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Ban on smoking in public places and selling tobacco to people under 20 have cut sales of cigarettes in the GCC by 12 per cent, according to industry experts.
Total sales across the region are about 60 billion cigarettes a year and Saudi Arabia is the largest market with an annual total of 12 billion. Small- and medium-sized tobacco manufacturers expect their business volume to decline further due to increased taxes and restrictions in regional markets.
But global giants such as British American Tobacco and Philip Morris International (PMI), which dominate the market, recorded an increased sales in the first quarter of 2008 mainly due to higher turnover in East Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Eema).
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Tobacco is the only addictive substance readily, cheaply, and legally available to Iranians from all walks of life, Hassan Azaripur of the Iranian Health Ministry’s Committee on Tobacco Control told the Mehr News Agency on the second day of Iran’s No Tobacco Week (May 25-31).
Unfortunately, there is an increase in the number of smokers aged between 16 and 25 in Iran, and 9 million of the country’s 70 million people smoke regularly, he lamented.
Some 25 percent of Iranians over the age of 15 are in danger of becoming smokers, Azaripur noted, adding, “14.1 percent of the country’s smokers are between 13 and 15 years old.” . . .
Unfortunately, the developing world is slow in taking measures in response to health threats like industrial pollution and bad diets, and we see the same thing in regard to smoking.
And in our country, the Iranian Anti-Tobacco Association (IATA), with the cooperation of the National Research Institute of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (NRITLD), organizes No Tobacco Week each year from May 24 to 31.
The IATA organized a number programs for the anti-smoking week . . .
In addition, many people in Iran and the rest of the world are still unaware of the danger of passive smoking, but concerted efforts to convince people that smoking is harmful to their family members could help to reduce smoking or even encourage people to quit.
And since today is World No Tobacco Day, hopefully some smokers will be encouraged to take the first step in kicking the habit
For 30 years Christine Levinson took care of the house and seven children while her husband, Robert, went off to perform secret work for the FBI and then as a private investigator. She didn't ask what he was hunting; he didn't tell her.
Today Christine Levinson, 57, is doing the tracking.
Since Robert Levinson, 59, disappeared March 9, 2007, from a Persian Gulf island off Iran, his wife has traveled the world demanding action. In December she flew to Tehran to pass out fliers in Farsi with her husband's photo and ask for help. In February she hired an attorney there to file paperwork urging the government to start an official investigation. . . .
Today she is flying to Washington, D.C., to get an update from FBI and State Department officials on their joint investigation. And on Sunday, the eve of her husband's 60th birthday, her family is holding a "hope rally" at 1 p.m. in the Wings Plus restaurant in Coral Springs to mark one year since his disappearance.
Family, friends and supporters will sign petitions urging the Iranian president to investigate.
The wife of a missing former FBI agent said Tuesday she hired a lawyer in Iran to try to persuade authorities there to investigate her husband's disappearance almost a year ago.
Christine Levinson said she has received no information on the location of Robert Levinson, who turns 60 on Monday. He was last seen March 8 on the Iranian island of Kish, where he had gone to seek information on cigarette smuggling for a client of his security firm. . . .
"He had a lot of clients in the tobacco industry, but he was subcontractor."
On Sunday, the Levinsons will stage a rally to mark the first anniversary of his disappearance.
Iran has allowed water pipes to reappear in tea houses, whose owners complained a recent ban on health grounds was putting them out of business, press reports said on Tuesday.
"Tea houses with a business permit can offer water pipes to their costumers," the interior ministry said in directive to police published in the Tehran Emrouz newspaper.
However it said that only plain tobacco would be allowed in water pipes and popular fruit flavours like strawberry and apple would remain banned due to "health risks".
Around 100 Iranian teahouse owners staged a rally on Sunday in protest at a ban on water pipes which they said has put their businesses in jeopardy, the state news agency IRNA reported.
"The protesters gathered in front of their union offices in Tehran and urged the authorities to help them with their financial problems after the ban on water pipes," IRNA said, quoting a teahouse union leader.
"As the water pipe accounts for more than 90 percent of income in this business, the ban in recent weeks has made many shops only semi-active," said the union leader, identified only by his last name of Alaee.
Iran is enforcing a long-standing law banning smoking in public places. As well as cigarette smoking, the authorities are also cracking down on the use of water pipes, known in Iran as "ghalian" and in other Arab countries as "shisha."
The authorities have shut down about 20 coffee shops in the capital for offering water pipes, Alaee added.
The wife of a former F.B.I. agent who has been missing since March 8 and was last known to have been on a Persian Gulf island that belongs to Iran left the country on Sunday morning after unsuccessfully seeking clues to her husband's whereabouts.
