A Minnesota court has reinstated a nearly decade-old class action suit claiming that the manufacturer of Marlboro Lights misled consumers by claiming that light cigarettes were healthier than the standard variety. The ruling by the Minnesota Court of Appeals reverses a 2004 decision from the district court denying class certification for the suit against Philip Morris. In that decision, the court said that it would be necessary to determine why each class member smoked light rather than standard cigarettes, making the case inappropriate for class treatment.

But the appeals court disagreed, ruling that, since the central issue in the case is false advertising, the class members’ individual reasons for smoking light cigarettes are largely irrelevant.
“As we understand it, appellants’ theory of damages is that, no matter what individual factors may have been involved in a class member’s decision to purchase Lights, all consumers of Lights were led by false advertising to believe that Lights were healthier than regular cigarettes when they were not,” the judges wrote in their 45-page opinion.

Ruling could lead to more litigation
An attorney for the plaintiffs said class certification is crucial to the case’s survival.

“An individual consumer cannot take on, alone, a Philip Morris,” attorney Kay Nord Hunt told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “So I think it’s very important to the Minnesota consumers … that they can proceed as a class.”
The court’s theory — that a case centered around false advertising does not require an investigation of each consumer’s decision to buy light cigarettes — could open the door to similar cases, if it holds. Perhaps for that reason, Murray Garnick, a spokesman for Philip Morris parent company Altria, was adamant that the ruling was wrong on the merits and contrary to precedent.

“We believe it is inappropriate to give class-action status to smokers’ claims because they raise numerous individual issues that can only be resolved based on the factual circumstances of each individual smoker,” Garnick told the Star Tribune. “Today’s ruling is contrary to every federal court decision on whether cases such as these should be certified [as a class action] and the overwhelming majority of state court decisions on the issue.”

Philip Morris said it is considering its options for an appeal.

False beliefs about “light cigarettes” continue to hold
The case highlights the misleading nature of so-called “Light” cigarettes. A recent survey found that 44 percent of smokers smoked “light” or “ultra-light” cigarettes, with one quarter of them saying they did so because they believed “light” cigarettes are less harmful and/or easier to quit than regular cigarettes.

New federal regulations, which took effect in July, prohibit manufacturers from using labels like “light,” “mild,” or “low.” Because of that law, “Marlboro Lights” are now branded as “Marlboro Gold.”

Tobacco use is responsible for over 400,000 deaths a year, and the FDA, as part of a requirement of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (Tobacco Control Act), has proposed a new warning label campaign to deter people from smoking.

The new graphic warnings would appear on cigarette packages and advertisements. The FDA hopes the nine warning statements accompanied by striking images will show consumers negative health effects caused by smoking.

The statements that would appear on the warnings include:

Cigarettes are addictive.
Tobacco smoke can harm your children.
Cigarettes cause fatal lung disease.
Cigarettes cause cancer.
Cigarettes cause strokes and heart disease.
Smoking during pregnancy can harm your baby.
Smoking can kill you.
Tobacco smoke causes fatal lung disease in nonsmokers.
Quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious risks to your health.
The images include a corpse with a toe tag, a man having a heart attack, a graveyard and other shocking graphics.

Somewhere in the afterlife’s screening room, Will Hays, architect of Hollywood’s old Production Code, and the stern Catholic bishops of the Legion of Decency are probably sharing a chuckle, maybe over Scotch and cigarettes. Why? The recent fuss over “Avatar,” the James Cameron film in which the latest in cinematic technology meets the oldest argument in the movies: whether vice on screen encourages vice in real life.

In “Avatar,” a character played by Sigourney Weaver smokes. Antitobacco advocates say on-screen smoking — even by a character we’re supposed to dislike, like Ms. Weaver’s — makes children pick up the habit. They have criticized the movie as a threat to public health.

Your initial response — for God’s sake — might be tempered by knowing that the advocates have persuasive scientific studies to support their warnings. Stanton A. Glantz, the director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, points to several, in publications like the medical journal The Lancet, showing strong evidence that on-screen smoking increases teenage cigarette use.

The World Health Organization wants governments to “severely restrict smoking imagery in all film media.” Mr. Glantz doesn’t go that far. He is not urging government regulation but industry self-restraint and greater public awareness, like an R rating for smoking so families can go to the multiplex forewarned.

