared with 267 cases as of October 1996. . . Of the pending cases, 500 are in the U.S., two are in Canada, three are in Puerto Rico and one is in Guam.

Shares of Brooke Group Ltd. (BGL) posted double-digit gains to a 52-week high Thursday, but neither the company nor an analyst had a specific reason for the activity. APS Financial Corp. analyst Joel D. Luton said the stock has been rising on speculation that Brooke's Liggett Group Inc. unit might

Boyz II Men took to Washington, D.C. on Tuesday to meet with Health and Human Services secretary Donna Shalala about helping President Clinton's campaign against teen smoking. Boyz II Men will soon be seen in a poster reading "Smoke free, it's the new evolution." The slogan is a more-than-casual nod to the group's new album, "Evolution," which has so far spawned the hit "Four Seasons Of Loneliness."

Major foreign tobacco producers to benefit most . . . Russia's State Duma is soon to consider finance ministry's proposal calling for an increase in cigarette excise tax rate. . . The planned move is bound to primarily affect the low income group of smokers who can hardly afford to spend an additional 7,000- 10,000 a month. On the other hand, expensive brands smokers will most likely ignore the retail price hikes involved. Domestic cigarette factories are projected to sustain significant loses due to the planned move, warns Russia's tobacco products manufacturers association Tabakprom.

But now as Congress gets ready to consider the future of the nation's tobacco policy, lawmakers, cigarette companies and regulators will confront one of the most contentious and complex issues in that debate: Are less-dangerous cigarettes possible and, if so, how should they be regulated and sold? "We have skirted around this issue for decades," said David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. "These products need to be regulated and criteria need to be developed so the science can be done to know whether they are safer." The proposed settlement . . . includes a provision that encourages manufacturers to develop and market "less-hazardous tobacco" products. . . That will leave federal officials to grapple with the twin tasks of how to regulate these cigarettes and what advertising claims to allow.

Some cigarette smokers are starting to roll their own or buy cheaper brands. Others are fuming and grumbling. But dealers said Monday that most smokers are just digging deeper and quietly coughing up the extra 37 cents per pack in taxes. "They're ugly, they're not happy at all," said Priscilla Goodine of the Discount Cigarette Outlet in Brewer

UST Inc. (UST) today announced that in cooperation with the United War Veterans' Council of New York County (UWVC), it will sponsor the Veterans Day Parade in New York City, November 11, 1997. The Company's sponsorship will include up to $50,000 in matching donations for contributions made to the UWVC by residents of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. The Company will launch the program with a print advertisement in newspapers in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County (NY), New Jersey and southern Connecticut. The ad urges the public to attend the parade and to "come honor the people who've brought honor to America." Referring to the matching donation, the ad explains that the funds raised will help support Veterans Day parades in New York City "for years to come." In addition to its matching donation and the ad, UST employees will serve as parade volunteers

Virginia Supreme Court . . . on Friday overturned a state board's decision to grant workers' compensation to a 41-year-old Augusta County sheriff's deputy who said he suffered a heart attack because of job-related stress. The county had denied the claim, citing the deputy's habit of smoking 2 1/2 packs of cigarettes a day.

"Our statistics show that 17 percent of our riding population are kids, many of whom travel without parental supervision. We're not just in the business of generating revenue. We are a member of the community." The CTA provides about 1.4 million rides a day. If approved today by the CTA's transit services committee, the measure would go before the full board at its meeting next Wednesday. It would be effective immediately for new contracts, but current agreements would be allowed to expire.

A study released yesterday by the Social Investment Forum suggested that the movement is becoming mainstream with one of every 10 investment dollars under professional management using environmental or social causes as criteria. . . The study found that much of the backlash is directed against tobacco companies, which agreed to a $368.5 billion settlement of lawsuits filed by states over the costs of treating sick smokers. The study found that money managers divested $157 billion in tobacco stocks during the past two years, up from the $6.6 billion in 1995.

Socially and environmentally responsible investments have topped $1 trillion in assets, bolstered by a backlash against investing in tobacco companies and a strong stock market, a new survey says. Part 2

Fueled in part by a backlash against tobacco, assets in socially responsible investments have jumped 85 percent to $1.185 trillion since 1995, according to a report released yesterday. Socially responsible investing now accounts for about 9 percent of the $13.7 trillion in U.S. funds under professional management, says the study by the Social Investment Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group. "Social investing is spreading by word of mouth," said Alisa Gravitz, vice president of the Forum. "People are saying, `hey, I know a way to do investing where I can provide for my family and sleep well at night.' " Although socially responsible investing can be abstract at times, the well-publicized health risks of tobacco products have crystallized the concept for many investors, Gravitz said. "Investors don't want to make money on products that kill people."

"A settlement will lessen the ethical stigma," said Harvard Business School professor Joseph Badaracco, who also heads a student-faculty advisory committee on shareholder responsibility issues that advised the university to eliminate tobacco stocks from its endowment and pension fund portfolios in 1991. "The polity will have spoken. If everybody signs off on the deal, protest will become more difficult and almost futile."

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., the nation's second-biggest cigarette maker, has opened two smoking lounges in Southeast shopping malls in a test that may do more than provide a welcome refuge to smokers. The lounges hint at how cigarette companies will market products under strict regulations under a proposed settlement of health-related lawsuits. The stores appear to be precursors to nationwide chains of cigarette-only shops.

"A Forum to Fight Hunger" will bring together leading national and regional experts -- those in the trenches of the battle against hunger every day -- and Corporate America -- the problem-solvers of today's most successful businesses -- to explore the issue of hunger and discuss what can be done about it. The forum will take place Thursday, Nov. 6 at the world headquarters of Philip Morris International, 800 Westchester Ave., Rye Brook, N.Y., from 4 to 5:45 p.m. At the conference, Philip Morris Companies Inc., the nation's largest corporate funder of programs to combat hunger, will announce that it has committed $2,000,000 in grants to hunger organizations in New York State this year.

Loews Corp. said third-quarter net income fell 49%, as a result of investment losses and charges relating to the settlement of tobacco litigation in Florida and Mississippi.

"Washington is corrupt, and parts of it are absolutely rotten," he said at a news conference attended by dozens of dark-suited aides and Reform Party backers. "Where is the outrage? Where is the shame?" The occasion for his criticism was the filing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco of a suit asking that certain federal election laws be declared unconstitutional and that the Reform Party and the 1996 Perot presidential campaign be paid damages. . . `During the campaign, we were severely penalized," Perot said yesterday. "Our standards in the Reform Party are much higher: We don't ask if it is legal or illegal, we ask if it is right or wrong." The purpose of the lawsuit, said Perot, is "to get the cost of campaigns down" and "level the playing field" for all candidates.

As the first legislation modeled on the proposed $368 billion settlement with the tobacco industry makes its way to Congress, state Medicaid officials are receiving a letter from the federal Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA, pronounced "hicva"). The letter reminds them that the Social Security Act requires states to pay the federal government a share of any money they recover in Medicaid-related actions -- including present and any future settlements with tobacco companies.

They just say no to reporters' requests to attend the intimate briefings and special receptions promised to contributors who gathered here for a $6 million fund-raising dinner tonight for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They will, however, tell which big givers are coming to dinner. NRSC spokesman Mike Russell said the dinner will be open to the press but that the associated events for big givers will be off-limits. . . But Russell cheerfully provided a list of the dinner leadership, those who helped bring in the big bucks. The dinner's general chairman was Robert Wood Johnson IV of Johnson & Johnson Cos., with the Washington, D.C., fund-raising led by lobbyist William E. Timmons. Dinner vice chairmen (those who contributed or raised $100,000 or more) included Philip Morris Cos. . . Among those giving at the $45,000 level were Arco, Federal Express Corp., International Paper Co., MCI Communications Corp., Pfizer Inc., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., the Smokeless Tobacco Council, Travelers Group Inc., United Parcel Service of America Inc., U.S. West Inc. and the Tobacco Institute.

The rise in the use of filter cigarettes coincides with an increase in the amount of adenocarcinoma, or cancers found at the periphery of the lungs, the research found. Such cancers were considered very rare in the 1950s, but have become the most common form of lung cancer, displacing squamous cell carcinomas found in the central bronchi of the lungs.

Filter-tipped cigarettes with milder tobacco actually have increased the incidence of one type of lung cancer because smokers have to inhale more deeply to get a jolt of nicotine, a study suggests. The use of filtered, low-tar cigarettes closely parallels the increase of a type of cancer that occurs deep in the lung, said Dr. Clark W. Heath Jr. of the American Cancer Society. . . This change in smoking habits, he said, now is thought to be responsible for the rapid rise in adenocarcinoma, a lung cancer which occurs in the small air sacs and tubes deep in the lung. In the study, researchers analyzed the types of lung cancer reported in the Connecticut Tumor Registry from 1959 through 1991. During that period, the deaths from adenocarcinoma in Connecticut increased from .9 to 15.2 cases per 100,000 person-years for women and from 2.4 to 23.2 cases per 100,000 person-years for men.

Changes in cigarette design have not made smoking safer but instead altered the kinds of lung cancer that people get, researchers reported on Tuesday. Writing in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the researchers said people were now developing more adenocarcinomas -- a kind of cancer found deep in the smallest passageways of the lungs.

The campaign finance and lobbying disclosure laws in Arizona are so weak that it is not possible to quantify the exact amount of money the tobacco industry is spending to influence policy making in that state, it is clear that the tobacco industry has intensified its lobbying efforts in the Legislature.

Making his first run for elective office, onetime tobacco executive John H. Hager captured Virginia's lieutenant governorship yesterday, upsetting former representative L.F. Payne Jr. and giving the GOP a chance for effective control of the state Senate through his tie-breaking vote. . . Nor was Payne able to capitalize on Hager's career as a tobacco executive during which Hager was involved in controversial nicotine research. Payne, who represented thousands of tobacco growers in Southside Virginia while in Congress, has close ties to the industry, which has contributed to his campaigns.

In 1988, when the New Orleans City Council first passed an ordinance regulating smoking in public places, restaurateurs fretted that the new law would hurt their business. Nine years later, with anti-smoking sentiments at a peak, restaurants are responding to an increasing demand from their customers to go completely smoke-free.

In the case involving second-hand smoke and flight attendants, the plaintiffs received no money at all. "The flight attendant settlement provides not a single dollar for any of the class members directly," says Morrison. Instead the settlement requires $300 million for the creation of a foundation devoted to fighting smoking-related diseases. In this instance, says Morrison, it¹s clear that some of those injured might have been better off pursuing their own cases.

Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala is quite the recruiter . . . Now she's set her sights on Boyz II Men, to serve as poster boyz for President Clinton's campaign to curtail youth smoking. Nate Morris, Mike McCary and Shawn Stockman met with Shalala yesterday (Wanya Morris has a cold). The Grammy-winning vocalists are hoping to make a public service announcement and stomp on smoking at their concerts.

Trick-or-treaters at David Putnam's house got some of the former mixed in with the latter, police say. Putnam, 34, was charged with providing tobacco to minors after he allegedly put individual cigarettes into the bags of some trick-or-treaters last Friday, Sgt. Jim Steffen said Tuesday. "When the officer spoke with him, he admitted that there were cigarettes in with the candy he was passing out," Steffen said. "He stated, `It would be a good lesson.' I don't know exactly what that means, but that's what he said."

It's out there in cyberspace, on television, on the streets. It's out of control because not even the Supreme Court knows how to define it. It's free speech - that democratic principle imbedded by James Madison in the U.S. Constitution and so dear to Americans that they were willing to die for it. But a lot can happen in 210 years, said First Amendment experts Ronald Collins and David Skover. . . Entertainment and money have become the cultural standard for dictating how many Americans live and think. They have seeped into nearly every form of the mass media in a way that Madison never anticipated, said Collins, co-author of the 1996 book, "Death of Discourse." . . [Madison] wanted to ensure that citizens could speak out against government without losing their lives. In modern times, however, the courts have embraced arguments that balloon First Amendment protection far beyond its original purpose. . . "Somehow I have a hard time conceiving of James Madison willing to die for tobacco advertising," Collins said.

Fifteen million American children -- or more than one in five youngsters -- were exposed to secondhand smoke at home last year, the government said Thursday. About 41 percent of adult smokers lived with children in 1996, and in most of those homes, smoking was permitted, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

So-called light cigarettes are just as dangerous as regular ones, in part because smokers unwittingly cover up the air holes around the filter that are supposed to dilute the cancer-causing agents, government scientists said Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that two-thirds of U.S. smokers don't know the vents along the side of the cigarette are there to reduce the tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide in smoke. One reason: The holes are almost impossible to see.

Philip Morris Cos. plans to launch an ultra low-tar version of its Marlboro cigarette in January, marking the first major addition to the company's powerhouse brand in six years. The move raised speculation that the company, which has been test-marketing Marlboro Ultra Lights for several years, is scrambling to get the new product on the market before Congress passes sweeping tobacco legislation. Philip Morris dismissed such talk as "nonsense." "We are launching Ultra Lights because we think it makes good business sense and rounds out the brand portfolio," a spokeswoman said. "We wanted to offer the consumer a wide variety of choices."

On the House Commerce Committee alone, Chairman Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.) and committee staff, both majority and minority, have taken upward of 100 trips this year, courtesy of Philip Morris Cos., the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the National Hydropower Association, the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Cable Television Association, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association and the National Oilseed Processors Association. "The public has this idea that there are no more freebies and it's simply not true," said Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity. . . Tom Lauria of the Tobacco Institute said issues facing the industry "are incredibly complicated and 20-minute office visits sometimes are insufficient for the necessary communication. . . . The last time we looked, it was a democracy and we were allowed to talk to one another." Asked why it was important to communicate in the palatial gold-and-marble setting of the Phoenecian, Lauria said: "That's irrelevant. Most Washingtonians would prefer to dine at The Palm than at McDonald's. I wonder why." The Tobacco Institute would not disclose the attendees or cost of the trip, but a review of the disclosure forms showed the cost exceeding $66,000.

One of the issues they tackled was the thorny question of smoking. Lastman said he'd like to see smoke-free bars and restaurants across the unified city by the year 2000. "Our position on smoking is that smoking will not be permitted by the year 2000," said Lastman. Both Lastman and Hall faced a revolt from bar and restaurant owners when they tried to restrict smoking in their respective cities earlier this year - although Hall's troubles were more serious. Hall said because of the controversy the city's bylaw created, she's wary of setting a specific target date for a smoking ban. "I don't think (we can) pick a specific date. The year 2000 would be wonderful but I know what happened when we did it prematurely in Toronto and I want to avoid that kind of situation again," Hall said, following the debate.

Tobacco farmers filed into feed and farm-supply stores across North Carolina yesterday to decide whether to continue to pay for a tobacco-research program. The levy -- 10 cents for every 100 pounds of leaf tobacco farmers sell -- raises about $500,000 a year for research into new disease-resistant tobacco strains and pest control, among other things. The assessment costs growers about $2.50 an acre.

Tobacco growers in the Triangle and across the state will vote today on whether to continue the annual research and education assessment they have paid since 1991.

Mississippi Attorney General Michael Moore, kicking off a campaign against teen smoking, said Friday that the state would be free of all pro-tobacco billboard advertising by the end of January. As part of Mississippi's landmark July 3 settlement of its Medicaid lawsuit against the tobacco industry, officials said 120 billboards, most of them currently carrying tobacco ads, would be covered with messages against teen smoking in the next few weeks. . . "Your parents did it. How cool can it be?"

Mack Brown lights up a cigarette. . . "What can we do to shut them down?" he yells to his defensive coord inator. "Hell if I know," the coordinator says. "Hey, you got an extra smoke?" "Sure," Brown replies, digging into his shirt pocket for a Camel. The assistant fires up and exhales a plume of smoke. . . Uh-oh. Another FSU touchdown and the game is slipping away. The beaten defense trudges to the sideline. "Man, I'm . . . whew . . . out of ppppphhh . . . breath," one defender pants. "Anyone got a 'Boro?"

General Cigar Holdings Inc., a New York-based company, says it began using the Cohiba name in the United States as early as 1978. But it was not until this year that lawyers for Habanos formally challenged that trademark, saying its property, which takes its name from an Indian word for tobacco, had been illegally expropriated. "It is very disconcerting that a serious company would try to appropriate the name of one of the most famous and sought-after cigars in the world by taking advantage of the inability of Habanos to enter the U.S. market," said Ana Lopez, the Cuban company's marketing director. She described the rival Cohiba as "a fraud" that "neither offers the superior characteristics of the Haban

Contrary to the impression created by CRC and others, tobacco companies have set up strict research-funding guidelines to ensure the integrity of the projects they fund. To receive BAT funding, for example, scientists must submit a proposal for review by a panel of consultants and independent scientists, wholly separated from BAT. . . Scientists claim the research as their own, demonstrating that BAT does not seek to influence the outcomes. One of the largest tobacco companies, Philip Morris, often gives money with no strings attached to a specific department in a university. If it does decide to fund a specific project, it sets up an independent board of experts in their field to monitor the research. As a spokeswoman for Philip Morris noted, "What good would it do us to have just a bunch of tobacco experts on the board?" . . . A private charity or research organ is free to discriminate against industries or companies it finds offensive, but a line has surely been crossed when governments endorse interference in scientific research and seek to abridge the free-speech rights of an industry they have not chosen to outlaw.

Kentucky led the nation with 31.6 percent of its residents puffing, an increase of 1.8 percent in 1996. . The information is part of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, today. Alyssa Easton, a CDC epidemiologist told UPI said one of the disturbing findings of the study was a 1-percent rise in the number of smokers in the United States. Easton says the increase is mostly among children who then become addicted to nicotine and that, "the younger they start the more they smoke." . . She admitted that some of the increase may be a result in the change of definition of what a smoker is. In the past only people who smoked daily were included, in the current survey those who smoked occasionally are included.

"In 1992, the Environmental Protection Agency classified ETS as a Group A carcinogen known to cause cancer in humans. The primary source of ETS is in the home," CDC officials state. They add that children exposed to ETS are at increased risk for sudden infant death syndrome, respiratory tract infections, asthma, and middle ear infections. "The findings in this report underscore the need for continued national and state-level public health initiatives to reduce cigarette smoking and children's exposure to ETS in the home," the agency states.

Centering on a newly married woman whose husband is killed at war, "it's about the need to let his spirit go so he can rest," [Wendy] Knox said. She was drawn to the script four summers ago when she saw it at PlayLabs, the Playwrights' Center's new-play festival. "It's beautiful and poetic, looking at this relation between passion and grief," said Knox. "And it's a great Girl Play. I saw four women onstage smoking cigars and I thought, 'This is great!' "Cigars are chic now but they weren't then. You probably could trace the trend of cigar-smoking directly to PlayLabs," she said.

Although Minnesota politicians frequently float higher cigarette taxes as a method of financing some controversial project -- a baseball stadium, for example -- the Legislature has turned back several increases, some tied to antismoking proposals, in recent years; the rate has been at 48 cents since 1993 and now ranks 15th in the nation. Meanwhile, smoking rates in Minnesota, like most of the rest of the country, are on the rise.

Big Tobacco's lawyers don't think so. They have launched a new legal assault on the state's consumer-fraud lawsuit, hoping that a judge will toss out key allegations before the case gets to a jury in January. . . . Three days of arguments over these and other issues are scheduled next week before Ramsey County District Judge Kenneth Fitzpatrick. He is expected to rule on the motions in December.

Hundreds of thousands of current and former smokers may be eligible for veterans benefits under a new ruling that says the government is obligated to compensate men and women who got hooked on cigarettes during their service. The Department of Veterans Affairs has received some 7,000 tobacco-related claims, including hundreds that have come in since the VA's general counsel issued an opinion this year saying the agency can grant benefits to disabled smokers. . . But veterans might want to hurry, because the VA is pushing Congress to end the benefit. . . . VA spokesman Ken McKinnon said veterans should contact their regional VA office or dial the VA's toll-free number, 1-800-827-1000, to inquire about filing a claim.

If Canada's anti-smoking legislation is to have any teeth, it's time for Health Minister Allan Rock to say a firm No to the tobacco lobby and its cash-hungry protégés. Former health minister Dave Dingwall, under pressure from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, pledged to amend the Tobacco Act to allow cigarette logos on racing cars and drivers' uniforms. Now other sports groups, cultural organizations and arts promoters want equal treatment. If Rock exempts them from restrictions on tobacco sponsorship, the act will be worthless by the time it comes into effect next October.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., the nation's second-biggest cigarette maker, has opened two smoking lounges in Southeast shopping malls in a test that may do more than provide a welcome refuge to smokers. The lounges hint at how cigarette companies will market products under strict regulations under a proposed settlement of health-related lawsuits. The stores appear to be precursors to nationwide chains of cigarette-only shops. "The tobacco industry is gearing up for life in a strictly regulated environment," said Kenneth Harris, a consultant who follows tobacco retailing for Cannondale Associates of Evanston. "Cigarette companies are taking destiny into their own hands." . . Mike Stephens, an Alpharetta activist, said he'll no longer bring his children to shop at the mall that sanctions what he calls "a cancer lounge."

Bridgeport - Robert Auger, who has emphysema, blew up his home Saturday by trying to smoke a cigarette while breathing with the help of an oxygen tank. The tank "went off like a bomb," said Acting Asst. Fire Chief John Currivan. Auger was treated for minor injuries.

Now U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and U.S. Rep. Michael Bili rakis, R-St. Petersburg, are filing legislation in Congress aimed at exempting states that win money in lawsuits against the tobacco industry from sharing any of it with the federal government. "To put it in simple terms, we feel the federal government ought to keep its hands off Florida's dollars," Graham said Saturday.

As of this month, Le Mirador Hotel and Spa in Switzerland is banning smoking in all of its public places. Smoking is not banned entirely, however. Smokers are welcome in separately ventilated lounge and a small number of smoking-optional rooms, each equipped with a ventilation system that will prevent smoke from getting into any other park of the hotel. . . Web site: www.mirador.ch.

