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CAPOLIVERI, Italy, Aug. 18 (UPI) -- A resort town on the Italian island of Elba has adopted an ordinance penalizing children under 16 who smoke or carry tobacco on municipal property.
The Capoliveri ordinance takes effect Aug. 25, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Tuesday. Minors who break the law could be fined 200 to 300 euros ($283 to $424).
''Our aim is not to repress, but to protect the health of our young people," Mayor Ruggero Barbetti told Il Tirreno
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The shelves of the Army and Air Force Exchange and Defense Commissary Agency outlets in Vicenza and Aviano are largely bare of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco — with only a few brands left in most locations.
The shortage is caused by a lack of tobacco shipments from Italian ports, officials said.
Previously, Italian carabinieri had escorted the shipments to Vicenza, Aviano and Camp Darby, AAFES-Europe spokesman Lt. Col. Wayne Marotto said. But they’re no longer doing that, and AAFES is working with various agencies to come up with a solution.
Until a solution is found, the tobacco will stay where it is.
Since AAFES supplies DECA with tobacco in northern Italy, they’re both affected.
Faced with budget shortages and limited personnel, the carabinieri have decided they don’t need to provide such escorts any more, said Col. Daniele Benvenuti, head of the Gruppo Carabinieri Southern European Task Force based in Vicenza.
Benvenuti said escorting cigarette shipments is not seen as a high priority, given all the missions they have to accomplish.
“We are a military police force. The escorting of cigarettes is not a military function. It never should have been,”
We are a military police force. The escorting of cigarettes is not a military function. It never should have been.Col. Daniele Benvenuti, head of the Gruppo Carabinieri Southern European Task Force, which has stopped escorting cigarette shipments from Italian ports to US military bases.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of timing and extent of smoking, type of cigarettes, and concomitant vascular risk factors (VRFs) on the association between smoking and carotid intima-media thickness (C-IMT) in a lipid clinic population. . . .
Conclusions-- In the present cross-sectional observational investigation, carried out in a cohort of patients attending a lipid clinic, consumption of light cigarettes does not reduce the atherogenic effect of smoking on C-IMT. The number of pack-years, cigarettes/d, and years of smoking are relevant covariates in evaluating the effects of smoking on vascular health. The presence of diabetes or hypertension strengthens the association between smoking and cardiovascular risk.
“My little cat … I’m going crazy without you …. You have repeatedly betrayed me, I think …. Little cat, when are you coming? ... I love you, little cat.” On Jan. 4, 2001, Dusanka Pesic Jeknic, representative of the Montenegrin trade mission in Milan, Italy, was speaking on the phone at her home in the southwest of the city. Milo Djukanovic, at that time president of Montenegro, was calling from the capital Podgorica. Billions of people around the world had just hailed the New Millennium. Dusanka, nicknamed “Duska,” the beautiful 41-year-old widow of the late foreign minister of Montenegro, was alone, far from her country. And she spoke out freely about everything: love, tobacco, and crime.
Eight years after Jeknic’s loving conversation with her president, transcripts of her phone calls, wiretapped by the Italian police for 20 months, are attached to hundreds of thousands of court records filed by the prosecutor’s office in Bari, in southern Italy. Here, in the Apulia region’s capital, facing Montenegro across the Adriatic Sea, prosecutors Giuseppe Scelsi and Eugenia Pontassuglia have at last wrapped up their long-running investigation of Djukanovic, Jeknic, and six other Montenegrins and Serbs, as well as seven Italians allegedly tied to organized crime. Their indictment charged the group with, among other offenses, mafia association aimed at illicit trafficking of tobacco, a serious crime in Italy. The indictment and an accompanying 409-page report by Italy’s anti-mafia unit, the DIA, which have not before been made public, provide an extraordinary look inside what may be one of Europe’s biggest smuggling operations in recent years — a tale of corruption, murdered witnesses, and a billion dollars in money laundered through Swiss banks.
From 1994 to 2002, smugglers shipped up to one billion cigarettes a month from the Montenegrin port of Bar to the Italian city of Bari and nearby. . . .
At the center of this case is a hidden bit of history, say prosecutors, of how tobacco smuggling became a state enterprise in Montenegro . . .