Does that strike you as nannyish and make you a little queasy? Us, too. But it’s hard to condemn the strategy of using information, not censorship, to confront a perceived public-health threat, especially when, as Mr. Glantz argues, big spending on movie product placement by tobacco companies tilts the field heavily in smoking’s favor.

Probably the only rational response is to let the artists and scolds flourish together, along with information. Protect our children as we must, but we should leave the moviemakers to do their thing.

German scientists have found evidence of a link between exposure to tobacco smoke during early development and abnormal behavioral symptoms (including conduct problems, hyperactivity and problems in peer relationships) that surface by age 10.

“Adverse effects of prenatal and postnatal tobacco exposure have been reported to be associated with behavioral problems” in the past, the study explains. But “the magnitude of the association with tobacco exposure at specific periods” was unclear before this new analysis.

The study used data from the GINI-plus Prospective Birth Cohort Study to assess the relative risk of behavioral problems in children who had been exposed to tobacco smoke in utero and after birth. The results indicated that exposure to tobacco smoke was especially detrimental in utero, but even those exposed to it only after birth had a higher risk of abnormal behavior than kids who weren’t exposed.

“Compared with children not exposed to tobacco smoke, children exposed both pre- and postnatally to tobacco smoke had twice the estimated risk of being classified as abnormal,” the study concludes. Children exposed only prenatally had a 90 percent higher relative risk and those exposed only postnatally had a 30 percent higher relative risk.

These results, the researchers say, could not be explained by parental education, father’s employment, child’s time spent in front of a computer or TV screen, being raised by a single parent or mother’s age.

The study, appearing in the online journal Environmental Health Perspectives, may serve as inspiration for parents or grandparents attempting to quit smoking.

While San Diego was Richard Nixon’s favorite city for political reasons, Copenhagen, may be Barack Obama’s worst. For it is the capital of Denmark where Obama’s last-minute pitch for Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics fell on deaf ears earlier this year. Today’s the “sky is falling” plea to 193 nations for a global climate warming pact most likely will suffer a similar fate.

Obama holds a poker hand the other players read. The joker is held by his own Senate which appears unlikely 1) to pass its own climate change bill any where near the one passed in the House, and 2) to ratify a treaty even if one is smoked out in Copenhagen.

In language a fifth grader can understand, poisons coughed into the air by carbon-producing fuels from vehicles and factories can only be reduced by universal cooperation. Doing it alone — or unilaterally in grown-up words — won’t accomplish anything.

The biggest stumbling block in Copenhagen has been resistance by China and some other rapidly-developing nations for reduction standard verification. No one trusts one another, especially the United States based on its record during the Bush administration.

The second hang-up is the cost. One proposal has wealthy nations paying $10 billion dollars annually until 2020 — about 20 to 30% of the total costs absorbed by the U.S. — to third world countries to help them achieve their goals in reducing pollution. From 2020 to 2050 the cost would be $100 billion annually.

The president is trying to take the lead but it is too late and not enough people and nation’s are following. At least the ones that matter: India, China and Brazil.

Obama in his speech to the world leaders today said their collective will to address global warming “hangs in the balance.”

“We are running short on time, and at this point the question is whether we will move forward together or split apart, whether we prefer posturing to action,” Obama said. “We are ready to get this done today, but there has to be movement on all sides.”

Whether it’s health care, rushing troops into Afghanistan when they’re not ready or climate change, Obama always is in a hurry-up crises mode, it seems. He’s right, of course, but in all cases the pushers and shovers outside his control are dragging their feet.

Before his arrival in Copenhagen, The Washington Post says it obtained a draft text of a basic agreement of general goals.

It provides a way for industrialized nations to commit “aggregate reductions of greenhouse gases” by 2020 and allows for this number to be judged based on both a 1990 baseline–which the European Union has insisted is the most meaningful date–and a 2005 baseline, which the United States, Japan and other developed countries have endorsed. The draft text includes all the near-term emission-cut pledges that industrial countries have made and would establish a 2050 target for reducing worldwide greenhouse gas emissions that would include all countries.

India, along with China the world’s second biggest polluter, is reluctant to even commit to emission reduction, according to French president Nicholas Sarkozy.