Two major European surveys produced this week show that for Irish students drugs, both legal and illegal, clearly are working. More worrying perhaps is the evidence that warnings from the Government about the health effects of alcohol, cigarettes and illegal drugs, as well as efforts to restrict teenagers' access to them, are not working. The European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) revealed that Irish 16-year-old students are top of the class of 26 European countries in terms of binge drinking. They rank second, after students in the UK, when it comes to taking cannabis or any other illegal drugs and second, after their counterparts in the Faroe Islands, when it comes to smoking.

A bidding war between tobacco giants Philip Morris and British American Tobacco (BAT) has erupted in anticipation of China hosting a round of the Formula One Championship which organisers here are saying could be realised within three years. . . Joe Lim, director of the Zhuhai International Circuit (ZIC), said . . . "China is a big market and the tobacco firms will be interested. You will need big money to sponsor such an event. If there are less tobacco sponsorship restrictions, the more likely it is we can host it. We will try our best." It is believed that China has re-drafted its tobacco legislation to clear the way for cigarette manufacturers who invest more than US$1 million in an event to advertise their wares at the venue.

"There's no doubt the attorneys general have lost some clout over the tobacco deal," said Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate. "But they still have plenty of power in other areas. They used to focus primarily on door-to-door scams, but now they're after large companies. Given the lack of regulatory law for consumer protection, the attorneys general are definitely the big kids on the block right now."

But even if it flops, Nelson said, the York Manufacturing Facility on Merrimac Trail in York County is proving to be a valuable testing ground for new workplace practices at Philip Morris. "We thought while we're experimenting with doing something new here, why not open the door and try to do something in the way we organize the factory that's team-based?" he said. Decisions needed to be made quickly and in concert ‹ decidedly not the traditional way for large manufacturers. In 1993, Nelson assembled a team of 80 engineers, scientists, technicians, marketers and even lawyers to work together in what he called a "Skunk Works" at York . . . But Philip Morris was developing a stealth cigarette. Secrecy was paramount because competitors were working on similar technologies.

"Given the profit potential of a truly innovative, acceptable product, and the language of the settlement agreement dedicated to reduced-risk cigarettes, we believe the industry feels that an acceptable, safer cigarette can ultimately be developed," said David Adelman, tobacco industry analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. "Such a product could reduce the number of smokers who quit smoking because of health concerns," added Adelman . . . There's another potential benefit to the new "reduced-risk" cigarettes:"It could also encourage some ex-smokers to return to smoking and could improve the industry's overall public and juror perception," Adelman said. . . These two new products may have raised the ire of anti-tobacco activists, but Wall Street just loves them. Both Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter upgraded Philip Morris to a strong buy.

Q: A settlement has been proposed between the tobacco industry and the attorneys general in states that sued to recover the cost of smoking-related illnesses. What is your view of that plan? A: The so-called settlement ended up as a proposal that turns out to be a great deal for the tobacco industry.

David Hyde Pierce and Sela Ward will host the 19th annual CableACE Awards Saturday at 9 from the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, airing live on TNT. . . The nominees for Saturday . . . CHILDREN'S EDUCATIONAL OR INFORMATIONAL SPECIAL OR SERIES "Smoke Alarm: The Unfiltered Truth About Cigarettes," HBO

Eric Carl has won the 1997 Playwright Award from N.C. State's Thompson Theatre for his play "Goldenleaf."The drama, inspired by the life of Johnston County native Ava Gardner, concerns the return of an aging movie star to her home, the tiny North Carolina tobacco town of the title, 45 years after she left it.

Toledo, Ohio-based Owens Corning () and Fibreboard Corp. () sued in state court in Oakland claiming that the tobacco industry conspired to hide information about the addictive properties and health dangers of tobacco.

The action seeks to recover the tobacco companies' share for injuries to smokers exposed to asbestos whose claims were paid by Owens Corning and Fibreboard Corporation -- now a subsidiary of Owens Corning -- which total in the billions of dollars. The lawsuit takes advantage of the recent repeal of a 10-year ban on product liability lawsuits enjoyed by cigarette manufacturers in California . . . The complaint charges that now, when the extent of the tobacco companies' concealment and misrepresentation of the causes of these injuries is becoming clear, the tobacco companies have brokered a "tobacco settlement" to limit their liabilities. . . The suit was filed Thursday, November 6, in California State Court, Oakland, California.

For many smokers who want to quit, willpower alone isn't enough to beat the yearning. For them, smoking cessation products the Food and Drug Administration has approved may reduce the cravings and other withdrawal symptoms. To help him quit, Brissette used the nicotine patch, which is now available over-the-counter along with nicotine gum. Other stop-smoking aids, available only by prescription, include nicotine nasal spray and the nicotine inhaler, as well as a stop-smoking product in pill form. While these products can ease the symptoms resulting from the physical addiction to nicotine, group or individual counseling and encouragement from family and friends are critical to help address the mental dependence.

To complete the road show, you'll need a few more eager young recruits, 18-25 years of age, and of course a flashy new car. Put it all together now, the car, three young sales reps, a whole bunch of smokes for them to give away and the matches. Yes, lots of matches, lots of those Hollywood trick-stick matches...

Shareholders in the nationwide system for educators, who include many of the nation's college professors, voted 27.2% for divesting the fund of tobacco stocks and 67.4% against it, while 5.4% abstained from choosing. The vote is a victory for CREF management, which has firmly stood by its policy not to exclude tobacco stocks from its pension funds. Instead, the massive pension system in 1990 started a 'social choice' fund.

Participants in the College Retirement Equities Fund (CREF) have once again rejected a resolution urging CREF to divest its holdings in tobacco investments. . . Commenting on the vote, TIAA-CREF Chairman, President, and CEO John H. Biggs said, "CREF participants again have defeated this resolution decisively. In fact, today's vote is close to how participants voted on a very similar resolution a year ago." Biggs further said, "I continue to believe the real reason for the small vote supporting this resolution is that the CREF Social Choice Account gives TIAA-CREF participants an excellent tobacco-free option." Participants in the CREF accounts that can hold tobacco investments voted on the proposal.

New evidence suggests that certain groups, including women and the very young, are more vulnerable to environmental insults, such as exposure to cigarette smoke, hormones, or toxic pollutants. . . Only about 5% of cancers are solely due to genetic mutations, while 95% are due to an interaction between genes and environment. Researchers hope to use this increasing knowledge in the ongoing effort to prevent cancer, according to author Dr. Frederica P. Perera, of the Columbia University School of Public Health in New York. . . -- 1 out of 10 whites carries a readily activated form of an enzyme that increases lung cancer risk in smokers. . . -- Infants and children are at greater risk than adults from environmental toxins, such as nitrosamines, pesticides, tobacco smoke, radiation, and air pollution. -- Female smokers are up to three times as likely as males to develop lung cancer, despite similar smoking habits and intake. . . -- Black Americans have two to three times the risk of esophageal, liver, cervical and stomach cancer, and 50% higher risk of mouth, throat, lung, prostate and pancreatic cancer compared with whites. . . SOURCE: Science (1997;278:1068-1073)

Phoenix-based SINGLE STICK INC. is a 4-year-old packager and marketer of single cigarettes. Former Valley Bank of Arizona president and CEO Jack Wertheim has joined up as president and CEO. Advisory board members include Quinn Williams of Snell & Wilmer and Frank Callahan, a professor of international marketing at American Graduate School of International Management. . . . It's hard to understand why any of our Valley leaders would support a company that promotes a habit the American Lung Association of Arizona says kills 425,000 Americans every year. Single Stick execs, of course, are trying to put a healthy spin on the product. They say their product is aimed at helping people reduce smoking -- one cigarette at a time. But the Lung Association doesn't buy that pitch and neither do we. . . While we certainly support entrepreneurial vision and business growth in Arizona, our values clash when the money is to be made off an industry that ultimately costs lives and billions in health care dollars.

John R. "Jack" Nelson Jr., Philip Morris USA's development chief, has heard plenty of wisecracks about the new Accord battery-powered "smoking system." . . . The device has microchips that provide an even burn -- lighting eight strips of specially-prepared tobacco. And a bar on the side of the device tells how many puffs are left (the average number of puffs on the conventional cigarette is remarkably low: eight; thus the Accord doesn't shortchange smokers, Nelson said). "It mimics what the . . . smoker would see in a conventional cigarette which gets shorter as you puff," he said. The Accord has other gee-whiz features, such as a meter that shows how much power is left in its custom-made batteries. It also comes with a battery recharger. And it can be locked to keep children (at least young children) from smoking it.

"Now if I have a grandbaby in my arms and walk into a restaurant where somebody's smoking, I'll just walk out. I don't even want to have to breathe it." They are hardly the words one might expect from the tobacco industry's most visible representative in Washington, but J. Phil Carlton breaks the mold. . . "It's a new breed of leadership. . . They want to be in a legitimate enterprise, engaged in interstate commerce with a legal product for adults who have been warned about the risk," Carlton says. "I don't have any problem working for people who think that way."

"It really shows how insincere the industry is in its claim that it doesn't want to encourage young people to take up smoking." Opponents say the lounge, which opened in September, sends a message that cigarettes are so popular, smokers get their own special room. . . Lisa Shepherd, spokeswoman for North Point Mall, said mall managers didn't even consider that the lounge would tempt teens to smoke. At R.J. Reynolds' request, the lounge is open to those only 21 and older.

The safety chief for the Philip Morris plant in Concord will resign to head the N.C. Occupational Safety and Health Division.

Gov. Lawton Chiles has suspended one of his most-trusted lieutenants and ordered an investigation after learning that the aide took loans from an attorney he brought aboard the state's anti-tobacco team. The aide is Harold Lewis, one of Chiles' closest friends and an insider in the governor's circle. He serves as the governor's inspector general -- rooting out fraud and waste -- and played a key role in negotiating August's $11.3 billion settlement with the tobacco firms. The attorney is Tim Howard of Tallahassee, who joined the state's legal team in 1995 and is seeking a share of the tobacco settlement -- to the dismay of other lawyers who say Howard deserves his salary and nothing more.

A newly formed committee of teen-agers that advises the City Council on youth-related issues is considering recommending that the council make it illegal for teens like themselves to smoke cigarettes in public. The Advisory Committee of Teens, a group of about 15 teenagers who were appointed to the panel by the City Council in August, was formed in hopes of giving youngsters a first-hand look at the inner workings of local government and at the same time providing city leaders with some valuable teenage feedback.

This year alone, eight states have boosted cigarette taxes -- Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon, Rhode Island and Utah. And according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, seven others -- Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, Wisconsin and West Virginia -- will take up increases within the next six months.

Thirty-five years ago, Helene G. Brown remembers smoking a cigarette while working on a report linking tobacco with lung cancer. Since then, the 68-year-old director of community applications of research for the UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center's Division of Cancer Prevention and Control has quit smoking and worked to educate the public about cancer, its prevention and control. For her efforts, Brown was presented with the 1997 American Cancer Society Medal of Honor for public health at the national society's annual awards dinner Sunday, held in Los Angeles.

In the 1950s and 1960s, people were shamed by divorce, by children born out of wedlock and by failing to pay off debts. Times have changed, and people in the 1990s are shamed by wearing furs, smoking in public and eating red meat. Shame still exists in American culture, but the things people get red-faced about have changed considerably during the past generation, said James B. Twitchell, an English professor and author of For Shame: The Loss of Common Decency in American Culture." One major culprit is the advertising industry, he said.

Competitive Media Reporting, which tracks advertising, said Tuesday more than $34.2 billion was spent to advertise the leading U.S. brands and corporations in the first half of 1997. General Motors Corp led corporate spenders with $1.1 billion -- $286.7 million more than second-place Proctor & Gamble Co (NYSE:PG - news), CMR said in a statement. Rounding out the top five were Philip Morris Cos Inc (NYSE:MO - news), Chrysler Corp (NYSE:C - news) and Ford Motor Co (NYSE:F - news).

Signature Brands, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: FLVRD - news) has entered into negotiations with Plaintiffs in a previously announced lawsuit whereby Signature would rescind the transaction in which it acquired IntraState Cigar Corporation. If the negotiations result in an agreement, Signature would have no assets or operations.

Shares in U.K.-based B.A.T Industries PLC fell 1.5 pence to 533.5 pence on the London Stock Exchange at 0246 GMT as rumors circulated that a statement on tobacco litigation could come out of the U.S. later this afternoon. However, Karl Green at U.K.-based brokerage Charterhouse Tilney Securities said he would be surprised if there was any news Wednesday. 'As far as we're aware, Congress is still tied up debating the issue,' he said, adding that Charterhouse isn't expecting any more news from the U.S. until next year.

Wheat First Butcher Singer analyst Jeff Omohundro started coverage of Philip Morris Cos. (MO) with an outperform rating. In a research note, the brokerage firm cited the company's solid third-quarter financial results and its international and domestic tobacco business, among other things.

In a carefully worded letter to President Clinton dated Nov. 7 and signed by the attorneys general of all 50 states, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, the officials said that any money received by the states suing the tobacco industry should remain with the states. In doing so, the state officials gave notice that the tobacco wars are not simply taking place between the industry and those suing it.

[T]he Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System claim will be easier to prove to a jury than Arizona's other five claims. Those center on consumer-fraud allegations, claiming the industry illegally targeted minors and contributed to their delinquency by intentionally marketing cigarettes to them. Arizona filed its AHCCCS claim Monday after Gov. Jane Hull gave the go-ahead two weeks ago. The claim had been included in the original lawsuit filed by Attorney General Grant Woods, but then-Gov. Fife Symington ordered AHCCCS dropped as a plaintiff. Hull allowed Woods to refile the claim after he reassured her that his staff - not AHCCCS - would do the investigation.

Conclusions.‹Cigarette smoking is already a major cause of death in China, and among middle-aged Shanghai men, about 20% of all deaths during the 1980s were due to smoking. The excess was greatest among men who began smoking before the age of 25 years, about 47% of whom would, at 1987 mortality rates, die between the ages of 35 and 69 years (compared with only 29% of nonsmokers). These estimates reflect the consequences of past smoking patterns. The future health effects of current smoking patterns are likely to be greater because of the recent large increase in cigarette consumption, particularly at younger ages, in China.

Conclusions.‹Previous prospective studies of smoking-related mortality in China tended to underestimate the risks, probably because of short durations of follow-up. We have demonstrated that smoking is a major cause of death in China, and the risks are similar to those seen in the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, about half of the 300 million smokers in China will eventually die of smoking-related diseases if urgent tobacco-control measures are not instituted to prevent this growing epidemic.

Tobacco researchers warn that more than half of China's 300 million smokers will die of smoking-related diseases if urgent control measures are not taken. In the first long-term research efforts of smoking in China, researchers say the emerging tobacco epidemic there has begun to have the same deadly impact that it has had in the United States and the United Kingdom. The authors challenge earlier studies that suggested the impact was less severe in China.

The American personal injury claim system is often derided in Britain. But are we right to sneer? I suggest that it is time for us to stop looking down our noses . . . A good example of all this is the tobacco cases. In reading through the papers that have emerged from the industry over the past three years, what is crystal clear is that the greatest fear of the industry was being taken on not by the regulators in the US and UK, but by the US lawyers. The industry was successful in its strategy, defeating 400 individual claims, until it was taken on by the big guns of the plain tiffs' Bar, with all the many hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal, primarily emanating from their successful asbestos claims. Recognising that its bluff had been called, the industry agreed to pay out $368 billion ...

But now many Yanks venturing north for the forbidden smokes are getting burned by Canadian scammers selling counterfeits. The worst of the fakes are foul creations made of sweepings from the floors of Havana's cigar factories, packed with moldy leaf and bitter stem. They contain human hair, insect parts, pieces of string and even banana peel. "All in all, not the sort of thing you'd want to pay $50 for the privilege of lighting up," said Constable Annette Doucette of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "But we're seeing these counterfeits sold from Halifax to Vancouver, and most victims are Americans."

R.J. Reynolds International on Wednesday opened a new tobacco plant in the central Tunisian city of Kairouan for manufacturing and marketing cigarettes. . . The plant was established under a convention signed with Tunisian state-run tobacco company Regie Nationale des Tabacs et Allumettes (RNTA). Reynolds said the plant would manufacture and market its own brands of cigarettes, Winston and Monte Carlo, as well as Cristal Extra, Tanit and 20 Mars, three brands owned by RNTA. "Tunisia ranks sixth in the cigarette market in Africa," Reynolds' executive vice-president Klaus Langner said.

The Smokefree Coalition yesterday released American research that showed making bars and restaurants 100 percent smokefree did not hurt bar takings and may even increase restaurant profits. Director Roger Booth said the group was now pushing for laws that banned smoking in all indoor public areas including bars, restaurants, casinos, schools and workplaces. Associate Minister of Health Tuariki Delamare has signalled his support for these moves, saying he favoured tougher smoking laws and was happy to see the habit relegated to the "back alley".

-Indonesia's Ministry of Finance is set to raise the excise tax on cigarette starting December 15, the Ministry's Director of Excise Tax A. Nur Indiarto told Dow Jones Newswires Wednesday. The excise tax for hand-rolled cigarettes will increase by 5 rupiah per stick, while the tax on machine-made cigarettes will increase by 10 rupiah per stick. Indiarto didn't comment as to the reasons behind the tax hike, but cigarette industry analysts say it is part of the government's move to increasing revenues for the state budget.

Indonesian blue-chip clove cigarette maker PT Gudang Garam (P.GGR) share price is down 8% Tuesday at 8,725 rupiah at 0412 GMT (11:12 a.m. EST) as investors are concerned over news of a strike among the company's workers. 'Nearly 10% of the 30,000-strong workforce are on strike, among their demands is higher wages,' an official at the Gudang Garam headquarters in Kediri, East Java, told Dow Jones.

Burley tobacco farmers are hoping for higher prices to make up for having less of a crop this year. Tennessee's crop is expected to be 83 million pounds, about 5 percent below last year. Burley auction markets open Nov. 24. "The crop is short due to extreme weather conditions," said Fred Serral, who operates New Burley Warehouse in Greeneville.

Lewis, one of the governor's old friends and hunting partners, is accused of accepting "inappropriate" loans from P. Tim Howard, a Tallahassee attorney who acted as a liaison between the governor's office and the private attorneys who took Florida's tobacco lawsuit to trial. The accusations were made by Mary Leona Boutwell, one of Howard's former legal secretaries, who provided the Florida Attorney General's Office with a detailed account of alleged improprieties.

Large: a share of the $11.3 billion tobacco settlement. Small: the propriety of personal loans to buy Christmas presents from L.L. Bean, Sugar Bowl tickets and pay a $500 hotel bill. Sitting unhappily in the center of the investigation is Harold Lewis, the governor's longtime friend and adviser. Chiles suspended Lewis from his $95,653-a-year job as chief inspector general after learning that Lewis received loans from a Tallahassee lawyer named Tim Howard. Chiles acted because Lewis has played a key role in advancing Howard's legal career, most notably by helping make Howard a member of the so-called "dream team" of lawyers who filed the massive lawsuit against the tobacco companies. Howard calls Lewis "a

Would-be governors Ted Mondale and Hubert Humphrey III, with surnames and connections that can pry open Democrats' checkbooks coast to coast, are logging thousands of miles this fall in pursuit of out-of-state contributors. . . Washington, D.C., fund-raisers held by Mondale and Humphrey in the past year do show a quantitative difference between the candidates. According to attendees and party insiders, Mondale reaped more than $50,000 at a fund-raiser this summer by lobbyist James Free, a former congressional liaison for President Jimmy Carter. Free's clients include the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., the Nuclear Energy Institute and the American Petroleum Institute.

Over the past decade, the state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in education, outreach efforts, media and health campaigns to reduce smoking -- cutting adult cigarette consumption by about 40 percent. For five years, California managed to keep teen smoking rates from rising, a feat compared to a nationwide increase. But over the past three years, the rate has increased. . . California health officials and anti-tobacco advocates take issue with Clinton's premise. "Maybe that kid focus works in Washington, but not here," said James Stratton, the state's deputy director for prevention services. "We are convinced you need a multifaceted, multilevel approach. To focus on youth alone is a big mistake." John Pierce, head of cancer prevention at the University of California at San Diego adds: "It's going to backfire if you're not doing anything about adult smoking . . . because kids are trying to be like adults."

A Lucky Strike booth at the weekend Festival of the Arts has some people ~ including the mayor ~ angrily claiming cigarettes had no place at the event. But sponsorship from companies like Lucky Strike was necessary to produce the festival, said Dana Harrison, a manager with Terry Pimsleur & Company, the festival's producer. "Quite frankly, we needed the support to make the festival happen," he said. "It's difficult to get sponsorship for a new show."

A federal judge has upheld tobacco advertising limits described by local health officials as the most restrictive in the nation. U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan rejected claims by store owners that the rules interfered with their right to earn a living. The rules ban most tobacco advertising outdoors and inside businesses if it is visible from the outside. Bryan ruled last week that the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department board acted within its authority in passing the regulations.

hat most evanescent of media, outdoor advertising, is attaining a kind of permanence. Museums, galleries and archives across the United States are beginning to pay attention to the history of billboards, signs, posters, bus and subway placards and even the carved figures that once stood outside stores. . . Indeed, the electrical extravaganzas known as spectaculars, which have bathed New Yorkers in a glitzy glow for decades, are the subject of a show that opens Wednesday at the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West at 77th Street in New York City. "Signs and Wonders: The Spectacular Lights of Times Square" is scheduled to run through March 8. . . Other ads are evoked in photographs: the waterfalls that peddled Bond clothes and Pepsi-Cola, the acrobatics of the cartoon character Little Lulu for Kleenex tissues, the constantly puffing Camel cigarette smoker . . The transitory nature of outdoor advertising is underscored by signs for such bygone brands as Clicquot Club ginger ale, Squibb Dental Cream, Royal typewriters, Egyptienne cigarettes and Miss Youth Form, "aristocrat of slips."

Most buyers see through smoke and its smell and residue to recognize true property values, but, if you're smoking and selling, lingering effects of cigarettes, pipes and cigars can hit you in the pocketbook. Local real estate agents say buyers seldom make an open issue of smoke odors when negotiating for a house, but it can have a negative impact on the buyers' perceptions and, subsequently, their value assessments and purchase offers.