Djukanovic is now prime minister of that “Tortuga.” Re-elected in March, he leads a country where for nearly 17 of the past 18 years he has served as either prime minister or president. And he is pushing hard for Montenegro to join the European Union, which is now considering the country’s membership. To that end Djukanovic counts on his main supporter, Italy’s premier Silvio Berlusconi, who in March lauded him during a state-visit in Podgorica. . . .
Affiliated with Serbia until 2006, Montenegro is now fully independent, but some EU nations, notably Belgium and Germany, remain skeptical that the country is ready to join the West. Djukanovic has said that the smuggling is a thing of the past . . .
Starting June 3, Bari Judge Rosa Calia Di Pinto will hold a preliminary hearing to decide whether or not the evidence gathered by prosecutors is enough to put the indicted on trial. The judge will hear a story of a “mafia war” stretching into 10 countries: not only Italy and Montenegro, but also Serbia, Croatia, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Aruba, and the United States. So far, two key witnesses and five others mentioned in the case have been murdered.
Sex, lies, the Italian mafia, millions of packs of Marlboro cigarettes, and billion-dollar profits are all rolled into the plot of one of Europe's largest smuggling operations in recent years, where trials in both Italy and Switzerland are under way. At the center of it all: the head of state for one of Europe's smallest but most beautiful countries, the coastal nation of Montenegro, the backdrop to the 2006 James Bond film, "Casino Royale."
Based on hundreds of pages of wiretap transcripts, law enforcement reports, and indictments, the scandal sounds like a screenplay. Between 1994 and 2002 tobacco smuggling became a state enterprise of Montenegro, allegedly controlled by Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic and an inner circle of Montenegrin officials, according to newly released Italian court records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a project of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. . . .
The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, has been very supportive of Djukanovic.
"We value our relationship with Montenegro and consider the second newest country in the world a close friend and ally," a state department official told ABC News. "We have excellent relations with the government of Montenegro, including Prime Minister Djukanovic."
The Croatian journalist Ivo Pukanic, who was murdered in Zagreb on October 23, had been one of the main witnesses in a Balkan cigarette contraband investigation of the police in the Italian city of Bari, the Italian Prosecutor Guiseppe Scelsi announced as quoted by the Trieste newspaper Il Piccolo.
Scelsi expressed the alarm of the Italian prosecution over the assassination of the owner of the Croatian newspaper Nacional, who was also its Editor-in-Chief, because it was going to affect the investigation against the Balkan cigarette smuggling mafia.
The Prosecutor also pointed out that another journalist who was also a witness in the tobacco contraband case - the Editor-in-Chief of Montenegro's Dan Daily Dusko Jovanovic - had been murdered in Podgorica on May 27, 2004.
According to Scelsi, the current Prime Minister and former President of Montenegro Milo Djukanovic had also been investigated as potentially involved in the Balkan cigarette smuggling ring but the investigation against him would be terminated because of his diplomatic immunity.
Switzerland's top prosecutor charged 10 people with laundering more than US$1 billion during a decade-long mafia cigarette smuggling operation, Swiss authorities said Monday.
The defendants -- five Swiss, three Italians, a Spaniard and a Frenchman -- are accused of having used Switzerland as a hub for laundering money from Italy's powerful Camorra and Sacra Corona Unita organizations, the office of the Federal Prosecutor said. . . .
The 10 are accused of having laundered well in excess of US$1 billion in Ticino from the early 1990s until 2001, the prosecutor's office said.
Women who smoke are more likely to have noninflammatory acne, especially blackheads and blocked pores, than nonsmokers are, according to the British Journal of Dermatology.
How much a woman smoked didn't seem to have an effect on the severity of breakouts. But those who had had acne as teens were four times more likely to have "smoker's acne" as an adult.
The testimony by Montenegro's prime minister Milo Djukanovic (photo) on cigarette smuggling before Italian prosecutors in the southern Italian city of Bari was a shame for the country, opposition leaders said on Monday.
Djukanovic, who has been considered the absolute political leader of Montenegro for the past eighteen years, surprisingly appeared before Bari prosecutors last Friday, answering their questions for more than six hours. . . .
Djukanovic is being investigated for a multimillion-dollar cigarette smuggling operation to Italy and for offering free access and shelter to Italian mafia members in Montenegro ports between 1994 and 2002.
