http://www.tobacco.org/newsfeed/org/wtc.rss Latest top tobacco news headlines en-us http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?we_cat=4&art_id=2443&sid=4797880&con_type=1&d_str=20050930 http://tobacco.org/news/207197.html To the irritation of Hong Kong's non- smoking advocates, a Japanese tobacco company says it is considering legal action against the government for allegedly breaching the Basic Law and the Bill of Rights over a proposed smoking ban. Japan Tobacco, the maker of Mild Seven cigarettes, said Thursday the smoking-ban bill will force it to change the name of its popular brand because of a clause outlawing the use of descriptions such as "light" and "mild" on cigarette packaging. But Hong Kong University chair professor of community medicine Anthony Hedley said it is just another complaint by tobacco companies. "The industry will argue against every part of the legislation," he said, urging the government to push the legislation forward. Hong Kong Standard Hong Kong Sat, 01 Oct 2005 04:00:00 GMT http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/licensed-to-kill/2003q3/000008.html http://tobacco.org/news/138473.html Last week, thousands of trade negotiators from around the world came to Cancun, Mexico for the 5th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Philip Morris was there, and so was Licensed to Kill, Inc! While the trade negotiations ultimately collapsed, Licensed to Kill made the most of the opportunity to lobby WTO delegates face-to-face to protect the tobacco industry from public health advocates. Our message: More Trade, Less Health! Below, please find links to photos of our lobbying efforts and press interviews. Essential Action tobacco@licensedtokill.biz Sat, 20 Sep 2003 04:00:00 GMT http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/krnewyork/20011208/lo/health_care_groups_rip_rudy_s_cuts_1.html http://tobacco.org/news/80595.html Health care advocates blasted Mayor Giuliani's proposed budget cuts yesterday, saying the city's poorest communities will suffer the most. The complaint focused on some of the $766 million in cuts the mayor intends to make to bridge a $1.2 billion gap in his final budget. The gap was caused largely by the economic aftershocks from the World Trade Center attack. Giuliani submitted a budget change plan to the City Council. . . Other proposed cuts: $6.5 million from an anti-smoking program [This graph only] Yahoo/Intellivu Sat, 08 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/07_12_01_b.htm http://tobacco.org/news/80508.html the word has been so devalued that even violence is no longer an essential prerequisite for its use. In recently announcing a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against 10 international tobacco companies, a Saudi Arabian lawyer told the press: “We will demand tobacco firms be included on the lists of terrorists and those financing and sponsoring terrorism because of the large number of victims smoking has claimed the world over.” If everyone recognized the word “terrorism” is fundamentally an epithet and a term of abuse, with no intrinsic meaning, there would be no more reason to worry about the word now than prior to Sept. 11. However, with the United States relying on the word to assert, apparently, an absolute right to attack any country it dislikes (for the most part, countries Israel dislikes) and with President Bush repeatedly menacing that “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists” (which effectively means, “either you make our enemies your enemies or you’ll be our enemy – and you know what we do to our enemies”), many people around the world must feel a genuine sense of terror (dictionary definition: “a state of intense fear”) as to where the United States is taking the rest of the world. [This graph only] Beirut Daily Star Fri, 07 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://www.canada.com/vancouver/news/story.asp?id=%7BD1A3B807-8166-47D7-BE92-56727F1BE7F5%7D http://tobacco.org/news/80483.html Tightened border security has had one unanticipated benefit for the B.C. government. That, said Provincial Revenue Minister Bill Barisoff yesterday, is an apparent decrease in tobacco smuggling. Barisoff told an open cabinet meeting that it appears the B.C. treasury has been losing about $200 million a year to illegal tobacco smuggling -- bringing tobacco into the province without paying provincial taxes. But since the border tightened up after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, "we've been seeing more revenue coming in," he said. It's too early to say just how much of the smuggling has been stopped by the closer checks at the border. Much of the rest of the smuggling comes from eastern Canada where provincial taxes are lower, Barisoff noted. Vancouver Province bmclinto@direct.ca (Barbara McLintock / The Province) Canada Thu, 06 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/011205/n05228505_1.html http://tobacco.org/news/80371.html Exposure to trauma puts a person at four to five times greater risk of substance abuse, and stress is considered the leading cause of relapse to alcohol and drug abuse and addiction and smoking, the report said. . . The study did not include cigarette smoking, but there are other indications that smoking also has been on the rise. Thirty percent of people who were smokers prior to Sept. 11 increased the number of cigarettes they consumed, and more than 5 percent of people who said they had previously quit smoking relapsed, according to a separate report by the American Cancer Society and drug maker GlaxoSmithKline Plc [This graph only] Reuters Wed, 05 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://www.suntimes.com/output/roeper/cst-nws-roep05.html http://tobacco.org/news/80361.html I'm watching "Hollywood Palace," an hourlong variety series that is among the thousands upon thousands of programs and specials on file in the library of the Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan. . . This tape is from ABC's coverage of Sept. 11, and it consists