Detroit will be host to the fifth annual national anti-smoking conference designed to stimulate the development of community-based tobacco control initiatives for African-Americans and other people of color. The conference will be held at the Crowne Plaza Ponchartrain Hotel, Nov. 13-16, 1997. The event is sponsored by the Tobacco Independence Campaign, an outgrowth of the National Smoking Cessation Campaign for African- American women.

The National Medical Association's (NMA) SASATAC Project, a tobacco control project established in 1994 in a collaborative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control Office on Smoking & Health, will join the National Tobacco Independence Campaign Conference to officially present, "Point*Counterpoint: An Agenda for Preventing Tobacco Deaths," as well as to announce the future steps in the war against tobacco use at a press conference on Friday, November 14, 1997, at Crowne Plaza Ponchartrain Hotel, 2 Washington Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan at 3:30 p.m.

A survey of the nation's best and brightest teenagers reveals (Tuesday) that of the minority of them who smoke and drink, very few base their behavior on advertising. The "Who's Who Among American High School Students" survey found that contrary to government studies which blame advertising for teen smoking and drinking, only 6 percent of teens say they were influenced in any way by the ads, instead citing parental influence as much more important.

Among those who admitted smoking or drinking, word of mouth, availability, and price were far more influential than advertising in the choice of brand of tobacco or alcohol.

hether black, white, Latino or Asian, the nation's brightest students strongly agree: Madison Avenue holds little sway when it comes to picking a brand of cigarettes, cheating is rampant, and AIDS is not a top concern when it comes to engaging in risky sex. Those are among the results of the 28th annual Who's Who Among American High School Students poll of 3,200 high-achieving 16- to 18-year-olds--that is, students with A or B averages who plan to attend college after graduation. . . the top teenagers reported they are more likely to base their choice of tobacco and alcohol products on a friend's recommendation. Only 6% said they heeded messages in magazine, broadcast and billboard ads. But a firm majority--almost 70%--said they have never smoked or drunk.

British Airways will ban smoking on all flights from March. Europe's largest airline said research showed customers overwhelmingly wanted a smoking ban.

As the annual stop-smoking campaign rages, the Tobacco Intervention Network is rallying health professionals around a new message: "Snuff Out Spit Tobacco!" Network director Ken Manske makes it clear, "Smokeless tobacco can kill." . . . His recommendation? Get spit tobacco users to switch to harmless Mint Snuff(TM), a safe, non-tobacco, food-grade alternative specifically designed to help people quit chewing tobacco.

In keeping with the theatrical tradition, fashion designer Carmen Marc Valvo put on a show during fashion week, literally. The designer turned the soundstage at Chelsea Piers into a virtual jazz club. As a live band complete with the vocal stylings of Freddie Walker, an original cast member of Rent, played jazz standards, models made their way across a square floor wearing some of the baddest, floor-length evening gowns in the universe. The Harlemesque atmosphere was enhanced when the fingerwave-wearing models puffed on cigars and cigarettes in elegant holders.

The Company reported operating profit of $56.9 million on sales of $513.1 million. Net Income totaled $20.5 million, or $0.46 per share ($0.44 on a fully diluted basis). . . The current quarter's results represent a sales increase of 24.9 percent and an operating profit increase of 50.5 percent over the same period last year. Net income and primary earnings per share increased 34.0 percent and 27.8 percent, respectively, reflecting the additional shares issued in the Intabex acquisition.

Specialty paper producer P.H. Glatfelter Co said Friday it would buy a German specialty paper company, Schoeller & Hoesch Gruppe, which is owned by Deutsche Beteiligungs AG (DBAG.F), for about $158 million. . . Schoeller, which makes tabocco papers and long-fiber papers, had sales of about $173 million in 1996.

A MAN who was sacked for smoking in his car in the company car park yesterday lost his claim for unfair dismissal. An industrial tribunal ruled that the man's employer had the right to dismiss him for breaking a strict no-smoking rule. Craig Bowery, 23, a forklift truck driver employed by Anchor Foods, was sacked in June after he was spotted by a manager at the company's butter factory in Swindon, Wiltshire.

"I have no opinion about American tobacco companies doing business in Uzbekistan or in the United States other than to say: Don't buy their products," she told students at Tashkent's University of World Economy and Diplomacy.

He plans to focus on the U.S. trade relationship with China, and also wants to meet with public health officials to discuss efforts to reduce tobacco use in Asia _ an issue which has been a focal point of his attention domestically.

"Perhaps tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars might be reasonable but $2.8 billion dollars simply shocks the conscience of the court," Judge Cohen ruled. "It is per se unreasonable.

The judge overseeing Florida's historic deal with cigarette makers on Wednesday threw out as ridiculous claims by anti-tobacco lawyers for $2.8 billion in fees, saying no lawyer's time was worth $7,716 an hour. Judge Harold Cohen of Palm Beach County Court said the dozen private lawyers who secured the $11.3 billion settlement for Florida should accept the outcome of fee arbitration spelled out in the negotiated deal reached in August. "If one considers $2.8 billion attorneys fees ... the result would mean an hourly rate of $92,593 per hour. Each of the 12 private lawyers would be $7,716 per hour," Cohen wrote in an order issued in West Palm Beach. "The court finds these figures patently ridiculous."

Among the losing bidders for Petersen Publishing last year was Robert L. Miller, an expansion-minded executive who helped create such magazines as Vibe and Martha Stewart Living during a 23-year career at Time Inc. . . As for next steps, Miller is tinkering with Vibe to attract an older audience. A hefty percentage of readership is in the early to mid-teen category, too young to legally consume the cigarettes and alcohol that are prominently advertised in it. Unless Vibe raises the age of its readers, it could stand to lose tobacco revenue under government proposals to restrict such advertising. Regarding Spin, Miller said he has no intention of dramatically overhauling the title, aimed at 18- to 29-year-olds. "We will continue to represent a voice to the younger market. They have very diffe

The survey results clearly validate that excessive smoking restrictions are not the answer," said MaryLou Clark, executive director, Club Association of West Virginia. . . The survey, taken of owners and managers of 402 full-service taverns and restaurants in West Virginia and conducted by The Craig Group Inc., was funded with a grant from The Accommodation Program, courtesy of Philip Morris Incorporated. Survey results revealed: *85.5 percent of those surveyed believe it is important that they be able to allow patrons to smoke.

More than 28 percent of Wisconsin children are exposed to second-hand smoke from cigarettes in their homes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. With 11.4 percent of the state's population having at least one smoker in the household with children, Wisconsin ranks sixth among the states and the District of Columbia in exposing youngsters at home, it says.

The Minnesota Decides Community Blueprint for Tobacco Reduction calls for protecting Minnesotans from secondhand smoke -- especially children. Other elements of the plan focus on preventing youth addiction and providing assistance for those who want to quit.

It will take no less than changing society's attitude if the state is going to reduce smoking, especially among younger Minnesotans, say public health and business leaders. . . Doctors, lawyers, business leaders and government workers who gathered at a two-day conference on reducing smoking in Minnesota tossed around those and other ideas Wednesday. After gathering opinions from 10 smaller forums around Minnesota last summer, the group of about 100 people at the "Minnesota Decides" summit planned to create the state's first comprehensive plan to reduce smoking.

The news of Carlson's newfound interest in the case is puzzling at best. And like the folks in the state attorney general's office, we think Carlson's latest demand is out of line. . . Humphrey began this battle without the governor at his side and he should be allowed to handle this lawsuit without any pressure from the governor's office.

"I believe in what we're doing," said George Diaz, whose family has owned the small market near the Oceanside Harbor entrance for 25 years. That is exactly what the health promoters at Vista Community Clinic want to hear. And they are likely to hear more of the same after Jan. 1, when the clinic will expand its efforts to deter youths from using tobacco products. Those efforts will be possible as a result of a $425,000 state grant, which will be used for education and outreach programs in Vista and San Marcos.

Federal health officials said approximately 15 million children risk health problems because they are exposed to passive cigarette smoke at home. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said one-third to one-half of adult cigarette smokers have children living in their home. Of those, more than 70 percent allow smoking in some or all areas of their home.

A lack of clean water, more children smoking cigarettes and bad manners on buses are among social problems facing China's city-dwellers, say researchers. Of 1,524 people from five cities who took part in a survey by Horizon Research, . . . 59 per cent were worried about increasing numbers of children smoking.

After a steady decline since the 1930s, alcohol and tobacco are rising to new prominence on cartoons. Researchers analyzed 953 cartoons from each decade to determine how many times alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, and legal and illegal drugs are shown. They found surprisingly high numbers. The average young person sees about 100 drug-, tobacco- or alcohol-related messages on cartoons each year, says the report presented here at the American Public Health Association meeting. The research was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. . . Tobacco use typically was portrayed negatively, with 39% of cartoon characters smoking cigars, 31% cigarettes and 28% pipes. In 93% of cases, no effect (positive or negative) of the tobacco was shown. What concerns Klein and his collaborators is that alcohol and tobacco references in cartoons went down in the 1980s but have gone up sharply this decade. . . About 7% of cartoons in the 1980s included tobacco, compared with around 11% in the 1990s.

"It is extremely unlikely that pesticides in the diet have any meaningful contribution to cancer rates," said Len Ritter, a Canadian environmental biology professor on the panel and executive director of the Canadian Network of Toxicology Centres. Tobacco use, blamed for one in five deaths in the United States, should remain the priority in the fight against cancer, the panel said. "For whatever reason, ... people feel more concern for risks over which they have no personal control than for risks associated with their familiar everyday life habits," Heath wrote in an editorial.

A state law that bans smoking on school property is bad business for bingo. Attendance at bingo games in Catholic schools has dropped so low that two western New York parishes and a school no longer sponsor them, according to the Buffalo News. Others are cutting back.

THE MACABRE e-mail address added to the billboard was charlie@levi.com. At the bottom of the original design, which was a red psychedelic vortex intended to promote smoking, the coolly deranged face of Charles Manson surveyed eastbound traffic approaching the Bay Bridge. The BLF (Billboard Liberation Front) had struck again, performing a "signage improvement." It lasted perhaps half a day on a high-concept cigarette ad peddling death on the largest billboard in The City. . . We might call it fauxvertising, where a message is falsified creatively to reach a higher truth or deeper meaning. It takes an unacceptable sales pitch and turns it into a provocative statement. Instead of selling something one may or may not need, the idea is to, say, kill your television and start thinking about issues that concern all of us. It's the last thing advertisers want us to do. . . In this time of toxic information overload, our real heroes are cut-and-paste warriors like the BLF, who put themselves on the line to make us smile, and give us something to think about. A pause for reflection, a gift of the realest thing.

My dad smokes, and it is starting to really get on my nerves. I would really like to tell him to quit. However, I really don't know how I should go about it. -- Sick of It.

NEW QUESTION: At a hearing in Los Angeles last month, California lawmakers and researchers complained of the increased use of tobacco in movies and on television. Critics said that Hollywood was sending a message to teen-agers that it's cool to smoke. Are you influenced by the movies or TV? Does the industry have a duty to not to show violence, smoking, unprotected sex and other potentially harmful activities? Are you more likely to imitate a star's clothing, habits or beliefs? Write Talking Back, Yo!Houston, P.O. Box 4260, Houston, Texas 77210 or fax us at 713-220-2780.

At a Spring Hill Fire and Rescue Commission meeting Wednesday, board members indefinitely postponed a decision about whether firefighters hired after April 7, 1997, would be required to remain tobacco-free. An American Civil Liberties Union representative said the policy may violate employees' rights and urged employees to challenge it. On Wednesday, the fire district's attorney advised the board to let the U.S. Supreme Court decide whether the policy could be enforced. The fire district's attorney "advised that until the Supreme Court rules, we shouldn't go there," Spring Hill Fire and Rescue Commissioner Eugene Wright said.

Donna Shalala, secretary of health and human services, told the House commerce committee that the administration's international priorities would be consistent with its domestic priorities - reduction of smoking, particularly among the young. "It is the policy of the Clinton administration not to interfere with a foreign country's non-discriminatory health-based efforts to control the use of tobacco," she said. HHS would from now on work with the administration's trade representative, Charlene Barshefsky - who has sought to reduce barriers to American tobacco exports - "to ensure that US tobacco trade policy incorporates the health policy perspective".

A French court on Thursday fined Philip Morris Cos Inc (NYSE:MO - news) and three of its European executives 150,000 francs ($26,000) for violations of French cigarette warning label rules. The tobacco firm and the three executives were also ordered by the court in Quimper, western France, to pay an additional 400,000 francs ($69,400) to the National Committee Against Tobacco Use (CNCT), which initiated the court action. . . A lawsuit filed by the organisation charged that the text of the warning labels required to be printed on Philip Morris cigarette packages sold in France were illegible.

Tabacalera, the Spanish tobacco producer and distributor which is due to be privatised early next year, lifted net group profit after minorities at the nine-month stage by 17.3 per cent to Pta12.2bn ($83.8m). The improvement was attributed to higher sales of cigarettes and cigars, up 11.5 per cent and 12.8 per cent respectively, as well as to improved operating costs and lowered financial charges.

The state is due to sell its 52 per cent stake in an issue worth some Pta173bn ($1.19bn) at current prices, and Mr Alierta has reasons to feel optimistic. Tabacalera's shares have outperformed the Madrid market, rising above Pta10,000 from Pta5,100 at the start of the year. Mr Alierta has enhanced Tabacalera's core strengths, grown margins and put its international strategy on a sound footing. He now relishes the sale of the state's stake

Palm Beach County Commissioners, seeking their own slice of the tobacco pie, want Gov. Lawton Chiles and the Legislature to give them $40 million of the money captured through a landmark legal settlement with cigarette makers. The county wants the money as reimbursement for what it has spent over the past seven years on state Medicaid programs, especially hospital and nursing home costs. The request will be made through a resolution that will be considered on Tuesday. It could be the beginning of a wave of similar requests from counties across the state.

Some of Florida's tobacco settlement money should go to help families caring for elderly spouses or parents, an advocate said Thursday, pointing to the state's high rate of murder-suicides. . . Towey pointed to research by Donna Cohen, chair of the Department of Aging and Mental Health at the University of South Florida in Tampa, that indicates the rate of elderly homicide-suicide in Florida may be triple the national average.

Attorneys fighting over fees in the state's $11 billion tobacco settlement want a judge to release all but 25 percent of the money so the state can use it while the fee battle continues.

Tobacco companies may have used their lawyers to help conceal the dangers of smoking, a federal judge said in a preliminary ruling releaesd Thursday in Texas' $14 billion lawsuit against the tobacco industry. The ruling was not final and a key hearing on the issue was scheduled for later this month, but it boosted the state's hopes that it will be allowed to use dozens of confidential and sensitive industry documents as evidence when its lawsuit goes to trial. "There is prima facie evidence that the services of the tobacco industry lawyers were sought and/or obtained to enable one or more defendants in committing or planning to commit the crimes, frauds or other misconduct (alleged by the state)," U.S. Magistrate Wendell Radford said in the order, which was dated Wednesday and released Thursday.

A federal judge Wednesday issued a preliminary finding that the tobacco industry may have used its lawyers to help conceal the dangers of cigarette smoking from the public. U.S. Magistrate Judge Wendell C. Radford scheduled further hearings on the issue for Nov. 24-25.

A Kansas state court judge refused to allow the immediate release of more than 2,418 internal tobacco industry documents that cigarette companies are strenuously battling to keep secret, rebuffing a request from plaintiff's lawyers. Circuit Court Judge Fred Jackson granted the industry a stay, pending appeal, even though he rejected arguments by cigarette company lawyers that he reverse an earlier ruling that they must relinquish the documents.

Fargo - Eleven of 36 tobacco retailers here failed an October compliance check of whether they sell tobacco products to minors, officials say.

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday let stand an unprecedented $2-million award to a smoker who blamed his lung cancer on asbestos in the filter of a popular cigarette brand. The September 1995 verdict for Milton Horowitz, a Beverly Hills psychologist, was the U.S. tobacco industry's first defeat in a product liability case. Horowitz died last year at 72 after Lorillard Inc., maker of Kent cigarettes, filed its appeal.

ONE child in three will grow up to be addicted to drugs, tobacco or alcohol, experts said yesterday as they called for a new approach to tackle the growing problem of addiction to heroin. The high risk of substance addiction is based on known levels of addiction in adults and the rising trends of drug, alcohol and tobacco use in the young. Prof John Strang, clinical director for drug and alcohol services at the Bethlem and Maudsley NHS Trust, London, and director of the National Addiction Centre, said that heroin use had doubled over three years with half of victims being new addicts.

His name is Ward Eames and he runs the National Theatre for Children, based here in Minneapolis. Over the next two years they'll go to more than 200 elementary schools performing a play called "2 Smart 2 Smoke." The play, developed with the University of Minnesota, is designed to teach children about the dangers of smoking. Thanks to my neighbor, I got to attend the world premiere for grades four through six at Andersen Elementary School. . . A good play requires a clever plot, witty dialogue and honest, moving characters, but if you want to get the attention of a room full of 9-and 10-year-olds you have to use some variation of the word "butt." The first thing they did was ask the kids to stay on their "heinies" for the entire performance. This is, of course, the funniest grade school joke of all, and the kids reacted as if Jerry Seinfeld had walked in and started working the room.

Psst! To anybody who trusted a Miami cop selling "smuggled" Cuban cigars from his desk at the police department, here's a news flash: You've been had. All those expensive boxes of Cohibas, Romeo y Julietas and Partagas peddled by Detective Sergio L. Martinez were fakes -- cheaper cigars from Honduras and the Dominican Republic that were elaborately repackaged to look like the real thing. Acting on a tip from another cop, undercover investigators made two buys (12 boxes at $130 each) from Martinez and busted him Wednesday, thinking they had a clear-cut violation of the Cuban embargo.

Empresa Cubana del Tabaco, known as Cubatabaco, has filed a trademark-infringement suit against General Cigar in federal court in New York. . . General Cigar . . . has registered Cohiba as a U.S. trademark and introduced its own Cohiba brand in September with a big advertising push. That angered the Cuban company, which has registered the Cohiba mark in 115 other countries. It claims General Cigar is deceiving the public by using the world-renowned Cohiba name to market an inferior cigar in the U.S.

MOLINS is to shed 500 jobs in Britain after American cigarette companies joined their Chinese counterparts in reducing purchases of the engineering group's cigarette-making machines. . . Molins' chief executive Peter Harrisson said US companies were delaying orders of its high-speed cigarette-making machines ahead of the proposed litigation settlement, which is costing $368 billion over 25 years. Mr Harrisson also said there had been no resumption of orders from China Tobacco, China's state tobacco company which is rationalising its 180 plants to about 100 plants.

Third quarter 1997 revenues were $100.3 million, compared to revenues of $114.6 million in the third quarter of 1996. The Company recorded operating income of $6.8 million in the 1997 third quarter compared to operating income of $0.9 million in 1996. Loss from continuing operations before income taxes was $15.9 million in the 1997 third quarter, versus a loss of $12.6 million in the 1996 period. Net loss applicable to common shares in the 1997 quarter was $15.6 million, or $0.86 per share, compared to a loss of $13.7 million, or $0.74 per share, in the third quarter of 1996.

Japan Tobacco Inc. (JT) Friday announced that its pretax profit for the first fiscal half ended Sept. 30 declined 16% from a year earlier, to 62.9 billion yen. Sales fell 4% to 1.3 trillion yen. The number of cigarettes sold in Japan fell 6%, to l26.4 billion. The company's domestic tobacco revenues declined 4% to 1.27 trillion yen as it raised prices. Cost of sales as a percentage of sales fell 1.2 percentage points to 79.4%. Operating profit fell 15% to 62 billion yen. JT increased advertising and promotional spending, and also changed its method for provisioning against retirement allowances.

The winners of the 1997 CableACE awards included: . . . CHILDREN'S EDUCATIONAL OR INSTRUCTIONAL SPECIAL OR SERIES: "Smoke Alarm: The Unfiltered Truth About Cigarettes," HBO.

For 11 years, tobacco industry lawyers poured money into the University of Texas Health Center here, bankrolling the work of a scientist known for questioning links between secondhand cigarette smoke and disease. Health Center officials now concede it was an uneasy match for an institution whose founding mission is treating lung disease. . . The hospital willingly participated in an unusual arrangement to shield from public view both the scientist's work for the tobacco lawyers and $1.68 million they sent between 1985 and 1996 to pay for it, records obtained by The Dallas Morning News indicate.

Mother Nature harassed tobacco farmers throughout the growing season with a cool spring, a dry summer and an early frost. Yesterday, it brought a gloomy curtain of cold rain to the final day of selling for most of the Piedmont tobacco warehouses. "There's not much of a silver lining," said Sam Nichols, a partner at the Golden Leaf Warehouse in Mount Airy. "The dry weather hurt us bad. We turned out more yield than we expected, but the quality was down a lot."

"I don't know how they sleep at night, quite frankly," he says of tobacco executives. "They must have cultivated a totally cynical approach to life, given they know their future market is dependent very largely on the recruitment of children to smoking" . . . He has been a member of the Council on Smoking and Health (COSH), a member of the more grassroots People Acting for a Smokeless Society, and a willing spokesman for the issue - making him a natural choice to succeed the much more subdued Professor Lee Siu-hung as COSH chairman . . . He wants 100 smoking prevention groups established in Hong Kong by the end of his three-year stint, and he will kick off his drive on Wednesday when he hosts a lunch for people from various sectors to brainstorm ideas for countering the tobacco industry.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in Winston-Salem has been selected as the recipient of Winston-Salem State University's first R.J. Reynolds Corporate Citizen Award. The award was presented recently at the university's Founder's Day Convocation.

More children are exposed to cigarette smoke in homes in Kentucky than in any other state, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control. More than 360,000, or about 34 percent, of Kentucky children breathe harmful cigarette smoke in their homes, increasing their risks for certain illnesses.