He has repeatedly denied the charges and the rumours that he was being investigated. . . .
Nebojsa Medojevic, the leader of the main opposition party, the Movement for Changes, said Djukanovic had shamed Montenegro by refusing to answer all of the 80 questions put by Bari prosecutors, invoking diplomatic immunity.
Physicians and Nurses Against Tobacco, a Rhode Island-based organization, is asking Pope Benedict XVI to support its campaign for a tobacco-free society.
The group's petition, posted online, appeals to the pope not only to denounce the sale and use of tobacco during his April 15-20 visit to the United States, but also to declare Vatican City the world's first tobacco-free state.
"We hope to convince him to make this gesture as an example to other religious and political leaders and policymakers," the petition says.
Some might dismiss the initiative as a publicity grab, but there is no denying that tobacco is a serious health issue. . . .
Bishop Boccardo made waves a few years ago when, as a papal trip planner, he shut down smoking on the plane that took the pope on his foreign visits.
For years after Alitalia instituted a ban on in-flight smoking, members of the papal entourage and journalists continued to light up on the pope's chartered plane. They were encouraged by the fact that Alitalia gave every passenger a free carton of cigarettes. . . .
even though the Holy See has expressed support for a World Health Organization convention on tobacco control, the Vatican continues to sell tobacco products to its employees at a discount. . . .
On a moral level, the church has never defined smoking as a sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says the gift of physical health requires "reasonable care" of the body, and more specifically says: "The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco or medicine." . . .
The 19th-century Pope Pius IX, for example, built a tobacco factory for cigar rolling in Rome's Trastevere neighborhood. The Latin inscription boasts that the pope thus provided the city with "a factory for processing nicotine leaves."
The number of acute coronary events such as heart attack in adults dropped significantly after a smoking ban in public places in Italy, researchers reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Researchers in Rome compared acute coronary events in the city for five years preceding a public smoking ban with those occurring one year after the ban. They found an 11.2 percent reduction of acute coronary events in persons 35 to 64 years and a 7.9 percent reduction in those ages 65 to 74.
"Smoking bans in all public and workplaces result in an important reduction of acute coronary events," said Francesco Forastiere, M.D., Ph.D., co-author of the study and head of the Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology Unit, Department of Epidemiology, Rome E. Health Authority, Italy. "The smoking ban in Italy is working and having a real protective effect on population health."
British American Tobacco Plc's Italian unit may have to pay all of an antitrust fine levied in a price-fixing case involving the company's predecessor, the European Union's highest court said.
Italian regulators fined BAT's Ente Tabacchi Italiani and Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris 70 million euros ($103 million) in 2003, the year BAT acquired ETI. The tobacco makers challenged the decision, arguing that part of the fine should be paid by ETI's predecessor, Italy's state-run tobacco agency.
``Responsibility for breach of the competition rules can be passed on from one economic entity to the one that succeeds it, if both answer to the same public authority,'' the European Court of Justice's highest chamber of 13 judges ruled in Luxembourg today. . . .
Philip Morris already paid its fine, Claudio Tesauro, a lawyer for the company, said in an interview yesterday. The company acted in support of BAT in the case, said Tesauro, a partner with Rome-based law firm Bonelli Erede Pappalardo.
The case is C-280/06, Autorita Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato v. Ente Tabacchi Italiani.
A new law took effect in Naples on Monday prohibiting smoking near pregnant women and children in the southern Italian city's public parks.
"We're not going to use a ruler to measure the distance between smokers and women or children," Deputy Mayor Gennaro Nasti told AFP.
"But it will be forbidden to smoke during open-air shows or under covered structures."
Naples brought in tough anti- smoking measures on Monday, but not everyone was convinced Italians in a city famed for flouting the law would stop lighting up in parks or near pregnant women.
"However they try and enforce this, they will meet with laughter", local councillor Gennaro Capodanno commented on the ban on smoking at demonstrations, in parks, and near pregnant women or children under 12 in public.
Traditionally rebellious Neapolitans now risk a fine of up to 250 euros (179 pounds).
Conclusion: The application of the smoking ban led to a considerable reduction in the exposure to indoor fine and ultrafine particles in hospitality venues, confirmed by a contemporaneous reduction of urinary cotinine.