mostly of unnarrated footage. . . After a few minutes, I stop the tragedy footage and punch in the code that returns me to "Hollywood Palace" and the summer of 1964. The tape even includes the commercials, including ads for L&M cigarettes ("More taste, more flavor, more pleasure!") and Velvet pipe tobacco, touted as the ideal gift for Father's Day. How reckless and naive we all were were back then. [This graph only] Chicago Sun-Times Wed, 05 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://nypost.com/news/regionalnews/35902.htm http://tobacco.org/news/80310.html Two years after the state doubled its tax on cigarettes, Gov. Pataki is considering another hike to fill a budget hole created by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Pataki is weighing a 39-cent-a pack tax hike in his upcoming budget request, source said. That would drive the state excise tax to $1.50 a pack - the highest in the nation. While Pataki would not confirm he is considering the move - which would generate an additional $250 million to $300 million for the state - he did not rule it out yesterday. "There's been no decision at this point," he said. "We're doing our analysis and we'll be making decisions over the course of the next few weeks." With the state looking at a multibillion-dollar deficit resulting from the World Trade Center attacks, Pataki is looking for ways to cut costs and raise revenues. New York Post Wed, 05 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/05/nyregion/05TAX.html?searchpv=nytToday http://tobacco.org/news/80298.html Facing an enormous revenue shortfall in next year's budget, Gov. George E. Pataki is considering raising the state's tax on cigarettes to $1.50 a pack, which would be the highest tobacco tax in the nation, several lobbyists speaking on the condition of anonymity say. Asked about the proposal during a walking tour of downtown Troy today, the governor neither denied that the tax increase was an idea being batted about in his budget office nor directly acknowledged that he was considering it. "No decision has been made at this point," the governor said of the tobacco tax. No one knows precisely how much tax revenue the state government will lose as a direct result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Mr. Pataki has estimated the drop-off could be $1.6 billion to $3 billion in this fiscal year, which ends on April 1, and $6 billion in the next. New York Times Wed, 05 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011204/ts/attack_crime_iranian_dc_1.html http://tobacco.org/news/80276.html An Iranian businessman who allegedly vowed to ``kill all Americans'' on an Air Canada jet 16 days after the Sept. 11 attacks went on trial on Tuesday with a defense lawyer claiming that the flight crew ``overreacted'' to his client because he is Middle Eastern. But prosecutors told the jury that 37-year-old Javid Naghani was belligerent and possibly drunk on Sept. 27, justifying the flight crew's decision to return to Los Angeles with an escort of fighter jets and turn him over to police. Naghani, owner of a janitorial business called Cleaning Of America, is charged with one count of interference with a flight crew on the Boeing 767 with 148 people on board and could face 20 years in prison if convicted. Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Yang told jurors during her opening statement that Naghani was smoking in the plane's lavatory just minutes after it left Los Angeles International Airport for Toronto, then called a flight attendant ``racist'' when she confronted him. . . Naghani's attorney, Theodore Flier, portrayed his client as a nervous flyer and a heavy smoker who was mistreated by crew members who were deeply suspicious of people from the Middle East after the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks. . . ``He said, 'I'm the president of Cleaning Of America,''' Flier said. ``He never said 'I will kill all Americans.''' Flier added: ``From that act of smoking in the bathroom, you get an (Air Canada) jet turned around with jet fighters ready to shoot it down, it lands and the SWAT team comes on and everybody is crazy.'' Reuters Tue, 04 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011204/ts/crime_hizbollah_dc_1.html http://tobacco.org/news/80268.html U.S. prosecutors urged a federal judge on Tuesday to allow them to use evidence gathered by Canadian intelligence agents in the trial of nine members of an alleged Hizbollah cell operating out of North Carolina. The criminal trial, set to begin in April in a Charlotte, North Carolina, courtroom, has emerged as a test case for U.S. prosecutors as they seek to open a new front in the war on terrorism in federal court, attorneys on both sides said. Defense attorneys, trying to block what prosecutors admitted was the linchpin of their anti-terror case, argued that a 117-page intelligence summary of wiretapped Arabic conversations was unreliable, in large part because the original tapes have been destroyed. ``We're hoping this will set good precedent for us,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken Bell said of a ruling on the evidence, expected to be handed down in the coming weeks. The case, which began as an investigation into cigarette smuggling, would be the first to come to trial under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to aid foreign groups designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations, prosecutors said. Reuters Canada Tue, 04 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20011204/1044081.asp http://tobacco.org/news/80261.html Smokers across New York, already the highest taxed in the nation, soon could be paying another 39 cents per pack to light up. The Pataki administration, desperate for cash for the upcoming 2002 state budget, is eyeing a sharp hike in cigarette taxes that would require smokers to pay $1.50 in taxes for every pack - boosting the cost of brand-name cigarettes to more than $5 per pack in some places, according to sources. A tax hike from the current $1.11 per pack to $1.50 