Rep. Scotty Baesler said farmers should fight to protect the federal price-support program instead of biting too quickly on cash buyout proposals under the $368 billion deal. . . Sen. Mitch McConnell, who shared the stage with Baesler at the Kentucky Agricultural Leadership Summit, said that he too will work to keep the program, which controls tobacco production and prices. But the Louisville Republican said that will be a difficult fight in an increasingly anti-tobacco Congress. "That's the environment," McConnell said. "Make no mistake about it. It is not a pretty picture."

A colorless, oily liquid used widely as an insecticide, it is fatal to humans in a large dose. Yet nicotine's extraordinary power over the human psyche has shaped history. . . As armies of lawyers skirmish in courtrooms across the country, scientists are still penetrating the secrets of the most active of tobacco's ingredients. They are piecing together the mystery of addiction and tracking the drug's action in scans of the brain. They are beginning to think aloud about whether there might be a role for this drug or its chemical relatives in some kind of smoke-free future.

scientists are now starting to realize that the many types of receptors for the neurotransmitter rule out a simple explanation for how nicotine behaves in the brain. Nicotine simultaneously effects many subtypes of acetylcholine receptors to create a variety of physiological reactions. Some are agreeable, like focusing attention and suppressing anxiety, appetite, and pain; while others are less desirable, like elevating blood pressure and heart rate and causing addiction.

Philip Morris Cos. Inc.'s sales keep rising, but so do its legal expenses. America's No. 1 tobacco company said in a quarterly securities filing yesterday that 365 smoking and health lawsuits had been lodged against it by Nov. 1, an increase of 65 cases from June 30. Philip Morris, the Richmond-area's largest private employer, also reported a slight increase in the number of class-action lawsuits filed by Nov. 1: 45 smoking and health class actions, up from 40 on June 30.

British American Tobacco are withdrawing from powerboat racing and will no longer be supporting the three-boat Gold Leaf Formula One team headed by Britain's Jonathan Jones, the three-times world champion. The team scored only one win in the 1996 series, Jones finishing joint third with a total score of 66 points.

"It has been the century's open addiction," Beard writes, "the world-wide admission that breathing by itself is simply not enough....A hundred years ago it must have all seemed so splendid, such an innocent pleasure so cleverly packaged and so obviously harmless that with hindsight it almost convinces, as feared by the Seventh Day Adventists, as the most perfect invention of hell itself."

Mexican cigarette maker Cigarros La Moderna, a unit of B.A.T Industries Plc . . . said on Monday it would discount cigarette prices 12.8 percent on four brand names. The announcement is the latest development in Mexican cigarette price wars between La Moderna and Cigatam, which is half owned by U.S. tobacco company Philip Morris Cos Inc . . . and Mexican conglomerate Grupo Carso SA de CV . . . Cigatam in Feburary cut prices on its market-leading Marlboro brand by 20 percent to fight growing contraband from the United States, and La Moderna immediately followed suit.

"Happy animals," the first such group in the country, will find companions for pets who want to reproduce but also for those who are jsut bored or lonely. Client pets will be registered in the agency's database with a photograph and a short description of the qualities they are seeking in a life partner. The agency initially will serve dogs, cats and birds.

Even Socrates would have a hard time sorting out all the moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding America's tobacco industry. A panel of experts in law, ethics and science gave it their best shot at a Nov. 7 forum sponsored by the philosophy department of Virginia Commonwealth University. VCU's third Institute for Ethics and Public Policy Conference explored the far-reaching ramifications of smoking and health, such as weighing the "personal choice" of choosing to smoke vs. the tobacco companies' responsibility to inform consumers of the health effects of cigarettes. Despite more than four hours of talk, there were no easy answers provided to an issue that hits home in a tobacco-rich area like Richmond

Nearly 200 children, parents and neighborhood activists rallied yesterday at Brightwood Park United Methodist Church in Northwest Washington . . . The effort was organized by the 'Cause Children Count Coalition . . . The coalition is lobbying for two bills now before the D.C. Council that would prohibit outdoor alcohol and tobacco ads near schools, playgrounds and recreation centers. A public hearing on the legislation before a council committee is scheduled for Nov. 25.

Blue mold has damaged at least 16% of the state's broadleaf tobacco crop, prized for its use in making cigar wrappers, the USDA estimates. State farmers already have lost almost 400,000 pounds of broadleaf tobacco to the disease, the USDA says.

Two teenagers died in a housefire this weekend that was caused by a discarded cigarette. The fire in the 1400 block of Idaho Street took the lives of 17-year-old William Chapman and 16-year-old Glenda Cusick. Cathy Stover survived the fire, suffering only smoke inhalation.

The motion will claim that the class-action, representing up to 500,000 Floridians, was unwieldy and that each of the cases would eventually have to be litigated individually, Robert Heim, an attorney for Philip Morris Cos Inc . . . said following a pretrial hearing.

Could this billboard on westbound State Road 50 near Bithlo in Orange County be advertising rolling paper? Less than a mile from an elementary school? . . . Parents of children who attend nearby Columbia Elementary School, less than a mile from the sign, are in an uproar. . . Chris Hill, who owns the Sarasota-based company that distributes the paper advertised on the sign, thinks the parents are being silly. "It doesn't have anything to do with marijuana," he insisted. It's for people to make their own tobacco cigarettes, he said.

The smoking jacket, a relic of 19th century England, is returning to fashion along with the dry martini and a fine cigar. And for good reason, according an executive of Cigar Aficionado. "When you smoke a cigar, you often find that the aroma lingers on your clothes,'' Niki Singer, senior vice president of the New York-based magazine, says. "So, one of the reasons to wear a smoking jacket would be to absorb the aroma.''

Eighty-two percent of the state's high school students have tried smoking and 33% label themselves regular smokers, according to '95 statistics. Stephen Wright, a Santa Fe physician who specializes in addiction medicine, has started Tar Wars, a program for fourth- and fifth-graders about the effects of the habit.

State Health Director Kim Belshe today announced that California has launched a public awareness campaign to promote the final phase of California's smoke-free workplace law that requires California restau rants and bars to become smoke-free on Jan. 1, 1998. . . "As of January 1, California will be the first in the nation to have a statewide smoke-free policy for restaurants and bars," said Belshe. "This new campaign is designed to help restaurant and bar owners with the transition by informing Californians when the law will take effect and, most importantly, why the law is so important."

Tomorrow's planned vote to impose a tobacco advertising ban in Snohomish County is "just the first of such actions we expect to be taken by local jurisdictions all over the state," according to Amy Brackenbury, executive director of the Washington Association of Neighborhood Stores (WANS).

Tucked inside a spending bill President Clinton signed last week is $500,000 for a commission to develop a plan for a National Health Museum. . . Now Koop and others are campaigning to bring it back from its exile at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where attendance is expected to be about 45,000 this year. . . They envision an interactive museum that would bring health issues into focus: a healthy lung beside a smoker's lung, for instance . . . The existing museum has a variety of fascinating, sometimes interactive, exhibits of its own. A section on pregnancy shows an ultrasound film of a fetus and allows visitors to try on an outfit that makes them feel as if they're pregnant. A plastic container shows a huge pile of cigarette butts, representing the number accumulated in a month by a pack-a-day smoker.

SmithKline Beecham PLC has struck a deal to sell Alza Corp.'s Nicoderm stop-smoking patch throughout most of the world outside the U.S. The companies said Monday that SmithKline Beecham, which earlier this year got the right to sell Nicoderm in China and Japan, can now sell it just about everywhere. Besides the U.S., the exceptions are Australia, Canada, South Korea and New Zealand, where Alza has a marketing deal with Hoechst Marion Roussel.

A group including the New York-based Zweig-DiMenna Associates LLC said Monday it has increased its stake in Consolidated Cigar Holdings Inc's outstanding Class A common shares to 8.5 percent or 940,900 shares.

DIMON Inc. . . said its board declared a higher quarterly dividend of $0.17 on common, payable December 12 to holders of record December 1.

Special effects wizard Stan Winston is moving into feature directing, teaming up with DreamWorks to make the fantasy comedy "Hell Bent." The project is about a loathsome tobacco executive whose wife can't stand him and who markets smokes to kiddies. When he's pushed from a windowsill to his death, he keeps going downward.

stabbings. Despite a nonsmoking law more than a year old, it's not like San Francisco. A New York smoker can light up just about anywhere. This, I submit, is fabulous. . . Two reasons. One, I love it. I like feeling a shirt-pocket pack of smokes - they're my "friends." I enjoy the taste of a cigarette. And smoke itself - don't get me started. I blew expert rings by age 13. (Still do.)

America likes to assume it has the high moral ground in its dealings with China. It protests politely about violations of human rights and registers concerns about forced abortions, child labor and lack of political freedoms--being careful not to undercut developing trade relations with the world's most populous nation. Meanwhile, Americans are helping to plant time bombs of illness and death that will eventually kill millions of Chinese--with the excuse of free markets, lowered trade deficits and corporate profits. Already, about 700,000 people die in China every year from tobacco-related illnesses, according to the current Journal of the American Medical Association.

Teenage boys who watch Formula One motor racing are almost twice as likely to smoke as those who do not, according to a new survey in Britain. The results of a survey by the Cancer Research Campaign are being published in the medical journal, the Lancet, on Friday.

MINISTERS are drawing up plans to compel pubs and clubs to segregate smokers as part of a wide-ranging Government crackdown. Landlords have been told by ministers that they are unhappy at the slow progress in voluntary measures to clean up air quality in public houses and that "further steps" are now necessary. The move will come in a White Paper on tobacco control and draft legislation to be unveiled by the Department of Health early next year.

Tessa Jowell, the health minister, is considering legislation to protect bar staff and waiters from passive smoking. Drinkers could be stopped from smoking anywhere in pubs in a bid to reduce the risk to staff.

Acuff is finding that the leaf used in cigarettes also contains vitamins A and E, beta carotene, proteins and amino acids. He is studying what is there and how it can be extracted and used so that the leaf is good for more than just cigarettes. And Acuff is not alone.

In an order filed late Friday, Judge Kenneth Fitzpatrick of Ramsey District Court said that four joint-defense agreements should have been given to Special Master Mark Gehan by Sept. 17 instead of Oct. 27. "Reasonable minds could not differ in their interpretation of the provisions contained in Special Master Gehan's Fifth Order," Fitzpatrick wrote. He said he's still considering whether to fine the companies and attorneys who signed the agreements.

LOW-TAR cigarettes are responsible for a new epidemic of lung cancer, doctors have discovered. Bestselling brands such as Silk Cut and Superkings Lights, marketed as less harmful than cigarettes with a higher tar content, are associated with this new wave of cancer.

The principle is that people who enjoy themselves in potentially intrusive ways ought to restrain themselves -- preferably without being asked, but most certainly if they are (politely) asked -- in the presence of those on whom such activities have an unpleasant effect. Is that a sufficiently non-provocative way of putting it? It is not that we want to spoil anybody's fun -- only that we want to take reasonable precautions against spoiling the pleasure of others. . . But by making health the only issue involved, we have managed to avoid dealing with the annoyance issue, which keeps popping up. It has become illegal to smoke in many places, but it is not illegal to annoy others if you can find ways to do so without causing cancer.

Anti-smoking campaigns are adding to the suffering of smokers by making them delay seeking medical treatment out of embarrassment, according to a study. Negative attitudes dominate the treatment of lung cancer in Britain which kills more people than any other cancer. Smokers feel guilty about having brought the problem on themselves, doctors feel there is no hope and there is little public interest in a disease that principally kills the old and the poor. Launching a campaign to raise awareness of the disease by the Macmillan Cancer Relief charity, Dr Robert Milroy, consultant respiratory physician, said lung cancer was the most virulent of all cancers causing 100 deaths a day in Britain.

As parents with their young children and groups of teens strolled by, a team of alluring young women encouraged people to fill out questionnaires on tobacco products and handed out samples of Lucky Strike cigarettes. The unspoken message ~ smoking is wholesome, glamorous and fun. . . The Leader shares in the sense of outrage that the Festival of the Arts would allow itself to become a forum for tobacco interests. We hope it never happens again.

The Super Stoppers Club hereby reopens for business. Let us offer a hack-free cheer to the following readers who have quit smoking cigarettes and who deserve recognition for finally treading the straight and narrow. . . . Got a nominee for the Super Stoppers Club? Mail full details to Bob Levey, The Washington Post, Washington, D.C. 20071. Or fax them to 202-334-5150, or e-mail them to leveyb@washpost.com.

Delays in diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer mean sufferers are dying earlier than they should, according to a study published Monday. The disease is the biggest cancer killer in the United States and most of Europe but people with early symptoms such as a lingering cough, sore throat, fatigue and coughing up blood are not seeing their doctors soon enough or being referred for specialist treatment.

About 24 percent of the women surveyed said they are personally most concerned about getting breast cancer, compared to 19 percent who said Alzheimer's, and 7 percent who said lung cancer -- both bigger killers than breast cancer. The reality is that one in two women will be killed by a heart attack, one in four will die of Alzheimer's, and lung cancer is the leading cancer killer among women. One in 25 women will die of breast cancer. . . "The focus groups support the findings that much of women's concerns about breast cancer, in particular, come from extensive media coverage on the topic, and anxiety about breast cancer encourages women to avoid other therapies that can reduce serious risks to their health," said Covello. . . And although most women surveyed knew that diet and exercise could help them avoid many diseases of later life, 40 percent did not know that such steps as quitting smoking and reducing stress can be just as important.

Nagging may have a role--although a limited one--in changing unhealthy behavior, says Virginia Hill Rice, professor of nursing at Wayne State University, Detroit, who has studied strategies to help people stop smoking. "Chronically nagging is probably not a good approach," she says. "Over the long haul, it is probably demoralizing. But all positive [comments] may not work either. There may be a critical balance." In her study published in 1996 in the journal Tobacco Control, Rice and her colleagues evaluated 137 smokers trying to quit, analyzing what effects their partners' positive social support and negative social support (what most call nagging) had on their efforts. "For some people, nagging seems to have a positive effect. But not nagging alone," Rice says. "As the smoker moves along the quitting trajectory, it may be that more 'nagging' or negative interactions are needed at some point to get smokers to quit, if positive support has not worked or is not working."

The role of women as the gatekeepers of the spirit world is an important element that Frank develops especially well. In one scene, the women join forces to rid Simone's house of evil spirits by giving the place a super-cleaning: exorcism via dustmop, choreographed to a rousing African-American spiritual, followed by the ritualistic smoking of cigars.

Supplementing one's diet with glucarate, a compound occurring naturally in the body and also found in fruits and vegetables, may reduce ex-smokers' risk of lung cancer by blocking cancer- causing agents, binding with them and removing them from the body, according to recent studies.* . . . A nutritional support formula for ex-smokers called NuStart will be available in January 1998. This unique formulation of glucarate and other natural compounds including antioxidants is designed to provide protection against the harmful effects of the dangerous chemicals in products such as cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco and snuff. . . *These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

Government officials would be barred from promoting American tobacco products overseas under legislation expected to be signed soon by President Clinton. The ban also would prohibit government officials from lobbying against foreign laws intended to curb smoking. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, sponsor of the measure, said on Monday that the tobacco industry "chose to not vigorously contest this in public." . . "We cannot have the American taxpayer be an unwilling accomplice in causing more [smoking) deaths abroad," Doggett said.

Gov. George Pataki is expected to announce today the disbursement of nearly $1.9 million to 39 counties as part of a statewide tobacco enforcement plan aimed at curbing sales to youth. The money must be used by counties to conduct undercover stings, using underage youths posing as buyers, on each tobacco seller in the state.

Attorneys fighting over fees in the state's $11 billion tobacco settlement asked the judge to remove himself from the case Monday, saying he was biased in favor of the state. Palm Beach Circuit Judge Harold Cohen had surprised the bickering attorneys last week with an order that, if upheld, would put an end to lawyers' claims for 25 percent of the settlement. . . Nobody asked for $2.8 billion in this case," attorney Sheldon Schlesinger of Fort Lauderdale told the judge Monday. "I'm asking you to disqualify yourself, because I do not believe . . . we can get a fair and impartial hearing."

In the motion, Robert Montgomery accused Circuit Judge Harold Cohen of "prejudice" and "bias" in dismissing their claim for $2.8 billion in legal fees without granting a hearing. Montgomery said his fee is based on a July 1, 1994, contract in which Florida agreed to pay 25 percent of any judgment to the attorneys who represented them.

Whiting's essay was one of about 1,000 from across the state - including about 100 from the Coast - in a contest to help Moore pick the first 50 tobacco billboards to come down in Mississippi. Two winners were selected - one from grades seven through 12 and another from grades five and six. Whiting's pick: A GPC Cigarette billboard in Greenville, near Shipley's Donuts and a Sonic Drive-In. Both are popular fast-food outlets that attract a lot of people, she said. Another student, sixth-grader Jessica Jordan Vaughn at Trigg Elementary in Greenville, also won a $500 prize in the contest. Vaughn, 11, picked a Doral cigarette billboard in the middle of a Greenville neighborhood.

Huber says that it was seeing previously secret tobacco industry documents this year that turned him against his longtime benefactors. "My revelation over the past year, my road to Damascus, was finding out what they knew," Huber says. "They clearly knew smoking caused lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema. They knew it was addictive, and they knew it in the 1950s. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on disinformation. And we spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find out what they already knew."

Mauro's "family first" platform starts with money. He wants to eliminate the 6.25 percent tax on motor vehicle sales. To balance that, Mauro would double "sin taxes" on tobacco (increasing the cost of a pack of cigarettes by 41 cents), mixed drinks and liquor.

Vice President Al Gore brought a White House campaign to reduce smoking among young people to a middle school Monday, then was headed to a fund-raiser at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Gore led an anti-tobacco forum before about 150 students, teachers and parents at Lincoln Middle School. "Our purpose is to have a massive national campaign to convince young people not to start" smoking, Gore said.

The Speaker of the Illinois General Assembly, Michael J. Madigan, has called upon all 20 House Members and both U.S. Senators from Illinois, to make sure that next year's anticipated national tobacco settlement guards the right of health care funds, representing hundreds of thousands of Illinois workers, to sue the tobacco industry and recover monies spent treating tobacco-related diseases among blue-collar workers in the state.

In a preliminary ruling, Ramsey County District Judge Kenneth Fitzpatrick has found that five national law firms representing the industry engaged in "willful and deliberate disregard" of an order to hand over defense agreements in the Minnesota tobacco litigation. . . Fitzpatrick, in a ruling late Friday, concluded that tobacco companies ignored a judicial officer's order to turn over two written agreements to jointly defend against smokers' lawsuits. The documents were eventually turned over to Special Master Mark Gehan . . . But industry lawyers face the threat of sanctions on two other fronts. In a separate ruling, Fitzpatrick said he was disturbed by reports that industry lawyers revised a chart presented to the special master during a closed hearing. The judge ordered Gehan to determine whether violations or abuses occurred during the presentation. Minnesota attorneys also are seeking sanctions against Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. for failing to turn over research documents held by former units of American Tobacco Co. Brown & Williamson acquired American in 1994.

The judge in Minnesota's massive lawsuit against the tobacco industry has ruled that the nation's major cigarette companies have "willfully and deliberately disregarded and violated" court orders by failing to produce documents they had been ordered to turn over. Ramsey County District Court Judge Kenneth J. Fitzpatrick also ruled that five major law firms, all longtime representatives of the industry, "participated in the willful and deliberate disregard and violation" of a court order by failing to produce two "joint defense" documents to which the law firms were signatories. The judge lodged the rulings in a court computer system Friday night, and they were made public Monday.

On Wednesday November 19, 1997, the Arcata City Council will consider becoming the first city in the United States to adopt a resolution to establish guidelines for responsible investment of public funds. . . Camejo continued, "It is time for California to join Massachusetts, Maryland, and Florida and stop investing in tobacco companies that profit from addicting our young people and damaging the health of our communities."

A September increase in wholesale tobacco that lifted retail prices in September and October may also have an impact on November prices, Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Patrick Jackman said on Tuesday. . . Wholesale tobacco price rises of 3.5 to 4.0 percent in September lifted retail tobacco prices reported in the bureau's Consumer Price Index by 1.4 percent in September and 1.5 percent in October, the biggest rise since April. The tobacco price rise was a driving force behind the 0.2 percent rise in the CPI for October.

Cigarette-maker Hanjaya Mandala Sampoerna has cut back production of its signature Dji Sam Soe brand because of concern a nationwide drought is reducing incomes and demand for the product. Hand-rollers of Dji Sam Soe in Surabaya who are paid by the number of cigarettes they make have had their work-day cut by three hours since last month, when the company also cut its profit and sales projections.

In a move that supports Kaiser Permanente's philosophy of prevention, the Kaiser Permanente facility in Santa Rosa is to become totally smoke-free, effective Nov. 20, 1997.

"It's a marketing gimmick that takes advantage of teen smoking." Even though the cellophane-wrapped, cardboard packages are decorated with photographs of the musicians or other artwork, they look unmistakably like cigarette packs. "If I didn't know it was a cassette, I'd think it was a foreign cigarette brand," accountant Sherean Nickdow, 30, of New Hyde Park, L.I., said when shown a Bioboxed cassette. "The packaging is exactly the same."

President Vaclav Havel was released from a hospital Tuesday after more than two weeks of treatment for pneumonia and bronchitis. . . Havel was hospitalized Nov. 2 with what doctors originally described as aggravated bronchitis. They later said the president also had pneumonia.

The people at Sabol Sports who make The Puffer, a putter that doubles as a humidor holding up to four 6 1/2-inch cigars in the shaft, have some tips for smoking cigars on the golf course. . . Never place your cigar on the green, it will absorb chemicals quickly. Don't get sunblock on your hands and if you do wipe them off before touching your cigar. And don't throw your cigar on the tee box or green. Use the garbage can.

BIG TOBACCO HAS to wonder what the world is coming to when mass tort defendants don't stick together. But that's what happened when former asbestos manufacturers Owens Corning and its subsidiary, Fibreboard Corp., sued the major tobacco manufacturers Nov. 6 in state court in Oakland, Calf. . . So to the extent asbestos defendants pay all the damages, under joint-and-several liability rules that apply in most states, said Mr. Molland, tobacco gets a free ride. Mr. Molland said 50 percent is a conservative estimate of tobacco's share. Said William S. Ohlmeyer, of Kansas City, Mo.'s Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P., lawyers for Philip Morris Inc. and Lorillard Tobacco Co., "There are a significant number of legal issues that would need to be resolved [in Owens Corning's favor] before they can prevail."