While it may make environmental advocates feel good, the Obama administration’s goal of reducing emissions unilaterally through the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory bureaucracies.not only will accomplish nothing on the global scope of things but politically dilute their bargaining power with other nations.

In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, two lawyers who both served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, write:

Unilateral action may well be the right option in cases in which the United States itself, given sufficient commitment and will, can achieve a particular goal. In the case of global climate change, however, the United States can do nothing that is in the least effective without the agreement and participation of all of the other major carbon-emitting economies, including Europe, India and China. Until all are on board, unilateral cuts will simply make the American people poorer, with no benefit to anyone but our foreign competitors.

The next time someone tells you “It’s all or nothing,” think global warming.

Seldom in the history of mankind has there been a proposal so altruistic for the common good and fraught with paranoia and parochial economic interests. It’s a green issue, all right, but in this case the color of money and not saving the rain forests nor taking a deep breath without choking nor watching Manhatten under 10 feet of water.
Posted by JERRY REMMERS, Columnist in At TMV, Breaking News, Economy, Politics, Science & Technology.
Dec 18th, 2009

Roger Cohen’s piece on “Climategate” (Herald, Dec. 9) miss-ed some key details. Serious scientists recognize the roles of both human-released atmospheric carbon dioxide and other natural phenomena on global temperatures.

Deniers who suggest the contrary, or who make uninformed claims over the recent decade’s temperatures, generate interesting sound bites and misinformation, but nothing more. Global temperatures result from a delicate balance between enormous heat radiated to Earth from the sun, counterbalanced with what Earth reflects back plus what it radiates into space.

CO2 reduces Earth’s radiation into space and disrupts that balance. Minute imbalances have profound long-term affects. The sun blasts Earth with, on average, 350 watts per square meter – pole-to-pole, day and night, summer and winter, 24/7. Without reflecting back 100 w/m2 and radiating 250 w/m2, average over the entire Earth, we would rapidly become a crematorium.

This precise balance controls our temperature.

Balance two 300-pound linebackers on a teeter-totter and nothing moves. Hand one a six-pack of beer, and he drops to the ground. Debating whether the 300-pound football player or the 5-pound six-pack caused the drop is ludicrous – which is the very logic used by deniers debating whether human-caused CO2 or natural phenomena cause global warming.

That humans increase atmospheric CO2 levels is beyond debate. At issue is the effect of CO2 on global temperatures. The correlation between global mean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 during the last 50 years is a stunning 79 percent. That means 79 percent of the variance in temperature is explained by CO2 level alone, the other 21 percent by all other causes combined.

It doesn’t matter if you use the temperature data from the much-maligned Hadley CRU, from NOAA or NASA. The relationship is 1 degree Celsius per 100 parts per million of CO2.

I wholly support Cohen’s suggestion to “follow the money.” Shell, BP and Exxon-Mobile most recently reported combined revenues of $1.2 trillion, with net earnings before taxes of $141 billion. Oil lobbyists received $125 million to discredit global warming science. It reminds one of big tobacco’s earlier denials of a link between smoking and lung cancer.

Gerald Baumann, Durango Editor’s note: Gerald Baumann holds a doctorate degree in mechanical engineering specializing in heat transfer and thermal science.

The MPAA has embarrassed itself an untold number of times over the years for its prudish attitude toward sex and its wildly permissive attitude toward violence. But what’s it’s done to Nancy Meyers’ upcoming comedy, “It’s Complicated,” is perhaps the ratings board’s biggest boneheaded move yet.

Its_complicated_ver2 According to a story by my colleague, Steven Zeitchik, the MPAA has given Meyers’ fluffy comedy about a middle-aged love triangle an R rating because Meryl Streep and Steve Martin’s (who star in the film along with Alec Baldwin) characters are seen sharing a joint while on a date.

The problem, according to people involved with the board’s hearing on the issue, isn’t that the actors are seen smoking pot — it’s that the scene “features pot-smoking with no bad consequences.” Apparently, everything would’ve been fine if only the characters had been killed in a gory car crash because their reflexes were slightly impaired after sharing the joint, which surely would’ve served as a stern warning to kids not to ever touch the evil weed.