would keep New York's cigarette taxes the highest in the nation. . . With the governor set to release his budget plans this month and possibly as soon as next week, more than a month early, his fiscal advisers are pushing the cigarette tax increase to help close a budget hole of as much as $9 billion - a direct hit from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to lobbyists and others aware of the plan. A cigarette tax hike will lead to further complaints by the tobacco and retail industries, which have long tried to convince tax regulators that higher taxes push smokers to purchase their cigarettes from bootleggers, Internet sites and Indian reservations. Health groups, however, say higher taxes push more people - especially teenagers - to quit smoking. The Pataki administration Monday did not rule out a cigarette tax hike. Buffalo News tprecious@buffnews.com (TOM PRECIOUS / News Albany Bureau ) Tue, 04 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--statebudget1204dec04.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire http://tobacco.org/news/80256.html Gov. George Pataki, facing a multibillion dollar revenue shortfall related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is eyeing a 39-cent per pack increase in the state's cigarette tax, according to a published report Tuesday. The report in the Buffalo News, which cited unidentified sources, was not denied by the Pataki administration. "It's too early to speculate on what the budget may or may not contain," Pataki spokesman Michael McKeon said Tuesday when asked about the newspaper's report. Such an increase would raise New York's per pack tax to $1.50. Currently, New York's $1.11 per pack state tax is the highest in the nation, although state of Washington voters last month approved a tax increase to $1.42 per pack, effective in January. AP Tue, 04 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-120301anger.story?coll=la%2Dhome%2Dtodays%2Dtimes http://tobacco.org/news/80156.html Fits of anger also can knock recovering alcoholics, drug users and smokers off the wagon, according to health professionals. "People tend to make use of such substances as mood regulators, trying to regulate negative moods, and anger is certainly one of those," said June Tangney, a psychologist who studies anger response at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. In the months after the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a survey found that 44% of residents there reported feeling angry "very often, fairly often or some of the time," compared with 35% of those surveyed in Indianapolis, a city of similar size and population distant from the crime. Compared with the people in Indiana, smokers and drinkers in Oklahoma City were twice as likely to drink and smoke more after the bombing. The rate at which people took up smoking for the first time was four times higher in Oklahoma City. [This graph only] Los Angeles Times Mon, 03 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT http://interactive.wsj.com/fr/emailthis/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1007339996220794560.djm http://tobacco.org/news/80128.html Earlier this year, a federal grand jury in Charlotte indicted Mr. Hammoud, fellow immigrant Said Harb and seven others on charges they conspired to smuggle millions of dollars of cigarettes and divert part of the profits to the Beirut-based terrorist group. Mr. Harb and three other men were also charged with trying to procure specialized equipment for Hezbollah, including night-vision goggles, global-positioning systems, laser range-finders and advanced aircraft-analysis software. Monday, a judge in the U.S. District court here is scheduled to hear arguments on a critical aspect of this closely watched case: whether the government can use wiretaps collected by Canada's intelligence agency as evidence in the defendants' criminal trial. The Charlotte case is the first big test of a 1996 law that prosecutors hope will be a major tool in Washington's legal war on terror. The law, known as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, makes it illegal to provide funding or material aid to foreign terror groups. . . By the mid-1990s, prosecutors say, Messrs. Hammoud and Harb were involved in a large-scale cigarette-smuggling operation that was initially discovered by a local sheriff's deputy, Bob Fromme. Mr. Fromme and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms pursued the smugglers for years as they plied the roads between North Carolina and Michigan, where they delivered their cigarettes to gas stations owned by another Lebanese immigrant. In North Carolina, the state cigarette excise tax is just 50 cents a carton. In Michigan, it is $7.50 a carton, enabling the smugglers to pocket much of the difference, law-enforcement officials say. Between 1996 and 1999, the group funneled millions of dollars of cigarettes to Michigan, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves, according to investigators' estimates. By the summer of 1999 -- when the ATF and the U.S. attorney's office in Charlotte were ready to seek indictments in the case -- the FBI stepped in. Agents said they had been investigating members of the smuggling ring for possible involvement with Hezbollah. FBI counterterrorism agents had been watching suspected Hezbollah members in the U.S. for years. The radical Shiite Muslim group was implicated in the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks outside Beirut that killed 241 people, among other attacks. Three alleged Hezbollah members also are on the list of most-wanted terrorists assembled by the FBI in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Prosecutors allege that significant sums of money generated by the Charlotte group's smuggling operations were sent to Lebanon by courier and wire transfer for use by Hezbollah. The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition gordon.fairclough@wsj.com (GORDON FAIRCLOUGH / Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ) Mon, 03 Dec 2001 05:00:00 GMT