What [Attorney General Mike Moore and other deal supporters] don't like to say is that in exchange for the measures that they hope will stop teen-age smoking, they are willing to make a trade-off that will do enormous damage to the civil justice system.

The Clinton administration has told the states that the federal government will take at least half of any money they recover through lawsuits against tobacco companies for the costs of providing health care to smokers under Medicaid. Administration officials reason that the federal government contributes at least half of every Medicaid dollar spent by the states, so it should get at least half of every dollar recovered from the tobacco companies for the costs of treating tobacco-related illnesses of Medicaid recipients. State officials angrily rejected the federal claims, saying the federal government had been of no help to them in their lawsuits.

A bill that would allow a pregnant woman who abuses drugs and alcohol to be forced into treatment -- or even detained in a treatment center to protect her fetus -- was passed by the state Assembly Wednesday. The proposal, which would extend the state's child protection law to include fetuses, sparked an emotional debate that spanned an entire afternoon during the last week of legislative action this year. It passed on a vote of 69-27. . . An attempt to add tobacco addiction onto the list of reasons to detain a pregnant woman failed.

The tobacco industry contends the state of Minnesota's smoking-and-health lawsuit should be dismissed because, among other things, the state long knew about the hazards of smoking but did little to curb the conduct of smokers, according to documents filed in advance of arguments this week. In addition, the legal briefs assert, the state consciously used cigarette taxes as as stream of revenue for various state needs, including sewer construction. But attorneys for the state and co-plaintiff Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota contend that years of fraudulent conduct by the industry kept from public view the incriminating evidence that would have reshaped public debate and policy on smoking, addiction and health issues.

The state and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota are not entitled to monetary damages in their lawsuit against major tobacco companies because neither plaintiff was directly injured, a tobacco company lawyer argued Tuesday. Murray Garnick, representing Philip Morris Inc., told Ramsey County Judge Kenneth Fitzpatrick that any injury to the state or Blue Cross was derived through injury to smokers. That remoteness limits the liability of tobacco companies . . . Attorney Michael Cirisi, representing the state, argued that the remoteness rule does not apply in the case.

The tobacco companies filed a motion Monday asking Fitzpatrick to limit his request to any joint defense agreements that were wholly or partially signed, any drafts of such agreements, correspondence about such agreements or drafts, documents reflecting or constituting such agreements, and documents regarding the procedures for signing or adopting such agreements. Should Fitzpatrick agree to the request, the companies wouldn't have to provide more general documents, such as letters with the term "joint defense" in them, drafts of court documents that reflect the exchange of information under a joint defense agreement and notes of meetings discussing joint defense experts.

The Minnesota Physician-Patient Alliance, a nonprofit organization formed by more than 700 physicians in July, is calling on Blue Cross Blue Shield, HealthPartners and Medica to re-examine their policies. The MPPA wants the plans to cover all smoking cessation efforts across the board, from nicotine patches and stop-smoking classes to such promising new drugs as Zyban, an anti-depressant successfully used by the Mayo Clinic to help patients stop smoking.

Bob Montgomery, one of the 12 private attorneys hired by Florida to handle its lawsuit against the tobacco industry, claims his colleague -- Mike Maher -- held secret meetings with representatives of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Philip Morris Inc. Montgomery says the companies wanted Maher to induce the state not to honor its contract with attorneys, which called for them to receive 25 percent of the state's settlement.

RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp's R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co and Philip Morris Cos Inc's Philip Morris Inc Wednesday denied allegations by an attorney involved in Florida's Medicaid lawsuit that they had schemed over fees paid to lawyers in the suit. "The tobacco companies have scrupulously followed the letter and spirit of the Florida settlement and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong," they said in a joint statement. The companies said they will fully comply with a provision in the Aug. 25 settlement agreement that obliges them to pay "reasonable" attorneys' fees determined by an independent panel of arbitrators.

Those who wish to see a kernel of principle in the tobacco money chase had better avert their eyes from Florida.

A high school football player who tested positive for nicotine in a drug screen and was forced to sit out the final game of the season is suing the Brown County school system. Ross Volbrecht, 18, of Brown County High School was disciplined after a random urine test showed that he had used tobacco. . . Attorney Andrew Szakaly sued the school system on Oct. 24, the day of the game, on behalf of the student and his father, Ronald Volbrecht, claiming the school cannot punish a student for an otherwise legal activity.

: Calling it a "courageous vote in the face of constant anti-tobacco hype," convenience store operators applauded the Snohomish Health District board's decision yesterday to reject and outdoor tobacco advertising ban.

National Rifle Association is trying to cultivate a new generation of gun owners by using some of the same strategies to hook children on guns that the tobacco industry has used to hook them on cigarettes, according to a new study by an anti-gun group.

The Eddie Eagle program employs strategies similar to those used by the tobacco industry -- from youth "educational" programs that are in fact marketing tools to appealing cartoon characters that put a friendly face on a hazardous product. While the tobacco industry denies that it is marketing to children, the NRA and the gun industry openly admit that they are. . . The research also reveals that the tobacco industry has made contributions to The NRA Foundation. Father Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina's Church and long-time activist for restrictions on tobacco and alcohol billboards, said: "The NRA through the 'Eddie Eagle' program seeks to tell the same lie that the tobacco industry said for years, 'We do not want our children to use our products.' But the Ligget disclosure exposes that lie and now the bloodline of money between Philip Morris and the NRA exposes them both."

With litigation and the on-again, off-again tobacco settlement making for an uncertain future for cigarette manufacturers, many analysts and investors thought they'd have to go cold turkey on tobacco stocks. But according to a new study by Scott & Stringfellow Inc., investors may be able to satisfy their cravings by buying shares in tobacco leaf merchants. . . In the November issue of Scott & Stringfellow's monthly Tobacco Trader, analyst Jack F. Kasprzak Jr. sings the praises of three tobacco leaf merchants and one cigarette paper supplier. Dimon Inc. (DMN) and Standard Commercial Corp. (STW) are rated strong buys, while Universal Corp. (UVV) and specialty paper company Schweitzer-Mauduit (SWM) are rated long-term buys. / Part 2 / Part 3

LONDON, November 19 (LPC) - The underwriting phase of the $8 billion facility supporting the demerger of B.A.T. Industries has proved highly successful, having raised $11.05 billion at the preliminary stage of syndication, according to the arranging banks. The loan, which is being arranged by Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, HSBC and Sumitomo has attracted commitments from 33 banks, which represents a 73 percent acceptance rate.

The Austrian state holding company OIAG sold another 1.21 million shares in Austria Tabakwerke AG (R.ATW) via the greenshoe option that was part of the group's initial public offering earlier in November, OIAG Chairman Erich Becker said Wednesday. Becker told Dow Jones that the exercising of the greenshoe option had increased the total stake sold to 49.5% of the group's base capital. The rest is still in state hands.

Caribbean Cigar Company (the "Company") announced today that it had restated its earnings for the Company's first fiscal quarter ended June 30, 1997 to reflect a loss of approximately $600,000 . . . The Company also announced a net loss of approximately $2 million for the second fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30, 1997 . . .

Despite the increasing number of areas being declared "non-smoking," cigar sales have risen by a factor of five during the past decade. Gordon Mott, the editor of "Cigar Aficionado" magazine, says cigar manufacturers are falling behind just trying to keep up with demand.

More and more investors are doing so, largely because of the growing antagonism toward tobacco companies. The number of funds that screen investments according to social criteria jumped from 55 in 1995 to 144 today, according to the Social Investment Forum, an advocacy group for socially conscious investing. Assets in such funds soared during that period from $12 billion to $96 billion, the forum says in a new study of social-investing trends.

And now that the 1997 season is over, Nascar officials and sponsors are discussing who will replace tobacco as the headline sponsor on the racing circuit. "There are all kinds of people wanting to jump in," says H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, president of Speedway Motorsports Inc. . . RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., parent of Winston maker R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. . . could retain the sponsorship by using brands other than cigarettes. Thus, the SnackWell Cup, or one of Nabisco's other food products, suggests Mr. Wheeler.

In a study conducted by the Air Transport Association, a trade group representing airlines, 25 percent of the incidents were alcohol-related, said Hanke. Sixteen percent were about seat assignments, 10 percent were smoking-related, 9 percent were about carry-on bags, 8 percent were the attendant's attitude and 5 percent were food service.

Your wife may be beyond the help you seek, but perhaps it will comfort you to know that your powerful letter may convince another person to stop smoking. And tomorrow will provide the perfect opportunity:

GREAT AMERICAN SMOKEOUT

The Great American Smokeout, that annual antismoking ritual, was duly ignored Thursday by many in Manhattan's tribe of outdoor smokers. Shivering as usual, they populated doorways and office lobbies in a smoke-out of their own. . . "The Smokeout is an excellent idea, but here I am, smoking out," said Doolittle, a lawyer for the Eastman Kodak Co. who stood outside 375 Park Ave., his Newport alight. "I've tried to quit several times, and believe me, it's not easy."

No turning back now. Twenty-three hours and 56 minutes of non-smoking loom ahead. I am about to sacrifice myself in the name of today's "American Cancer Society's 21st Great American Smokeout"

"It's infringing on our rights," said Costa Mesa photographer Dennis Gasper as he drank a mug of beer at the Stag. "It's the last bastion of freedom." The 20-year-old Great American Smokeout -- meant to encourage smokers to quit, if only for one day -- didn't exactly light a fire under any local bar-goers this year. A few knew of the event, some heard of it but didn't know when it was and all of them didn't care. . . But around the corner, patrons at Blackie's by the Sea -- overwhelmingly nonsmokers -- cheered the new law. . . And The Quiet Woman in Corona del Mar has rendered smoking a non-issue by banning it in September, months ahead of the state mandate. Bartenders and patrons there said the no-smoking rule hasn't hurt business much. "A couple of daytime regulars have gone elsewhere," said bartender Hank Schwartz. "But a lot of people are coming back who had fallen off because of the smoke."

• 11/20/97 MISSISSIPPI: Smokers Asked to Butt Out in Great American Smokeout Biloxi Sun-Herald
• 11/20/97 American Cancer Society Marks 21st Annual Smokeout: Kids Debate Tobacco Issue in City Hall Council Chambers PR Newswire
• 11/20/97 CALIFORNIA: 18 Bars Participating in Smokeout San Diego Union-Tribune
  
  "With the law in effect, we'll have a level playing field. People will adjust to it. After we went smoke-free, more people came in to enjoy the food," he added.
• 11/20/97 NEW YORK: American Smokeout Campaign Begins AP/Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
• 11/20/97 COLORADO: Smokeout Urges Teens to Snub Tobacco Reuters
  
  "I didn't realize I would get addicted." Tom Merrill, a Denver teenager, spoke for many smokers when he described how he fell into a habit that he now wants to quit. . . It is really hard to quit smoking, according to both smokers and medical experts. So today, the American Cancer Society (ACS) is focusing the efforts of its 21st annual Great American Smokeout to convince young people not to start.
• 11/20/97 Free Survival Kit for Smokout from LifeSign PR Newswire
  
  From now through January 1, 1998, LifeSign offers a free survival kit for quitters which includes an audio cassette of tips entitled, "The Twenty-One Best Kept Secrets of Successful Quitters" and toll free hotline support staffed by trained counselors. For people with loved ones that smoke, the company is giving away a free booklet entitled "How to Help Someone You Love Quit Smoking." This offer is extended to teens who smoke and their parents as part of Research & Development in teen cessation being launched by PICS in several Washington area High Schools under a grant from the National Cancer Institute. . . Visit the PICS Internet site at http://www.LifeSign.com.
• 11/20/97 DEBI MAZAR Signs on to Kick Butts USA Today
  
  Debi Mazar started smoking when she was 12. Thursday, at 33, the actress will try to quit her half-pack a day habit during the Great American Smokeout. "I love smoking. I love it. I'm miserable when I have to quit, but I hate being a nicotine addict. I hate how it smells. I hate having to walk outside. I hate how my lungs feel." She has tried to give it up before. "Acupuncture, switching brands, cold turkey, smoking the most hideous cigarette I could possibly find, hypnotism." . . Now, as the latest celebrity signed by a pharmaceutical company to tout a health product, she has been hired by SmithKline Beecham to work with the American Cancer Society and take part in Thursday's Smokeout. "I'm not required to quit," she says. "I'm required to try."
• 11/20/97 Debi Mazar Tries Again Item in Changes in an Award Ceremony, The New York Times
  
  "I have been smoking for two decades, and I'm sick of needing cigarettes , for health reasons," she said. "My voice is getting deeper as I get older, and I feel it when I run." And then there are her toy poodles, Dolores and Loretta, to consider. "It's awful to pick up the dogs and have them smell of smoke," she said."
• 11/19/97 Debi Mazar Speaks Out . . . as a Smoker Intent on Quitting PR Newswire
  
  Debi Mazar has teamed up with the American Cancer Society to join millions of Americans across the country on Thursday, November 20 . . . "I've been smoking for 21 years, and I'm ready to quit for good," says Debi. "I've tried to quit several times before and relapsed. . . " Debi, a half-pack-a- day smoker, will be using the NicoDerm(R) CQ(R) nicotine patch to aid her with her quit attempt and will develop a personalized plan to help her through the process.
• 11/20/97 Nine Years Clean, and Never Again LA Times
  
  [O]n Great American Smokeout day, from a guy who sucked down cigarettes for 20 years, has now been clean for nine and will never smoke one again ~ here indeed are some tips for those who want to stop: * Drink gallons of water . . .
• 11/20/97 CESSATION: Beyond Cold Turkey; Where to quit if you need a little help? Six serious smoke-cessation programs Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires (Lenox, Mass., 800-726-9900), Coolfont Resort (Berkeley Springs, W. Va., 800-888-8768), Canyon Ranch Health Resort (Tucson, Ariz., 800-726-9900), Hilton Head Health Institute (Hilton Head Island, S.C., 800-292- 2440), Cooper Wellness Program (Dallas, 800-444-5192), Mayo Nicotine Dependence Center (Rochester, Minn., 800-344-5984). November 24 1997 Fortune Magazine
• 11/20/97 CESSATION: 'I Wanted To Sweat Out Poisons'; South Of The Border, One Man's Quest To Leave Behind A Decades-old Smoking Habit Pete Hamill, November 24 1997 Fortune Magazine
  
  I smoked when I said hello. I smoked when I said goodbye. Maybe next week I would go to the gym. Maybe next week I'd put the butts aside and get rid of that vaguely emphysemic wheeze that sometimes kept me from weary sleep. Sure. Then, abruptly, the job was over. And I was alive. I knew what I had to do: go away and try to heal the damage.
• 11/20/97 A Day in the Life of a Smoker Kansas City Star
• 11/20/97 Smokers Unite Against Anti-smoking Efforts Kansas City Star
  
  They're joining smokers' rights groups, such as the American Smokers Alliance. Today it is calling on members to take part in the Great American Smokers' Strike. On this day -- when the American Cancer Society also marks the 21st annual Great American Smokeout, encouraging smokers to quit for one day -- the alliance is urging smokers to skip work to stay home and smoke.
• 11/19/97 CALIFORNIA: Hollywood's Laugh Factory Joins Area Bars and Clubs for Smoke-Free Night in Anticipation of New Law ACS PR, Business Wire
  
  In celebration of the American Cancer Society's 21st Great American Smokeout, local bars and clubs will be going smoke-free on Thursday, Nov. 20.
• 11/19/97 Andy the Purple Ant Still Has a Point Worth Making Richmond Times-Dispatch
  
  Working through the American Cancer Society in Norfolk, Sechrist . . . performed a high-tech conversion of an existing set of society booklets aimed at warning young children about the dangers of smoking. Sechrist brought the five, 10-year-old booklets to life on computer software, which has been distributed to schools and child-care centers in Hampton Roads. The interactive, computerized version of the short stories feature a variety of cartoon characters, including a purple ant named Andy.
• 11/19/97 American Cancer Society: 90,000 Californians Urge Entertainment Industry to 'Stop the Smoke Screenings' Petition Display on Hollywood Boulevard Scheduled for Great American Smokeout Day November 20. PR Newswire
  
  The American Cancer Society will place on public display 90,000 signatures collected on a statewide petition that urges the entertainment industry to stop glamorizing tobacco use. The petition display, entitled "Stop the Smoke Screenings," will be the centerpiece of a media event to be held at the Women in Film Gazebo located at Hollywood Boulevard and LaBrea Avenue at 10:30 AM Thursday, November 20
• 11/19/97 Anti-Smoking Campaign Hits Movie Theaters Business Wire
  
  Just in time for the heaviest movie-going season, Los Angeles County theater patrons will see movie trailers that contain anti-smoking messages on 150 screens throughout Los Angeles County. The advertisements are part of a larger campaign sponsored by the Los Angeles County Health Department to combat the entertainment industry's glamorization of smoking and tobacco products in movies.
• 11/21/97 OHIO: Students Yell Just for Sake of Good Health Akron Beacon Journal
• 11/20/97 OHIO: The James Cancer Hospital Breaks New Ground with Anti-Smoking Campaign for Kids PR Newswire
  
  The Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Research Institute at The Ohio State University is embarking on a unique campaign to encourage young adults not to smoke. In addition to several advertising messages, The James Cancer Hospital has produced a cassette tape, called "Lost In Smoke," full of scenarios, comedy skits and music for young adults ages 11-14. The goals of this tape are to get out the message that smoking is not healthy and to encourage kids not to start smoking. By using humor and music kids love, The James hopes kids will pay attention to the message.
• 11/20/97 OHIO: Students to Shout Out against Tobacco Akron Beacon Journal
  
  The American Cancer Society has announced a seven-second Scream Out Against Smoking at noon today by Akron-area students. They include students from Akron, Woodridge, Stow and Hudson school districts. Some students will take part in the "scream-out" at their schools while others will attend a program at LifeCenter Plus in Hudson.
• 11/19/97 OHIO: Don't Just Smoke Out--Snuff Out PR Newswire
  
  As thousands of Ohioans put down their cigars and cigarettes for the Great American Smokeout, dentists throughout the state are saying it's not enough; it's time to snuff out, too.
• 11/19/97 CALIFORNIA: Smokers Urged to Take up the Net Instead LA Times
  
  The Great American Smokeout is challenging Ventura County smokers to put down their cigarettes and take up computer keyboards and holiday crafts to participate in an Internet "Surf-a-thon" or a holiday "Craft-a-thon" today on the eve of the Smokeout. . . The real-time Internet "Surf-a-thon" will allow tobacco users throughout the world to go online from 5 to 9 p.m. to a chat room filled with other would-be quitters, successful quitters and cessation experts. Internet linkage sites will be available throughout the evening for tobacco users who do not have Internet access or would like to learn how to use it at the Computer Training Center of Ventura County in Camarillo and the SurfNet Cafe in Ventura. The Web site that will host the Smokeout chat room can be reached at http://www.rain.org/smokeout
• 11/19/97 Study Shows Educational Partnership Increases Quit Attempts Among SmokersAmerican Cancer Society and SmithKline Beecham Are Making a Difference Among Smokers. PR Newswire
• 11/17/97 Smokeout Campaign Begins Reuters
• 11/17/97 PENNSYLVANIA: Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield Offers Quit Smoking Tips in Advance Of The Great American Smokeout November 20 Highmark Offers Start SMART(TM), a Smoking Cessation Program to Help Members And Nonmembers Kick the Habit for Good. PR Newswire
• 11/17/97 MINNESOTA: Physicians Call for Changes in Health Plan Policies on Smoking Cessation Thursday is D-Day, But Will Your Health Plan Help You Quit? PR Newswire
  
  In honor of Minnesota D-Day (The Great American Smoke Out), the Minnesota Physician-Patient Alliance (MPPA) is calling on the state's three major health plans -- Blue Cross, HealthPartners and Medica -- to re-examine their policies which support patient efforts to stop smoking. The alliance -- an organization of over 700 Minnesota physicians -- maintains that Minnesota health plans do not adequately cover smoking cessation services for their enrollees.
• 11/17/97 ARIZONA: Help on Hand Arizona Daily Star
  
  Quit-smoking kits and a 24-hour help line are just two ways smokers can help kick the habit. The free Quit Kits are available at the American Cancer Society, 1636 N. Swan Road, Suite 151, weekdays between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Or one can be mailed to you by calling 321-7989. A live remote radio show by KHIT-107.5 FM Thursday will announce the opening of the 24-hour smokers' help line.
• 11/17/97 ARIZONA: Prizes Galore Offered When You Give Up Your Butts Arizona Daily Star
  
  Give up your smokes, get a freebie. That's the premise of a couple of activities Thursday in connection with the Great American Smokeout. Here are the details:
• 11/17/97 ARIZONA: UA Can Help Smokers Quit Arizona Daily Star
• 11/17/97 Kiss 'Em Goodbye Arizona Daily Star
  
  Here are some tips for smokers to kiss their butts goodbye
• 11/17/97 Telling Facts about Use of Tobacco Arizona Daily Star
• 11/17/97 PROFILE: LYNN SMITH: Cold Turkey Arizona Daily Star
  
  Years before "smelly, puking habit" became imprinted forever in our brain cells, a small-town newspaper editor in Minnesota got people to give up their cigarettes - some forever. "No, I didn't think it would go as far as it did," says Lynn Smith, who is credited with starting the campaign now known as the Great American Smokeout. Now retired and wintering in Tucson, Smith, 77, used his newspaper as a bully pulpit and the small-town cohesiveness of Monticello, Minn. - population 1,700 - to get hundreds of smokers to quit, if only for a day, on Jan. 7, 1974.
• 11/16/97 GREAT AMERICAN SMOKEOUT: Up in Smoke Great collection of stats on: Profile of the American Smoker, Cigarettes Sold in U.S., Cigarettes Sold Outside the U.S., Advertising dollars spent in 1995, Seconhand Smoke, Cost of Tobacco, Deaths, Cigar Smoking, Smokeless Tobacco, Pipe Smoking. LA Times
• 11/15/97 GREAT AMERICAN SMOKEOUT: Database: Smoking Cigarettes US News
  
  Forty-eight million Americans have broken their habit since the first Smokeout; 48 million still smoke; some 34 million say they want to quit. . . The average age of a first-time smoker in this country is 13. More than 3 million American adolescents smoke cigarettes. . . The average smoker spends $900 a year on cigarettes. Sales of smoking-cessation aids are up 41,000 percent from a year ago

When the researchers took into account other influences on coronary risk like smoking, trans fats stood out as the most serious problem. Among the women who consumed the largest amounts of trans fats, the chance of suffering a heart attack was 53 percent higher than among those at the low end of trans fat consumption.