In other words, you can score a tidy amount of pot at hundreds of marijuana clinics across Los Angeles, but it you take a puff on a joint in a Hollywood movie, you immediately get walloped with an R rating, whether you’re a gangsta’ rapper like Snoop Dogg or a genial white-haired Oscar host like Steve Martin.

It’s another outrageous example of the lunatic priorities of the MPAA, which claims to serve the interests of parents but actually dances to its crazy drummer, happily handing out PG-13 ratings to unbelievably violent movies like “Terminator: Salvation” while whipping out the R rating at the first sign of a few naked breasts or, God forbid, an unsheathed penis.

The R rating for “It’s Complicated,” which hits theaters Christmas Day, is especially ludicrous. It would be one thing if we saw Kristin Stewart smoking weed in “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” since the movie is right in the sweet spot for teens and tweeners. But if the MPAA is really sticking up for families everywhere, it hardly seems to be a parental concern that impressionable kids are going to be flocking to see a romantic comedy featuring actors who are — in the case of Streep and Martin — even older than some of their grandparents.

I’ve been ranting and raving about the MPAA’s nutty priorities for years without any discernible effect. I think it’s time that filmmakers and actors start sticking up for their peers, in this case Meyers, who is getting the shaft from the MPAA for a totally harmless comedy scene. Since George Clooney (and I mean this with no offense) seems to weigh in on every pressing foreign policy of the day, maybe he could spare a little interview time to take the MPAA to the woodshed, which might serve to embolden some of his more cautious brethren to speak out against an organization whose moral compass has clearly gone haywire.

Here’s the trailer for “It’s Complicated,” where you can actually see, toward the end, the giddy after-effects of Streep’s and Martin’s characters’ marijuana indulgence:

Farmers have slowly switched from sugarcane to tobacco farming in most parts of Nadi. In Sabeto, large areas that used to be sugarcane fields are now tobacco farms.

Akuila Nacegutuilagi is one of the many tobacco farmers at Balenakula in Sabeto. The 33-year-old farms his land during his leisure.
Nacegutuilagi said he started growing tobacco for British American Tobacco (Fiji) Limited this year.
He said the crop is harvested twice a year and looks like a healthy business to do.

“This is my first year to grow tobacco. Before I used to grow sugarcane but I cleared up the place and now grow tobacco for British American Tobacco,” Nacegutuilagi said. “I am an electrician but I work on my farm during my spare time and it also is my second means of income. Tobacco normally matures in three months that is when we start harvesting which would take up another three months. “Normally in a year I would grow tobacco twice.

“This is my first year so I want to see if it’s any good going into tobacco farming.”

British American Tobacco provides the seedlings, fertilizer, labour and ploughs the farms.

Mr Nacegutuilagi said all of this is deducted from their payment.

“We are paid according to the grade of tobacco. Grade one is 46 cents, grade two 44 cents and grade three 27 cents,” he said.

“On the farms we weed, hoe and take out the suckers everyday.”

With the sugar industry going through one of its toughest times in history, farmers are slowing switching to tobacco farming.

OSLO, – Prices of everyday goods such as clothing and food will barely rise if rich nations slash greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to a study on Wednesday that concludes green lifestyles are affordable.

The study, in New Scientist magazine based on data for Britain from consultancy Cambridge Econometrics, said prices of only a few consumer goods dependent on fossil fuels would rocket, such as fuel-guzzling air travel.

“These results show that the global project to fight climate change is doable,” the report quoted Alex Bowen, a climate policy expert at the London School of Economics, as saying. “It’s not such a big ask as people are making out.”

The model, assuming cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of 80 percent by 2050 in line with goals by major developing states, projected that prices of food, clothing and cars would rise 1 percent by 2050 and tobacco, alcohol and electronics 2 percent. Phone bills would be unaffected.

But energy prices would jump, with a shift to renewable energies such as solar and wind power. Electricity prices would be up 15 percent and a return flight from London to New York would soar 140 percent.

“We can afford to go green,” New Scientist said of the findings. “Electricity and other forms of energy make up only a fraction of the price of most goods,” it said. “Other factors — raw materials, labour and taxes — are far more important.”

“The energy that goes into producing food, alcoholic drinks and tobacco, for instance, makes up just 2 percent of the consumer price,” it said, noting there were many uncertainties about the projection.