The former agent's wife, Christine Levinson, who traveled to Iran on Tuesday along with her son Daniel and her sister Suzan Halpin, said at a news conference on Saturday that they found no new information about her husband.
"We still don't know where Bob is," she said about her husband, Robert Levinson, 59, who had gone to Kish, a resort island off the southern coast of Iran, to investigate cigarette counterfeiting for a private company.
As of Saturday, Iran will implement a strict smoking ban in all public places, Teheran media reported.
According to the new law, smoking is prohibited in all public organizations, hotels, restaurants, tea houses and coffee shops.
Police has been ordered to decisively confront all restaurant owners nationwide with a warning first, then temporary closing and, in case of repetition, permanent closing of their enterprise.
Also forbidden is the offering and smoking of the traditional Persian water-pipe which is a must in Iranian tea houses.
TEHRAN (Reuters) - The wife of a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran nine months ago said on Saturday she had not been able to find out what had happened to her husband during a four-day visit to the Islamic state to search for him.
"Our trip is almost over and the miracle we were hoping for has not happened," Christine Levinson told a news conference in Tehran together with her son Daniel and her sister Suzan.
"We still don't know where Bob is and the nightmare I and my family are experiencing will continue."
Robert Levinson, who retired from the FBI a decade ago, traveled from Dubai to Iran's Gulf resort island of Kish on March 8 to investigate counterfeiting and smuggling of cigarettes for a client, likely a tobacco company, according to his family.
This may seem like an unusual introduction to a comic book. But Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir, in part a coming-of-age story set against Iran's Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, defies easy classification. In one major New York bookstore, I found "Persepolis" in the Middle Eastern history section.
"Persepolis," the animated movie, makes its U.S. debut next week. . . .
Ms. Satrapi, 38, is clearly not shy about expressing herself. She sits across from me in a posh room at New York's Regency Hotel, smoking cigarette after cigarette and rapidly shooting off opinions on a diverse array of topics. Ms. Satrapi, who currently resides in Paris, tells me that she loves New York. "I like bagels and cream cheese and lots of stuff. So you know, I feel at home."
The subtitle for Marjane Satrapi's highly personal animated film "Persepolis" might as well be "Iranians: They're Just Like Us." They lose their keys, dance to "Eye of the Tiger," endure rocky relationships.
Satrapi, an Iranian who now lives in France, said her mission was to share with Westerners her stories . . .
Satrapi, dressed in flowing black, stabbed her lit cigarette in the air to emphasize points as she talked about the movie in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
The wife of a former FBI agent who disappeared during a trip to Iran arrived in Tehran on Tuesday to press the Islamic republic's government to help find him, a Reuters witness said.
Christine Levinson last week said she had received a visa to travel to Iran along with her son to search for her husband, Robert Levinson, who vanished in March while on a business trip to Iran's Gulf island of Kish. . . .
Levinson retired from the FBI a decade ago and his wife said he had traveled to the Iranian resort island of Kish to investigate counterfeiting and smuggling of cigarettes for a client, likely a tobacco company.
The government granted the permission in a statement from its mission to the United Nations, which said it was responding to a written plea to Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister, from Christine Levinson, the wife of the missing man, Robert Levinson. . . .
Mrs. Levinson said her husband disappeared on March 8 after flying from Dubai to Kish, a resort island off the southern coast of Iran. Kish belongs to Iran, but it is a free-trade zone . . .
Mr. Levinson, 59 and the father of seven children, was an F.B.I. agent for more than 20 years until his retirement in 1998. He has since worked as a private investigator. . . .
According to the family Web site, www.helpboblevinson.com, he went to Kish to investigate cigarette smuggling for a corporate client.
Iran's Foreign Ministry said Sunday it would consider allowing the wife of an American man who vanished in Iran earlier this year to visit the Islamic country to search for him.
''The request has not officially been relayed to us yet. If it is conveyed, we will review it,'' ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters.
On Thursday, Christine Levinson, the wife of missing former FBI agent Robert Levinson said she was planning to travel to Iran in search of her husband even though she was advised by the State Department not to travel to the country because of the risk. . . .
Robert Levinson was last seen March 8 on Kish Island, a resort off the southern coast of Iran, where he had gone to seek information on cigarette smuggling for a client of his security firm, R.A. Levinson & Associates, based in Coral Springs, Fla.
A former FBI agent who vanished in Iran two months ago was apparently investigating a cigarette-smuggling operation, according to a hunted assassin who says he was with the American on the day he disappeared.
What happened to the burly, 6-foot-4 Robert Levinson in the weeks since then remains an international mystery and a subject of whispers and conjecture.
The FBI said it has no information on Levinson's whereabouts, adding that he had not worked for the bureau for years. State Department officials have said they are skeptical of Iran's claim that it knows nothing about the former agent's fate.