COSH [Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health] yesterday launched a children's charter aimed at promoting the rights of children to be free of tobacco. This includes their rights to live in a smoke-free home, visit public places which are smoke-free and live without cigarette promotion and advertising. . . Professor Hedley said: "We don't have Formula One in Hong Kong but anyone can watch Formula One racing on television. "We would say exactly the same conclusions can be drawn from the industry's sponsorship of Southern China's football leagues; of rave parties in Shenzhen; of tennis tournaments sponsored by Marlboro and Salem; and of volleyball by Kent."

Ignoring the threat of a lawsuit from the convenience store industry, Albany on Monday night became the first city in the state to snuff out tobacco advertising near schools, day care centers, game rooms and other places where children congregate. The Youth Protection Against Tobacco Promotion bill, passed unanimously by the 15-member council, would effectively eliminate such common images as the Marlboro cowboy and the R.J. Reynolds' Camel logo from the city's landscape.

Already inmates are seeking comfort inside candy wrappers and building a whole new monetary system around the empty calorie. The holdouts can be found foraging through the exercise yard for butts left over from the old days. None of it is pretty, said Tuggle, a pack-a-day Newport smoker who calls the policy "cruel and unusual punishment." Unusual, it is not.

[Forest, OH] village police are using surveillance cameras to catch underage smokers. They posted a camera at one problem area outside Forest Elementary School recently and taped a group of teen-agers thought to be smoking and passing out cigarettes to younger children. Police charged 13 juveniles under the ordinance and two 18-year-olds under a provision of the Ohio unruly child law, which makes it an offense for an activity that would "injure or endanger the health...of himself or others."

Law enforcement and education officials are urging more teens to stop smoking through a new education program. Starting today, police will issue warnings to teens caught smoking. A copy of the warning will be sent to their parents. In February, police will cite teens who are smoking. They will be required to pay a $40 court fee and attend a three-hour class on tobacco with their parents, said Assistant Chief Daniel Sharp of the Tucson Police Department. "It's not a punitive type program," said Nic Clement, principal of Flowing Wells High School. "It's an educational program."

Smokers need not apply next year to Providence Medical Center in Seattle. Determined to eventually make its labor force smoke-free at work, at home and everywhere else, Providence will ask job candidates to sign a statement that they don't smoke anytime, anywhere, hospital spokesman Serge Gregory said.

Popovich said Wei did require evaluation, but is in good shape. Medicine was prescribed to help keep Wei's blood pressure down, Popovich said. Doctors also are recommending that he eat a low-salt diet, exercise and stop smoking.

Many of my friends have recently become addicts. They have not taken up some new drug or habit. They're doing the same thing they have been doing for years. They smoke. They became addicts because of a push, socially and legally, to "medicalize" smoking -- that is, make their habit a medical problem. . . We normally do not blame sick people for their illnesses. We have understood them as victims of chance or some evil power. But calling a smoker a victim of an addiction shifts responsibility away from the individual. . . Turning smokers into addicts has given government a new justification for expanding its authority. Federal, state and local governments now have a reason to regulate behavior, by limiting where people can smoke, and to penalize tobacco companies, by censoring their advertisements.

Every time I finish one of those editorials, I want a cigarette. . . We need a dramatic change in advertising across all media to stop making cigarettes look cool (including an end to product placements in the movies and TV), maximum use of price increases and policing to impede youth purchases, stiff and inescapable penalties against cigarette companies if underage smoking doesn't plunge. All of this sounds extreme and misguided to the adolescent in my home, who adheres to that pure brand of libertarianism available only to the young or highly naive. People are completely responsible for all their choices, as he sees it, and if they're so weak that they can be influenced by advertising, then they deserve what they get.

About eight percent of Americans have a gene variant that protects them against lung cancer, even when they smoke . . . They said the gene variant -- one of several normal versions of the gene -- reduces the risk of lung cancer by about 54 percent among smokers. . . . It affects a gene that controls production of an enzyme known as myeloperoxidase. "The enzyme, myeloperoxidase, activates the potent carcinogen benzopyrene, which is a product of tobacco smoke, the burning of most fuels and most other kinds of combustion," London said. People with a mutation of the gene known as A/A seem to produce less of this enzyme, London's team reported in the journal Cancer Research. Most people have versions known as A/G or G/G, London said.

The study, made at the University of Birmingham, is not about passive smoking, the effect of smoke on children's lungs. It is about the damage smoking can cause long before babies take their first breath.

Men who smoke could be damaging their sperm and increasing their children's risk of developing cancer, researchers said on Tuesday. A study by doctors at the University of Birmingham in England published in the British Journal of Cancer found that children whose fathers smoked more than 20 cigarettes a day had a 30 percent higher risk of developing cancer than other children. The raised chance of getting cancer was not linked to smoking mothers and could not be explained by social class, family size or paternal age. "Damaged sperm is the likeliest culprit," Dr Tom Sorahan.

The younger children are when they first start experimenting with smoking, drugs or drinking, the harder it is for them to quit, researchers said on Tuesday. They said the riskiest time for kids was around age 12, and if they started that young, they were unlikely to kick bad habits. David DeWit and colleagues at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, studied the drug histories of 4,300 children and adolescents in the area. . . They said drug-abuse programs should start with younger children.

Psychologists from St. George's Hospital Medical School in London, England, report finding no evidence of increased anxiety in patients who gave up smoking. In fact, they found a significant decrease in anxiety beginning in the first nicotine-free week. These results lead the researchers, Drs. Robert West and Peter Hajek, to suggest that smoking leads to "chronically increased anxiety and that giving up smoking improves the situation."

A Finnish study published in the association's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found that eating foods rich in vitamin E (eggs, whole grains, liver and leafy greens) or beta-carotene (orange and yellow vegetables) may offer some protection from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease even among elderly, long-term smokers. But taking the vitamins as supplements does not appear to protect against the breathing diseases (more commonly known as emphysema and chronic bronchitis), the researchers added. And quitting smoking still had a much more dramatic effect on such illnesses than the best diet.

The Arcata City Council has delayed a vote on a proclamation that would have set a goal of investing public funds in so-called socially responsible investments. . . Instead, the council decided to hold a public study session to discuss socially responsible investing on December 15 and vote on the proclamation in January.

Experts will play a key role in the Minnesota tobacco litigation. Both sides have released impressive lists. Not all necessarily will testify at the trial in January. These lists were taken from documents filed with Ramsey County District Court in St. Paul, Minn.

[I]t's often called "the early grave defense" -- the notion that smokers die sooner, saving on medical expenses. But a St. Paul judge, in a rare comment from the bench, said Wednesday that he won't allow cigarette makers to use such a ghoulish argument at the Minnesota tobacco trial in January. Interrupting a Philip Morris Cos. lawyer at a pretrial hearing, Ramsey County District Judge Kenneth Fitzpatrick made his position clear without issuing a formal order. "But counsel, can you imagine my sitting here during the trial of this case and allowing you to present what is ultimately a position that you deserve a credit because of the death of people that was premature by reason of smoking?" Fitzpatrick asked.

State Republican Party Chairman Bill Cooper on Thursday urged Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III to stop gambling with the health of teen-agers and abandon his lawsuit against the tobacco industry. Cooper accused Humphrey of using the high-profile case for political gain and making an "unconscionable" agreement to pay 25 percent of any settlement in the state's case to Robins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi, the law firm hired to do the day-to-day work on the case.

"The greed of the thing is amazing," said Bill Cooper, who challenged Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III to renegotiate a better deal with the Minneapolis firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi. Cooper also accused gubernatorial candidate Humphrey of pursuing the case in court instead of participating in national tobacco settlement talks to further his political ambitions. . . "Basically Skip Humphrey is gambling with this huge multi-billion dollar settlement," he said. "Minnesota is liable to end up with nothing."

Republican Party Chairman Bill Cooper accused Humphrey, perhaps the most widely known DFL candidate for governor, of striking an "unconscionable" agreement to pay a local law firm up to $1 billion in contingency fees if the state and the firm are successful in their pending lawsuit against tobacco companies.

Gov. Arne Carlson expressed strong opposition Wednesday to the Clinton administration's decision to seek half of any Medicaid reimbursement recovered by states from tobacco companies for the treatment of smoking-related illnesses. . . "While the opportunity to craft a settlement is a noble undertaking," Carlson said in his letter, "policymakers must resist the temptation to turn the settlement proceeds into a 'grab bag' for federal agencies."

If the state's suit against the tobacco industry is successful, Brown Rudnick and four other firms would divvy a $250 million payoff. That is nearly as much as Boston's two biggest law firms - Ropes & Gray and Hale and Dorr - take in annually, combined, according to estimates by American Lawyer magazine.

Secretary of State Lewis Massey and the American Cancer Society are joining forces to urge lawmakers to ban smoking in the state Capitol, where thousands of school children visit each year. Massey is a candidate for governor

State Atty. Gen. Jeff Modisett urged Indiana lawmakers Thursday to repeal legislation that bans local restrictions on the sale and marketing of tobacco products. The General Assembly earlier this year overrode former Gov. Evan Bayh's veto of the legislation, which also was opposed by the American Cancer Society and the Indiana State Medical Association. . . . The legislation preempts local ordinances.

The Senate OK'd a bill allowing minors to be used in "stings" to nab retailers who sell cigarettes to underage customers. Store clerks and the minors who buy cigarettes could be charged $250 for breaking the law.

Arizona filed its AHCCCS claim Monday after Gov. Jane Hull gave the go-ahead two weeks ago. Maledon said the revised claim will likely delay the trial now scheduled for October 1998. He said the tobacco companies already have provided about five million pages of documents, and the state has given the defense about a million.

Gov. Jane Hull agreed yesterday to let Arizona's indigent health-care program - and its 400,000 enrollees - join the state's lawsuit against tobacco companies. The decision greatly expands the scope of the case, enabling the state to claim actual damages that Attorney General Grant Woods places at $600 million. Hull granted Woods' request to include the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System in the litigation. Woods contends the decision will not only increase the state's potential award, but also bolster its chances of winning.

The ad, by the Long Haymes Carr unit of the Interpublic Group of Cos. in Winston-Salem, N.C., ran as part of a new campaign promoting Winston cigarettes as additive-free . . . The company's lawyers said that the ad used a "generic blues guitarist" who was not meant to look like Bo Diddley, because he was dressed differently and held a different kind of guitar.

Bluesman Bo Diddley has threatened to sue R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. for using what he says is his likeness in an ad campaign without his permission. The magazine ads had the caption "My blues are real, just like my smokes" and showed a photograph of a guitarist who Diddley and his attorneys say looks too much like Bo. "Our client considers any association of his celebrity with cigarette smoking -- an activity that he does not condone -- to be particularly distasteful and patently misleading," attorneys for the 68-year-old Diddley wrote in a letter to the tobacco giant. Reynolds said the "generic blues guitarist" isn't intended to look like Diddley.

Activin, a highly potent antioxidant derived from red grape seeds, has been shown to reduce the death and damage to human cells caused by tobacco products by up to 85 percent and defends cells against the detrimental effects of tobacco better than vitamins C and E. The findings of the study, conducted by Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., will be presented Friday at the fourth annual meeting of The Oxygen Society.

To be sure, there's no evidence that additives increase the health risks of smoking. Even additives critic Greg Connolly, head of Massachusetts' tobacco-control program, admits, "It's the natural stuff that kills you, stupid." For now, though, it's the natural stuff that sells. If Winston's renaissance continues, look for others, like industry leader Philip Morris, to join the additive-free parade.

Nabisco Holdings Corp. said H. John Greeniaus, chairman and chief executive officer, resigned for health reasons and will be succeeded by James Kilts, a former Philip Morris Cos. executive vice president who revitalized its vast Kraft Foods operations. . . . Although Mr. Kilts should be able to hit the ground running, the timing for his arrival is awkward. The change will put Nabisco's management in flux just when RJR is hoping to spin off the food company from its tobacco operations, perhaps as early as next year.

The presence of Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co., the lone remaining cigarette company in Durham, continues to diminish in a city that a half-century ago made a quarter of all the nation's cigarettes. "For sale" signs are posted on the massive brick structures that now house the research laboratories and the main administration offices at the corner of Main and Duke streets. . . Once the buildings are sold, Liggett will lease them back for a short period of time until the remaining 35 employees are relocated in the main factory at 700 W. Main St., Jackson said.

During the third quarter, Franklin Mutual Advisers Inc., a money-management group that includes Wall Street guru Michael Price, increased its position in several tobacco and oil companies, according to Federal Filings Business News.

As cheroots go, so goes Swisher International Group (SWR), the world's No.1 cigar maker. With 32% of the U.S. market, Swisher is a popular play for pros who think the cigar craze won't go up in smoke anytime soon. Swisher's stock has wafted up from 14 in mid-July to 18 on Nov. 18. Some money pros who have bought are betting it will hit 25 in six months. Among Swisher shareholders: Fidelity Investments and Putnam Investments.

If you missed the William Doyle sale of American Furniture and Decorations on Wednesday, which included a bargain countertop cigar store Indian in a feathered skirt that sold for $3,450, you and the tobacconists can turn to the charming show at the Museum of American Folk Art at 2 Lincoln Square: "The Image Business: Shop and Cigar Store Figures in America." Sponsored by the General Cigar Co., it runs through Jan. 11 in New York and then travels to the Baltimore Museum of Art from Feb. 18 to April 12. It is a show geared to children and adults alike.

[T]he European and Asian members of the 29-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will agree to a treaty setting the end of next year as the deadline for each country to adopt the anti-corruption rules. The pact, to be signed by cabinet members from the OECD nations in a ceremony here in mid-December, is seen as an important step in leveling the playing field for U.S. and overseas companies seeking contracts with foreign governments.

Monterey High School senior Ryan Bonebreak has a simple argument for why his peers shouldn't start smoking: "You die." Ryan's message came across clearly on a T-shirt design that earned him first place in the Burbank Unified School District's anti-smoking T-shirt contest. The school board honored Ryan at its regular meeting Thursday, along with second-place winners Karla Menjivar, a 14-year-old Burbank High freshman, and Winston Krutsch, a 14-year-old freshman at Burroughs High.

Florida's top fraud investigator has resigned (Friday) amid allegations of financial improprieties. Chief Inspector General Harold Lewis is accused of improperly accepting loans from a lawyer involved in the state's $11.3 billion settlement with tobacco companies, and from a legislator he was later asked to investigate.

Chief Inspector General Harold Lewis devoted much of his time to Florida's landmark case against the tobacco industry. But while Lewis traveled the state to attend high-powered tobacco meetings, he left behind an understaffed, overwhelmed inspector general's office.

A state health panel recommended Friday that Gov. Christie Whitman and lawmakers consider raising the cigarette tax to help New Jersey hospitals cover the cost of free medical treatment for the uninsured. The 36-member advisory committee concluded that the state's $16 billion budget should finance the estimated $400 million annual cost of the free health care, known as the charity care hospital program. The committee is made up of representatives of hospitals, insurers, consumer and business groups and organized labor. The panel's members unanimously endorsed an increase in the state cigarette tax to help replace money from the state's general funds, but they did not specify an amount.

Busted! A student on the Lafayette High School yearbook staff last year put four or five photographs of students holding or smoking cigarettes on one page of the edition just published, but no matter how hard you look, you won't find them. If you look closely, though, you can see the remains of page 11, which was sliced out of the 1996-97 edition. Principal Mike McKenzie ordered the page cut from all 600 copies. . . He said students on the yearbook staff were told at the beginning of last year that no photographs of students smoking, drinking or using drugs would be allowed. "That expectation wasn't met," he said.

Gov. Arne Carlson did not violate Minnesota's ethics laws when he traveled to Australia last year on a trade mission indirectly financed by tobacco giant Philip Morris, the state Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board ruled Friday. Complaints about the eight-day trip in August 1996 by Carlson and his wife, Susan, were lodged earlier this year by state Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville, and two antitobacco activists. The $7,000 trip was arranged by the National Governors Association, of which almost all states are members. But it was actually paid for by two nonprofit foundations. Those groups, in turn, were largely financed by Philip Morris.

Now the agency faces a major revamping ordered by Congress to hasten approval of drugs and devices, an acceleration that critics say could expose patients to risky items that are hurried through for the financial benefit of their manufacturers. And the agency faces delicate negotiations over tobacco. And it still has no leader.

Anthony Laughing, a 50-year-old fugitive, was arrested yesterday, five months after he had taken sanctuary on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, which straddles the border with Canada. Mr. Laughing had been wanted on Federal charges that he played an important role in a $687 million cigarette and liquor smuggling operation. . . . Mr. Laughing was lured off the reservation and charged with smuggling, money laundering and racketeering, the authorities said.

Members of Human Rights Watch/Asia, and Human Rights in China, the two groups that are helping him with logistics, have been scouring New York's Chinatown in search of his favorite Chinese brand of cigarettes -- Red Pagoda Mountain -- even though U.S. physicians who examined and t reated him in Detroit expressly ordered him to quit smoking.

In his first days of freedom, Wei exhibited his habit for bucking authority. Defying an order by a Detroit doctor to stop smoking, he lit a cigarette in his hospital bed.

Doctors also told him to quit smoking, but one human rights activist at the news conference chided him for insisting upon smoking in his hospital room.

Why threaten someone when you can buy him off? It's so much easier -- and legal to boot -- to get out one's checkbook and send a hefty donation. Just ask Big Tobacco. It got a $50 billion tax write-off into the budget without any compromising photos of the speaker of the House canoodling with Marv Albert's dominatrix.

A portly, pipe-smoking man, he presided over a period of enormous growth for the university. But as the '60s swept by, Kirk repeatedly found himself and Columbia at the center of public controversies: for deteriorating relations with the surrounding community, capped by the university's decision to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park; for taking a controlling interest in a cigarette filter whose sale would bring revenues to Columbia; and finally, for the way he handled the student demonstrations of 1968

It was a long time until that great man, Richard Doll, who knew everything about the human body, first spotted the connection with that body and the inhaling of tobacco smoke. (There is the mystery here - I don't think even Professor Doll could elucidate it - the mystery of the vast hundreds of thousands of people who had smoked like chimneys without coming to any harm.) Come, away from this dandying and playing and mincing and dancing; I am speaking up for people - ordinary, decent, honest people - who like to smoke.

Stepping aboard the coach to Biggin Hill from where our flight departed I entered a fug immediately reminiscent of the short time I once spent in a small room with Lord Harris of High Cross and his pipe. As I waded through to a seat, the smoke cleared briefly and there was Lord Harris, in trademark deerstalker, chugging on his pipe

The report by the National Cancer Institute will provide the first major look at the health risks associated with cigar smoking since cigar sales rebounded in the early 1990s. The release of the study, initially targeted for this fall, has been postponed until January or February. General Cigar Inc., the largest manufacturer and marketer of cigars, and two other publicly-traded cigar companies have warned investors the study could affect sales, prompt lawsuits and lead to increased government regulation. . . "The explosive increase in cigar use is mostly based on the idea that it's very low risk, and I think that assumption is wrong," Thun said.

Although details were still sketchy at the time of going to press, it is reliably understood that two thirds of the commercial farms in Norton were on the list while almost all the commercial farms in Trelawney, one of the country's most productive tobacco growing areas and scene of wildcat disturbances during the recent farm workers' strike, would also be appropriated.

Mr Mugari trained for five years as a tobacco grower and spent 18 years working the land of his 1,800-acre farm to become a millionaire. He has spent more than a month repairing crop damage caused by strikers in a bitter dispute involving agricultural workers. . . Mr Mugari said his dry, sandy land was good for only tobacco and could not support maize and other crops. He said: "Resettlement is fine, but whoever comes on to this farm will have to have at least five years' training and five years' experience on the land to make it work. Whether these people are out there, I don't know."

Warwick Evans, the head of the Trelawny and Darwendale farmers' association in northern Zimbabwe, is one whose tobacco farm, which he built himself from scratch, has been "designated" for resettlement, along with the properties of 60 of his neighbours. "We know the government already has in its possession nine million acres for resettlement which is laying idle. Funds should be made available to develop it before any productive land is taken," said Mr Evans. Sources at the agriculture ministry indicate that there is less than £6 million to work with, enough to purchase only a handful of farms. But Mr Mugabe's government appears determined to push ahead with what it sees as the reclamation of the people's land - a transfer he has been promising for more than 20 years.

A ban on tobacco advertising in the European Union grew more likely at the weekend after the Netherlands switched sides on the issue. The Hague cabinet voted to outlaw nearly all promotion of cigarettes in the Dutch market except at point of sale. It also agreed to back any majority for an EU-wide clampdown which emerged at a meeting of health ministers in Brussels next week. However the Dutch, who are regarded as holding a crucial swing vote at the December 4 session, are at odds with the UK government which wants to back tobacco advertising curbs provided that Formula One motor racing is given an open-ended exemption.

"We are used to highly competitive markets, and this is a highly competitive market," he added. The Mexican tobacco market is carved up between CLM and Cigatam, part of Grupo Carso (CARa1.MX), which is in partnership with Philip Morris Cos Inc (NYSE:MO - news). In February, both companies cut prices to help thwart the sale of smuggled cigarettes, and CLM recently cut prices further, but Broughton said this was a temporary move rather than another round in a price war.

Mexican cigarette producer Cigarrera La Moderna SA, or CLM, confirmed its second round of price cuts in less than a month, further squeezing margins in its bid to boost volume and wrest market share from chief competitor Cigatam SA.

Virginia's flue-cured tobacco auction markets closed Tuesday with the average price down 8 percent from last year's premium prices. But this year's average -- nearly $1.73 per pound -- would have been markedly lower without some late-season purchases by TEKEL, Turkey's government-owned tobacco monopoly.

Bravos, which have no nicotine or tobacco, aren't new. Torigian sold the lettuce cigarettes in the 1960s, until a fallout with his partner.

To cigarette smokers wanting to kick the habit, Puzant Torigian offers unusual advice: Smoke lettuce. The New Jersey pharmacist and chemist is marketing a cigarette composed mostly of iceberg lettuce and spiced with herbal extracts. Manufactured in College Park, the cigarette, called Bravo, adds to the smoking-cessation market an offbeat product that Torigian is convinced will find its niche. "If you light up a Bravo, you're not going to get addicted again," said Torigian, founder and president of Safer Smokes Corp.

Supporters of a plan to hike Maryland's tax on cigarettes from 36- cents a pack to $1.86 say most voters agree with it. A poll done for anti-smoking groups found the margin is 2-to-1. And perhaps even more ominous for legislators who might vote against the increase, the poll says swing voters would be willing to cross party lines to punish them. A vote on hiking cigarette taxes isn't expected until next year.

Anti-smoking activists say they will push for a $1.50-a-pack increase in the state's cigarette tax next year, and they warn that lawmakers who oppose them will be putting re-election at risk. The current tax is 36 cents. A spokesman said 54 of the state's 188 lawmakers are members of the group.

Secretary of State Sandra Mortham used a tobacco company's $60,000 donation, meant for the support of a museum, as an expense account for her office, a newspaper reported. Mortham solicited the donation from Philip Morris Cos. two years ago for Florida History Associates, a nonprofit charity that supports the Museum of Florida History, The Tampa Tribune reported Sunday.

They are laryngectomees -- people whose larynxes were removed because of throat cancer. Their vocal chords are gone, too, and they no longer breathe through their nose and mouth. It's not pretty what cancer -- primarily attributed to smoking -- has done to them. The awkward speech and the breathing hole -- called a stoma -- cause many laryngectomees to avoid public outings, but groups such as the Lost Chord Club have helped many overcome their fears. . . Fourth-graders think the speech wands are cool, and high schoolers tend to think nothing bad will ever happen to them, so group members like to talk to 11-and 12-year-olds. "Get them before they start smoking," Torgerson said.

About 80% of inmates at the Montana State Prison smoke or chew tobacco, but they must quit on Jan. 1, when the prison bans tobacco use. Prison officials say it's too costly to pay health care bills for inmates who get sick from smoking and chewing.

"People in this country just love Cuban cigars," says Marcos Casillas, 30, who joined his father in Miami when he was 18 and went into the family business only a few months ago. "They can't get enough of them." Technically, of course, they can't get them at all, which is one reason that celebrities such as California Governor Pete Wilson and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger stop in the Casillases' small storefront near the Capitol from time to time. Demi Moore's picture is on the wall, a cigar in her hand. The place is also popular with CIA and FBI agents, Casillas says, adding that the family plans to open more stores in addition to the ones in Miami, Reno, and Long Beach, Calif.

Caribbean Cigar Co. (the "Company") announced today that it has organized a conference call scheduled for 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 25, 1997. The conference call will be hosted by Kevin Doyle CEO, and Ed Williams CFO. The purpose of the conference call is to update our shareholders of what has transpired during the most recent quarter. . . Please dial 1-800-230-1085 starting at 9:55 a.m.

On Sunday, city officials and the National Football League team struck back, bringing a judge and a makeshift courtroom to Veterans Stadium, where fans were charged with crimes like disorderly conduct and illegal drinking of alcoholic beverages. It was, by all accounts, a first for professional sports in this country. . . . Steven Cartwright of Hazelton, Pa., fared better. He made an impassioned argument before he and a nephew were acquitted on charges of disorderly conduct after being charged with smoking in a non-smoking area.

Adbusters includes parodies of well-known products and brands: Calvin Swine; Ronald McDonald with the word "grease" smeared across his juicy red lips; and a wicked takeoff of the U.S. cigarette mascot, Joe Camel. "He's my favourite," says Lasn, holding up a poster of cancer-stricken Joe Chemo lying in a coffin. The magazine has been going since 1989 and sells about 40,000 copies per issue, Lasn says. "Believe it or not, we have the biggest penetration of any Canadian magazine into the United States market."

Mr. Eastwood sees that same mentality at work in national politics, in the Clinton administration's crusade against the tobacco industry. " Cigarettes kill people, but so does booze and fat food," Mr. Eastwood says. "The president, who likes his hamburgers, is sitting there with his cholesterol. Nobody bans that kind of food--why not?"

Smoking was banned at Science Park long before Moon-shong Tang, a molecular biologist, last year raised the center's reputation by finding a smoking gun -- the first direct evidence that a major chemical carcinogen in cigarette smoke seeks out and damages a gene critical to the health of lung cells. The carcinogen was one of a class of chemical byproducts of combustion called polycyclichydrocarbons that aren't confined to tobacco smoke. . . Awaiting publication is Lau's 12- year study of the effects of small doses of hydroquinone on laboratory rats. It found that they developed kidney and liver cancer. She plans to replicate the study using donated cells from human kidneys and livers. Her rat results may be an explanation for recent findings elsewhere that smoking increases the risk of kidney cancer.

A DECISION by Gordon Brown to defer a hike in cigarette duty by five months to 1 December has cost the Treasury £300m in lost tax and handed manufacturers a likely profits bonanza. Since the Chancellor made his announcement in his first budget last July to delay the imposition of extra duty by five months, the major producers have all been laying on extra shifts to make as many cigarettes as possible ahead of the deadline. Their bonded warehouses are full to bursting with cigarettes, which, provided they are taken out of bond by the first of next month, can be sold by retailers without the duty increase. So many cigarettes have been made, and demand from retailers to beat the deadline has been so great, that cigarettes at "pre-budget prices" will be sold well into next year, even as late as summer.

Indeed, German society is latticed with taboos -- some evident, some less so. . . . In a low-key debate about smoking in public places, the authorities are said to be reluctant to be too stern because the Nazis frowned on public smoking, especially by women.

THE Australian Film Commission may restrict smoking in the films and documentaries it funds. The commission will this week decide whether to act on concerns that children are being encouraged to smoke by the portrayal of cigarettes in movies.

Rembrandt brought suit contending that Philip Morris, the world's largest cigarette manufacturer, has been allowing its cigarettes, primarily Marlboros, to be smuggled into South Africa through bordering countries. According to pleadings in the case that have not been made public, Rembrandt argues that the movement of smuggled Marlboros violates an exclusive license that Rembrandt acquired in 1981 to make and sell Philip Morris products in South Africa. . . The trial, before a judge, ended on Friday. A ruling is expected in the next couple of weeks.

The tentative settlement between state attorneys general and the major tobacco companies will send cigarette prices skyward when some version of it is approved, and it will reduce demand for the farmers' product. In addition, plans are being mulled in Congress to ease tobacco farmers out of the business. Those changes lay like the threat of a drought over places like South Boston, a town of 7,000 that lies 30 miles east of Danville near the North Carolina border.

Smokers may be more likely to consider quitting when they are experiencing high levels of stress, according to a study at Ohio State. The study showed that, contrary to popular belief, stress at home or at work heightens people¹s ability to see smoking as a health risk. . . "The increase in the severity of their symptoms seems to make them stop and think about the fact that smoking isn¹t good for them." (From a recent issue of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine.)

TOBACCO, the main cause of lung cancer, is now being used to produce an anti-cancer drug. Tobacco plants are being genetically engineered using human genes to produce compounds to treat a cancer of the female reproductive system. The plants are also being genetically engineered to produce a variety of other medical treatments, from an anti-tooth-decay drug to a treatment for a rare nervous disorder.

"Bottom line: Cigar stocks are no longer value investments," Gabelli tells us. Then he adds ominously, "At some point, someone is going to do something about the health effects of cigar smoking." As it turns out, someone is doing exactly that right now, and the research probably will make a big public splash early next year. The guy in charge is Don Shopland at the National Cancer Institute, who is putting together a lengthy monograph drawn from all salient research on the medical implications of cigar smoking. The document is now undergoing peer review and is expected to be made public in January. The report is likely to say that cigar smoking dramatically increases the risk of a range of cancers, especially those that affect the mouth, larynx and nose.

"The viewer is supposed to see the cigarette and her nervous smoking as a visible counterpart to the panicky feelings of imminent loss that are sweeping over her," US film writer Richard Klein recently wrote of the scene from Australian director P. J. Hogan's box-office hit, `My Best Friend's Wedding'. "She's about to explode, and this cigarette, as it often is in films, is a fuse. Utterly desolate, out in the cold, Ms Roberts never looked more appealing, huddled around a brief flame and warming cinder, smoke streaming glamorously from her nose." The scene has become emblematic of the latest skirmish in the long-running running battle between the tobacco industry and the anti-smoking lobby.

A lot of people these days are relating to a woman named Ally, the title character of the new hit Fox television series "Ally McBeal," a young, attractive, impulsive, Harvard-educated lawyer. The hourlong show, which has been on the air for eight weeks, has attracted a legion of followers so devoted that every Monday night at 9, when the show starts, they refuse to answer the telephone. And every Tuesday morning they gather at work to talk, obsess and argue about the latest adventures of Ally and her law-firm colleagues. "Tuesday morning we have to congregate at the smoker and go over it scene by scene," said Leslie Reed, 24, an assistant in the marketing department at a Manhattan investment firm. "It's a bonding moment for us at the office. And I don't even smoke."

No one will ever know how cigarette-craving may have affected Japan's input into the communique of Pacific Rim leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto was perturbed to learn the picturesque museum where the leaders were meeting allowed no smoking. "We can't smoke here?" Japanese officials quoted him as asking.

Leaders of the 18-member group meeting in Vancouver [Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation], are scheduled to walk through an underground shopping mall connecting the hotel where U.S. President Clinton is staying to the waterfront convention center where the presidents and prime ministers will meet. Along the route is a tobacco shop, proudly advertising Cuban cigars for sale. . . To save any embarrassment, the store owner was discreetly approached by officials and persuaded to remove his advertisement and cover up the cigar display so as not to offend the U.S. president.

Sri Lanka's Ceylon Tobacco Co. Ltd. said Tuesday its net profit rose 8.8% to 402.7 million rupees in the third quarter ended Sept. 30, from 370.5 million rupees in the same period the year before. Ceylon Tobacco is the sole manufacturer of cigarettes in Sri Lanka, and is a unit of British-American Tobacco.

The five worst environmental threats to children, including their primary sources and primary health effects:. . Tobacco smoke SOURCE: Adults smoking in the vicinity of children. FFECTS: Increased lower respiratory illness, worsening of asthma, increased asthma cases, SIDS.

Childhood cancer, asthma and other diseases may be linked to air and water pollution and the occurrence in a child's environment of lead, pesticides and cigarette smoke, an environmental group said Tuesday. In a report, the Natural Resources Defense Council urged the Clinton administration to "take broad steps to safeguard the next generation." "A growing body of evidence points to disturbing links between pollution and illness," Dr. Routt Reigart, a pediatrician at the Medical University of South Carolina, said at a news conference.

A new report by the National Resources Defense Council says (Tuesday) that lead, air pollution, pesticides, environmental tobacco smoke and drinking water contamination are the worst environmental threats to children's health. Group officials say there are no federal guidelines to determine what levels of exposure are unsafe for children.

Less than a quarter of U.S. adults smoke cigarettes regularly, according to figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC data, drawn from a random telephone survey conducted in 49 states (excluding Hawaii) and the District of Columbia, found that Kentucky had the highest percentage of smokers (31.6), while Utah had the lowest (15.9). . . SOURCE: CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 1996

As part of its ongoing effort to oppose the Tobacco Industry's proposed settlement, INFACT reveals that Philip Morris is hiding behind the respectable image of its subsidiary, Kraft Foods, to lobby for FDA "reform." The FDA Modernization Act of 1997, signed by President Clinton on Friday, was heavily lobbied on by Philip Morris. In 1996 and 1997, several generously-paid Kraft lobbyists from the Washington, DC-based firm Olsson, Frank and Weeda took advantage of the All- American Kraft image to influence decision making on issues affecting Philip Morris's tobacco business. Lobbyists for Philip Morris's Kraft include John Bode, formerly with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Marshall Matz, former Special Council to a U.S. Senate Committee.

"Cigar smoking has assumed a stylish mystique over the years," said James W. Stewart, III, executive vice president, partnership marketing, First USA. "Whether you are new to cigar smoking or a long-time connoisseur, the Cigar Platinum Visa card program, with its unique combination of designs and benefits, is a personal expression of good taste."

Philip Morris Co., the tobacco giant, made an even bigger turnabout. Its political action committee also gave 59% of its money to Democrats in 1994, but two years later gave 73% to Republicans. Philip Morris and AT&T were hardly alone. Their political arms, which contributed more than $1 million each to congressional candidates last year, were part of a stampede in business donations away from the Democrats to Republicans since the GOP won control of Congress in 1994.

Despite pharmacy licenses and health-oriented slogans, a large percentage of corporate-owned drug stores in California allow the tobacco industry actually to advertise and promote tobacco products at their "family health" oriented stores. This is one result from a statewide survey by the Pharmacy Partnership, a coalition of physicians, pharmacists, public health agencies, and community leaders organized by the California Medical Association Foundation.

Tobacco growers lucky enough to have a crop ready to sell got a pleasant surprise yesterday when dark tip tobacco brought $2.05 a pound on the opening day of the burley markets. It was the first time many farmers could remember that tobacco topped $2 a pound. Even mediocre-quality leaf was bringing top price if it was dark red. But enthusiasm was muted by weak overall prices, which yesterday averaged $1.896 a pound statewide, about 2 1/2 cents less than last year's opening average.

Florida told U.S. officials Tuesday to keep their hands off the state's landmark $11.3 billion settlement with cigarette makers, saying any federal reimbursement should be part of a national deal. Arguing that the state successfully battled the tobacco industry alone, Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles and Sen. Bob Graham said at a news conference in the state capital that Florida should be able to keep the entire settlement.

A row of smiling young faces peers down from the first anti-smoking billboard unveiled on Monday as part of Florida's $11.3 billion settlement with cigarette makers. Flanked by about two dozen students from a middle school in Tallahassee, Gov. Lawton Chiles officially launched the "Florida Kids Campaign Against Tobacco."

Gov. Lawton Chiles, who wrested $200 million from cigarette makers to underwrite a statewide anti-tobacco campaign over the next two years, unveiled billboards Monday near middle and elementary schools in Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Tallahassee. They portray nine students from Raa Middle School in Tallahassee beckoning people to join the state's anti-tobacco "team." "It's pretty cool," said Terrell Sermon, an eighth-grader at Raa, home of the Rams, who is pictured spinning a basketball on the billboards. "Most students my age are either hooked or being pressured into tobacco."

Between 1990 and 1995, cancer deaths increased for women, especially respiratory system cancers. In fact, during the 1990s, cancer of the trachea, bronchus and lung overtook breast cancer as a killer of women in Minnesota. That's apparently due to higher rates of smoking, according to a study by the State Demographer's Office. The news doesn't get better for women. While rates of death from all cancers have fallen for men, they've increased for women. Similarly, the overall death rate for men dropped from 1990 to 1995.

Premedent Technology Inc. signed an exclusive agreement to transfer nicotine-gum technology to Novopharm Ltd., as part of a plan to produce a generic equivalent of SmithKline Beecham PLC's (SBH) Nicorette. In a joint press release Tuesday, the companies said the Novopharm gum would cost 30%-50% less than Nicorette, which is sold as a smoking cessation aid. Novopharm and Premedent said they expect the generic nicotine gum to be available in early 1999.

When Steven Bailey wants a smoke, he doesn't reach for a Marlboro or a Camel, he pulls out a Bailey's -- a cigarette made by his family company, S&M Brands Inc. Bailey isn't alone. In the shadow of cigarette behemoths such as Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds, small companies are fighting for a share of America's $45.7 billion a year cigarette market. There are about a dozen so-called microsmoke companies in the United States

If her singing on the new album and tour is stronger than in the past, it is because she quit smoking on Jan. 1 and does 40 minutes of vocal calisthenics several hours before every concert.

Then leaving his cart to walk, Rodriguez, who just quit smoking, wailed: "Oh Mr. Nictoine, leave me alone."

"The law requires that all restitutions by state Medicaid programs be shared with the federal government," said department spokesman Victor Zonana. The law, however, did not anticipate the ingenuity and doggedness of the state attorneys general -- who got no help at all from federal lawyers -- in taking on the never- before vanquished tobacco industry. The settlement is now in the hands of Congress. When and if Congress works out a formula for divvying up the tobacco money, acknowledgment of the boldness and tenacity of the states should win out over legal technicalities.

Even the most hooked smoker can quit if he or she has an incentive. Everything has its price. Make the reward for not smoking sufficiently attractive - and you will see a miracle occur before your eyes.

But how far do we as a society want to go in trying to promote healthy behavior? Should insurance companies and others responsible for health care costs be allowed to coerce people into exercising or giving up smoking? Is there some point at which an obsession with improving health can itself become a kind of sickness? . . The half-day conferences are jointly sponsored by the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics and the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics organization based in Garrison, N.Y.

KidNews has learned that candy cigarettes rank first and second in novelty candy sales. Topping the list were those chalky, white peppermint cigarettes, followed by bubble gum cigarettes.

After winning approval in a survey of its regular guests, Le Mirador Resort and Spa, a popular corporate retreat perched high above Vevey (where Nestle is based) on Switzerland's Lake Geneva, has decided to become what it says is the first smoke-free five-star hotel in Europe. But not entirely: There is a lounge, pub, meeting room -- all separately ventilated -- and a few guest rooms in an annex where smokers can light up.

The Aug. 25 back-room settlement effectively imposes a national excise tax on cigarettes, with the revenues payable to the state of Florida. After $750 million in lump-sum payments, each company's future payments under the agreement will be directly proportional to its future national sales. Whatever you want to call it, a per unit charge on national sales is a national excise tax. If Philip Morris or any other firm sells another two cartons of cigarettes in California tomorrow, it owes the state of Florida an additional 18 cents in "damages." . . . Not surprisingly, long-standing principles of state sovereignty prohibit states in a federal system from legislating tax policy for other states.

The Federal Government pulled the plug on an advertising campaign to dissuade teenagers from smoking, after spending more than $600,000 on its preparation. The revelation prompted a row yesterday as to the motive and the prudence of ordering a halt before $2 million was spent on advertising time and space. The general theme of the campaign was "Smoking is really interesting" portraying smoking as being "uncool". A spokesman for the Health Minister, Dr Wooldridge, said: "We canned it because it was a crap campaign."

International cigarette makers say a lack of regulations, low taxes and a strategic location in the region make Cambodia a good bet for business . . . A survey last year by the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) found 86.3 percent of rural men and 64.7 percent of urban men smoke. . . Cigarettes in Cambodia are among the cheapest in the world. Local brands are as little 20 cents per pack . . . But only about six percent of the population consumes foreign brands -- a fact international firms hope will change soon.

No matter what smoking cessation strategy you use, you must be ready to quit - to make that commitment - to be successful. But there is help. Nicotine-replacement products come in the form of gum, patches, and a new mouth inhaler. Zyban, the new product you're asking about, is the first nicotine-free smoking cessation agent.

The Recovery Network, Inc. (NASDAQ: RNETU - news) announced today the signing of Glaxo Wellcome's (NYSE: GLX - news) Zyban, the first non-addictive, non-nicotine smoking cessation pill, approved by the Federal Food and Drug Administration, as an advertiser on its cable network.

"These midbrain neurons (nerve cells) help us achieve pleasure through food, water and sex by releasing dopamine," said Dr. John Dani, associate professor of neuroscience. "What we found is that nicotine from tobacco will activate these neurons and cause dopamine to be released as well. The release of dopamine contributes to the sensation of pleasure." Eventually, however, the midbrain neurons turn off as the smoker continues to light up during the day -- even though the nicotine is still present, Dani said. "Only after the nicotine concentration falls or disappears are the receptors and neurons ready to fire again," he said.

They believe that nicotine finds its way to a portion of the brain known as the ventral tegmental area (VTA). Nerve cells in the VTA are especially receptive to dopamine . . . However, as smoking continues throughout the day, VTA nerve-cell receptors specifically 'tuned in' to nicotine become increasingly desensitized due to their prolonged exposure to nicotine. . . And since nicotine has a 'half-life' in the body of about two hours, they believe smokers "maintain a rather steady low-level background of nicotine throughout the day." A night's sleep, however, temporarily shuts down the smoking habit, allowing the VTA nerve-cell receptors to regain their former sensitivity.

Dr. John Dani, lead author of the study that will be published in the British journal Nature Thursday, says his team focused on a group of neurons, or nerve cells, in the midbrain that release dopamine. Receptors in the midbrain neurons (called nicotinic acetylcholinereceptors) respond to nicotine as it enters the body after smoking a cigarette. Dani said, "We found that as the nicotine first arrives, the neurons burst with activity. That burst causes dopamine release that contributes to the sensation of pleasure." Since the first cigarette of the day gives smokers their first exposure to nicotine in eight to 10 hours, the neurons go wild.

Tobacco company surpassed all political donors with $4.2 million in contributions, new study shows

The shabby exercises will have done little to ward off what the companies most fear: the inevitable day when smoking is banned in all public places. It is a day that cannot come soon enough. . . The NHMRC recommendations that were dropped from the final report included bans on smoking in all enclosed public areas, in confined workplaces and in cars carrying children. While the recommendations are not "official", in that they were withdrawn, they should still be implemented. . . Today's governments are morally and socially obliged to address this issue - just as authorities of earlier times were forced to regulate sanitation after the discovery of the link between filth and infection.

The meeting was Mr Mugabe's first with farming leaders since the Government announced it had drawn up a list of more than 1,700 mainly white-owned farms it intended to seize without payment. Mr Mugabe has said if the farmers want to be paid for their land the money would have to come from Britain, the former colonial power. He said this was just the first round of the government's land seizures, saying many more farms might be needed.

Three state commissioners is sued a letter Wednesday demand ing Attorney General Hubert Humphrey provide details of the cost of his case against tobacco companies so far. . . The commissioners -- all appointed by Republican Gov. Arne Carlson -- join others who have questioned Humphrey's deal with the Robins Kaplan firm. Commerce Commissioner David Gruenes, Human Services Commissioner David Doth and Health Commissioner Anne Barry wrote that Minnesota taxpayers deserve to know the size and details of the bill they will be forced to pay.

Several high-ranking Carlson administration officials asked Wednesday for a review of the attorney general's fee arrangement with private attorneys handling the state's lawsuit against tobacco companies. They want Legislative Auditor James Nobles to look into the appropriateness of expenses incurred by the firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi for the trial scheduled to begin Jan. 20. . . "We're concerned that we're going to get 10 to 15 cents on the dollar," he said.

For nearly a year, the U.S. government insisted that Rosa Jimenez's cigars -- all 20,000 of them -- were forbidden Cuban Cohibas. While trying to prove its case that the smokes were illegally imported into Miami by her company, RJ Cigars, the feds kept them in a warehouse at Miami International Airport. Now, the government has changed its mind. In a letter to the company's attorney, Peter Quinter of Hollywood, a prosecutor says it will not hold them any longer.

Swedish tobacco company Swedish Match AB (S.SWM) said Thursday it has signed an agreement with R.J. Reynolds of the U.S. to buy that company's cigar factory in Pietersaari, Finland, effective Dec. 1, 1997. R.J. Reynolds' Finnish cigar operations will be integrated with Swedish Match's cigar division, but sales, marketing and distribution in Finland will be handled by R.J. Reynolds on behalf of Swedish Match. The deal gives Swedish Match access to the Finnish market via strong, well-known and leading brands such as Hofnar and Van Kemp, as well as various local brands.

The action comes ahead of plans to privatize Spain's largest tobacco producer in 1998, and is the third such action since 1993. . . 'Specifics haven't been worked out yet and until we speak with labor we don't think it's fair to speak about how many and who will be affected,' the company spokesman said. 'But we will say that it won't be traumatic. It'll be voluntary, through incentives and early retirement options.'

Earlier this month, some 30,000 Gudang Garam workers walked off their jobs for three days at the company's factories in East Java. In addition, Indonesia's Finance Ministry raised taxes on cigarette producers through an increase in the sticker price of cigarettes. For any other local company, such a confluence of negative news - coupled with the region's economic and currency crisis - might prove devastating. But analysts say that for cash-rich Gudang Garam, the setbacks should prove temporary.

Standard & Poor's today has assigned its preliminary triple-B'-minus rating to RJR Nabisco Inc.'s $1 billion Rule 415 shelf registration for debt securities, and places the preliminary rating on CreditWatch with negative implications. . . Total debt outstanding at Sept. 30, 1997 (excluding Nabisco Inc.) was about $5.6 billion.

CART avoided the tobacco problem that looms for NASCAR's Winston Cup stock car series by striking a balance between recognition and political purity. . . If proposed federal regulations result in a ban on tobacco sponsorship in sports, NASCAR would have to seek a new sponsor willing to fill the reported $25 million to $30 million contributed each year by R.J. Reynolds. Several CART teams are backed by tobacco companies, including Roger Penske's Marlboro-sponsored teams.

But so as not to trod too heavily upon the life-loving family man image surrounding the late Nowell, proceeds from those limited-edition Sublime T-shirts available with "Second-Hand Smoke" will go to the Musicians Assistance Program (M.A.P.), an association that helps musicians and industry personnel conquer drug dependencies. Blatant commercial exploitation isn't quite as obvious when an album of new material is released from an artist who died in the midst of its recording. But projects like "Second-Hand Smoke" are often more about banking on the sentimentality of fans than releasing quality, must-hear music.

aced with a Dec. 15 deadline for disclosing ingredients in cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products brand by brand, lawyers for manufacturers yesterday asked a federal judge to delay the reporting requirement until their lawsuit challenging the 1996 state law is resolved. . . But the state . . . argued that the state Department of Public Health - which is gathering the ingredient information - has no intention of publicly disclosing it until at least September 1998 . . . [C]igarette manufacturers fear the information could get into the public domain far sooner than September 1998.

The D.C. Council is considering legislation to ban tobacco and alcohol advertising within 2,000 feet of schools and other areas where children congregate. . . Such ads also would be prohibited in Metrobus shelters and Metrorail stations and taxicabs.

The 'Cause Children Count Coalition is holding a rally Tuesday of schoolchildren, parents and concerned citizens to urge the City Council to ban tobacco and alcohol advertising within 2,000 feet of schools and other areas where children gather.

"This is a gross example of governmental gold-digging," said U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who, with U.S. Rep. Mike Bilirakis, R-Tarpon Springs, has filed legislation aimed at keeping the money in Florida.

The manager of a store that is part of a Boca Raton-based chain of gas station/convenience stores that has been busted at least eight times in 16 months for selling alcohol or tobacco to minors is sending a message. But there is confusion over exactly what the message is. A sign posted at the Exxon Nexstore at Palmetto Park Road and Interstate 95 reads: "Wanted!!! Any Underaged Sting Participant! Bust the Beer and Tobacco Sting and Get a Reward. Let's Catch Them Before They Catch Us."

The number of smokers who said the presence of children had no effect on their smoking consumption fell from 31 per cent in 1989 to 22 per cent in 1994 and the number of smokers who did not smoke when with children jumped from 14 to 29 per cent over the same period. While this was an improvement, the report noted that a "disappointing" majority of smokers surveyed continued to smoke around children, albeit to a reduced extent.

Wendy Mankelow, 28, has been smoking since she was 11 and has smoked through three pregnancies. Now expecting her fourth child, she can't give up the fags and doesn't want to anyway. She has three children, aged seven, four and two. Her youngest child has bronchitis but she does not think that is caused by her smoking. The Geelong mother says people "say stuff" to her about smoking while pregnant - "like it stunts their growth" - but she just shrugs her shoulders.

The Federal Government yesterday promised a national response to the deadly dangers of passive smoking, after its chief medical advisory body reported there was a conclusive link to lung cancer, heart attack, childhood asthma and other diseases.

Passive smoking massively increases the risk of babies developing respiratory illnesses, contributes to tens of thousands of Australian children suffering asthma and puts non-smokers at greater risk of lung cancer and heart disease, according to a National Health and Medical Research Council report. The report, Health Effects of Passive Smoking, released yesterday by the NHMRC, the nation's peak medical research body, was likely to fuel demands to ban smoking in public places.

Almost 50,000 Australian children are suffering asthma symptoms or other respiratory illnesses because of other people's cigarette smoke, an official report said yesterday. The report, by the National Health and Medical Research Council, also concluded that non-smokers suffered a greatly increased risk of lung cancer and heart disease through passive smoking. The council's meeting in Canberra endorsed a revised report, "The Health Effects of Passive Smoking", which followed the suppression of an earlier draft by the High Court in response to a case brought by the Tobacco Institute.

The fight over a multibillion-dollar pot of money from lawsuits filed against tobacco companies has all the makings of a classic showdown between the federal government and the states.

French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the government would raise taxes on tobacco by over 30% over the next six years in order to create an economic incentive to limit youth smoking. According to French press reports, Strauss-Kahn told the French parliament in a late-night session that tobacco taxes would rise by FF20 per year through 2003 from the current minimum of FF380 per 1,000 cigarettes.

The gregarious 49-year-old is the owner of Father's Office, a Santa Monica tavern that made headlines in 1991 when Mr. Moench decided to make it California's first smoke-free bar. . . To help his colleagues make the transition, Mr. Moench has been appointed a spokesman of a statewide campaign organized by Breath, an arm of the American Lung Association.

Naperville police will begin enforcing the city's ban on tobacco possession by minors on Monday. Police said those younger than 18 seen smoking in public have been handed leaflets warning of the deadline, and thousands more fliers have been distributed in Naperville high schools and junior high schools.

The lawsuit was filed Nov. 22 on behalf of the health plans of the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists and unions representing screenwriters, directors and technicians. It seeks unspecified damages and punitive awards. Fred Altshuler, a lawyer for the unions, said Wednesday that the talent unions' members are company employees and not the people who make the decisions that have glorified smoking in film.

As anti-tobacco activists admit, pop culture's growing re-acceptance of smoking, as witnessed through movies, music videos, and the lifestyle choices of today's young adults, reflects a mind-boggling surge in the popularity of cigarettes, despite concentrated efforts to reduce smoking rates among the nation's youth.

Dr. Deborah P.M. Symmons and colleagues at the University of Manchester and St. Michael's Hospital in Norwich in the U.K. . . report, in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism, that a history of smoking, a body mass index greater than or equal to 30, and a history of prior blood transfusion were all significant risk factors for the development of rheumatoid arthritis.

In a petition addressed to European social affairs commissioner Padraig Flynn, the European Respiratory Society (ERS) said the numerous illnesses and deaths attributed directly to smoking were imposing a huge burden on public health-care systems.

Under new Turkish laws now coming into force, there will be fines for those who fail to use special smoking areas in airports, stations and public offices. And there are new restrictions on tobacco advertising. The BBC Ankara Correspondent says measures last year banning smoking on public transport and in cinemas have often been ignored, and the number of Turks who smoke is continuing to increase.

"I sit up at night sometimes, so angry at the tobacco companies for making this product that's so addictive," McCutchan says. "For the rest of my life I'm gonna have to fight the urge to smoke." A smoker for 10 years, McCutchan quit her pack-a-day habit just two months ago with the help of a nicotine patch. Like many young-adult smokers, she had little concern about her habit into her early 20s. But when smoking started to affect her appearance noticeably and leave her winded from common activities like climbing stairs, she tried to stop. Her difficulty doing so just drove home the message that she was hooked. "It makes me mad that I'm addicted to something," she says.

Attorneys for the Federation of Advertising Industry Representatives, Inc. (FAIR) filed a statement yesterday in opposition to the Chicago Transit Authority's "unconstitutional" proposal to ban alcohol and tobacco advertisements from its trains, buses and stations. . . "The proposed ban, like the city council's ordinance, is an assault on the First Amendment rights of advertisers." . . A vote on the ad ban is scheduled for Dec. 10.

No matter how judges threaten to make them pay for delays or dodge tactics, lawyers generally don't have to shell out money for courtroom misdeeds. . . In the Minnesota lawsuit, attorneys for Philip Morris Cos., RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp. and other tobacco companies wouldn't turn over certain documents about smoking and health. They said that their "joint-defense" pact means that they don't have to turn over each other's research. The judge wants to see the terms of their agreement to make sure that is true. If he decides that Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue of Cleveland and Shook Hardy & Bacon of Kansas City, Mo., and three other law firms are throwing up a smoke screen, legal experts say he probably will find another way to punish them other than monetary penalties. He might bar evidence, for example, or decline to allow a particular defense argument.

Both Republican and DFL candidates to replace him as attorney general have publicly stated they will continue the litigation. If it is not an issue in the race among the candidates for attorney general, why is Cooper trying to make it one? . . Cooper stated that the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society and the American Public Health Association supported the proposed national settlement. That is not true. We do not and have not supported the proposed national settlement. There were significant problems with the proposal as it was initially negotiated by the state attorneys general and the tobacco industry. Our own attorney general refused to support it; we opposed it; the Congress and the White House opposed it. That is why the settlement failed to move at all this year.

As the federal government and the states gear up to combat teen smoking, California - the state with the longest-running antitobacco effort - may offer a startling lesson: Focusing ad campaigns on teens alone doesn't work. And nobody seems to know what kind of approach does work. . . But despite the effort, since 1993 the rate among teens has climbed from 9 percent to 11.6 percent. Officials attribute the increase to funding cuts . . . But critics like Stanton Glantz, a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, blame the increase on the youth focus of prevention campaigns, because "kids are looking at young adults."

California Children and Families First Co-Chairs, filmmaker Rob Reiner and businessman Ron Burkle, today announced the appointment of two of Los Angeles County's top public leaders -- Senior Advisor to the Mayor of Los Angeles, Steven Soboroff and Van Nuys Assemblyman Robert Hertzberg -- to the California Children and Families First Initiative Committee. Both men will serve as vice chairs. . . The California Children and Families First initiative directly asks voters to support an additional fifty cents a pack tax on cigarettes as a way to generate nearly $1 billion a year -- every year -- for programs that target children from the age of 0 to 5 to prepare them to be healthy, emotionally well-developed and ready for school.

Two years ago, the company, Tabacalera S.A., tried unsuccessfully to buy control of General Cigar Holdings Inc., one of the largest American cigar makers. But now, even though the boom in premium cigars may be slowing, Tabacalera is finally establishing a foothold in the United States. "It's never too late," said Cesar Alierta, the company's chairman. "We should have done it sooner, but it's still a good market."

Britain's Imperial Tobacco Group Plc, spun off from Hanson Plc in October 1996, should report on Monday profits before tax of around 310 million pound for the full year, said analysts. . . "The improvement is coming through from better sales, not only from discounting but also from genuine sales growth," said one analyst.

Compagnie Financiere Richemont AG, the Swiss-based industrial holding company, on Friday said it was planning to buy out the minority owners of the Vendome Luxury Group Plc (VEN_u.L) through an offer worth 1.036 billion sterling. Richemont, which already owns 70 percent of Vendome, said in a statement that it had approached the board of Vendome to seek its support for an offer of 495 pence per share.

Swiss-based Compagnie Financiere Richemont AG launched a surprise bid on Friday to buy out the minority shareholders of Vendome Luxury Group Plc (VEN_u.L), owner of such high-profile brands as Cartier, Chloe and Piaget. . . Analysts called Richemont's offer of 495 pence per share tempting to investors who had seen hopes for rapid growth dashed since Vendome was formed three years ago from the reorganisation of cigarette and luxury goods groups Rothmans and Dunhill.

Tobacco prices fluctuated wildly Monday - the opening day of Kentucky's tobacco market - from a record $2 a pound to $1.76, nearly 20 cents off last year's average of $1.92. "To my recollection, it's the first time tobacco has ever brought over $2 a pound," said Danny McKinney, chief executive officer of the Lexington-based Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association.

Some Kentucky farmers have left burley tobacco auction warehouses without paychecks, having rejected prices offered by suddenly pickier buyers during the opening three days of sales. Farmers who failed to separate burley into three distinct grades have been penalized with lower prices. Instead of accepting those prices, many unhappy growers decided to hold over their burley for another sales day in hopes of a better price later.

Ted Smith, a Republican activist and former party official who in the past has railed against high taxes, is trying to start a movement to raise Kentucky's cigarette tax. Mr. Smith, 60, who gave up smoking 35 years ago after 10 years of lighting up, has been talking to state lawmakers to see if there is sentiment for increasing the tax, which is 3 cents a pack. That's the second-lowest rate in the nation.

In a state where burley tobacco is the king crop and more than 30 percent of the adult residents smoke, Turfway Park jumped into the 21st century by introducing a smoke-free environment at the thoroughbred race track. When the track opened its holiday meet Sunday, smoking was prohibited on the fourth level of the five-story facility. This is the first time a Kentucky thoroughbred track has designated an entire smoke-free zone, and track officials say they think it is one of only a few in the United States.

Dr. James Fisher, head of pulmonary and critical care at Wayne State University and the Detroit Medical Center, warns that the lungs of people with emphysema, such as the late Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, will never heal. . . The patient also gets related illnesses such as bronchitis and pneumonia. . . Fisher said the first thing a person diagnosed with emphysema should do is stop smoking. Although the lungs will never regenerate, he said, there are treatments that can improve quality of life.

Women with depression and anxiety symptoms have the most severe withdrawal after quitting smoking, say researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Australia's Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane. "What is different about this study is that before there had been very little research done on different patterns of withdrawal symptoms," says Pamela Madden, instructor of psychiatry at Washington University.

THE QUEEN is expected to withdraw the royal warrants issued to cigarette manufacturers ahead of the proposed European Union ban on tobacco advertising due to come into force in 2000. Members of the royal family are understood to be concerned that the royal crest, which adorns brands including Benson & Hedges, Silk Cut and John Player, suggests that they condone smoking.

Last month, local police arrested the seven Ukrainians and 17 Bosnian Croats while they were unloading more than $620,000 worth of cigarettes and alcohol from two Ukrainian military trucks in the divided Bosnian city of Mostar. The seven Ukrainians included two lieutenant colonels -- the chief of staff of the Ukrainian peacekeeping brigade and an adviser to the brigade's commander. . . Clarke said NATO is now considering measures to avoid repetition of similar incidents.

Also Sunday, the president's adviser on women's affairs, Zahra Shojai, said the Cabinet has approved the allocation of 20 percent of tax revenues from cigarettes for sports events for women.

Faced with the government's decision to seize their land without paying for it, several individual farmers and farming groups are taking legal advice on the prospect of bringing a constitutional test case before the courts.

"This means that the country could be forced to borrow in order to import food, a situation that would push up the balance of payments deficit which is currently estimated at $1billion. Declining export receipts from tobacco and other crops would worsen the situation with the balance of payments deficit projected at $4 billion," one economist said.

Coleman A. Young, the man who molded the face of modern Detroit, died peacefully of respiratory failure at 1:55 p.m. Saturday after a long battle with emphysema.

Gwyneth Paltrow spent three days alone on a deserted island near Belize in September and found out "that I am stronger than I thought. I am braver than I thought." She went without a toothbrush, soap, pillow or towel in an adventure undertaken for Marie Claire and writes about it in the magazine's January issue. People magazine says Paltrow, 25, stopped smoking on the trip and even shucked her clothes for many of the daylight hours.

The soundtrack for this week's No. 1 box office movie, "Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation," featuring metal and industrial artists including Megadeth, KMFDM and Rammstein, is under fire for an unexpected reason: the packaging. The release is the first to use "Bioboxes" as cassette packaging, which anti-smoking advocates say looks far too much like cigarette boxes.

Stephanie Zwilling dispensed knowledge Alex Trebek-style. The sixth-graders in Barbie Feuer-Stern's class gripped the buzzers Wednesday and tested their knowledge in such categories as Tobacco, Name That Drug and Alcohol. . . The adaptation of the popular TV game show Jeopardy! is just one of the tools Zwilling uses in a new program that is taking the Franklin County Teen Institute into middle schools.

Sam Chilcote, president of the Tobacco Institute, has four club-level seats at the MCI Center, all purchased by the Tobacco Institute, each costing $7,500 per year. "It's for business purposes. . . " Chilcote says. "The poor working stiff, he can't go to a game anymore and take the kids because it's too damn expensive." . . Long division suggests that the price per ticket is $91.46 for each of the 82 games, but by subtracting the value of amenities such as a private concourse, waiter service and wider seats, the MCI Center has declared the face-value per ticket to be $48 -- which is $2 less than the U.S. Senate limit on acceptable gifts.

Although such sweeping change will waft through California shortly, making this the first state to go completely smoke-free in bars, it appears that details remain hazy, such as which kinds of businesses are affected and who will enforce the law. "My cigar shop is exempt, but the law will hurt my outside sales business," said Greg Hill, owner of Politically Incorrect Cigars in West Los Angeles.

Mark Savage, a victim of throat cancer, blames his malady on years of working in smoke-filled casinos. He isn't happy with a proposed tobacco industry deal that would exempt gambling halls from a nationwide ban on smoking in public places. But the exemption makes sense to Mike Brewer. Dipping into a tray of 50-cent pieces at a slot machine in the Rio Hotel-Casino, Brewer said no gambler would want to leave a machine or a table to go for a smoke while on a roll.

North Carolina tobacco growers could be forced to cut their crop by 20 percent or more next year because of millions of pounds of surplus leaf and a proposed national legal settlement on smoking. The first couple of weeks of December are always a nervous time for growers because that's when the U.S. Department of Agriculture calculates how much tobacco farmers will be allowed to raise in the coming year. . . But with a proposed smoking settlement simmering in Washington, the next two weeks are shaping up as one of the most nerve-wracking periods in many years.

Tobacco farmers uncertain about their own future can look to Ron Fitchhorn's cornfields for some answers. . . Grain farmers have been learning to live with the free market since Congress voted last year to phase out their subsidies. Tobacco farmers, who have enjoyed a New Deal-era program that controls tobacco output and keeps crop prices high, could be next.

The list includes former shock-TV host Morton Downey Jr., physicians doing scientific research, cartoonists hoping to create an anti-Joe Camel, retirees wanting money to clean cigarette butts off of beaches to broadcasters seeking a slice of the advertising pie. The governor's office is being deluged with marketing ideas for fighting cigarette smoking among young people.

The lengthy complaint adds a Hollywood twist: It alleges that the tobacco companies used the movies to glamorize smoking and push tobacco products, even when they knew about the health risks of their products. The suit seeks an injunction to counter the earlier message by funding public education and programs to help smokers quit. And it asks the tobacco companies to disclose their research into the health consequences and addictiveness of nicotine.

Williams declined to "speculate" on the possibility that his company would use more direct marketing in the future. But he said the sweepstakes "second chance" entry form "is certainly an opportunity to generate names for our database."

Beard has written a series of variations on smoking and not smoking, on starting up and giving up, on addiction and social reprobation, on the merciful pleasures and the merciless price. It is a play of wit and pain, a novel of ideas as a succession of comic and touching skits, a series of entrancing cape passes with the sword concealed and each character alternating as bullfighter and bull.
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So let us take a moment to sing the praises of Joe Schwartz, and learn some of the lessons he taught us about change, pain and loss . . . and about picking up and moving on. Some of those lessons might help us to understand what lies in store for our nation's tobacco farmers -- and, perhaps, what we ought to do for them. . . The tobacco farmers, too, are losing their link to the past -- as have steelworkers in Pennsylvania and cobblers in New England. . . So yes, we should do whatever we can to soften the blow for American farmers. But we shouldn't kid ourselves -- the blow, eventually, will come. And life will go on.