Search
President Bush pledged to Latin America on Tuesday that after he returns from a hemispheric summit he will intensify his effort to get key trade negotiating authority from Congress.
Two of three foreign spokesmen for the alternative People's Summit, which opened in Quebec City yesterday, were detained for questioning by Canadian immigration officials and granted limited visas to enter Canada.
Reaction to the summit's final declaration ranged from a ''deplorable sham'' to ''a good start, but there's still a lot more work to be done.''
The public release of the draft negotiating text for the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA)underscores the wide gulf between the 34 countries involved in the talks while giving impetus to the citizens' movement to stop it.
Uruguay has defeated Philip Morris, the global tobacco giant, in a major international lawsuit over the country's tough anti-smoking regulations. The Swiss-based company sued Uruguay at the World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment Dispute under the terms of a 1991 bilateral investment treaty between Uruguay and Switzerland.
Over one million people in the Canadian province of Quebec will receive a total of C$15.6 billion ($12.5 billion) in damages for smoking related diseases from three of the biggest tobacco companies in the country. The settlement is the result of a 17 year long court battle.
Uruguay has presented a 500 page document to defend itself against an international lawsuit challenging the country's tough tobacco packaging regulations. The claim was brought by Philip Morris, the global tobacco giant, at the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in Washington DC.
A clandestine lobbying effort at the European Union (EU) by Swedish Match company to get legislators to lift a ban on a special kind of smokeless tobacco has forced the resignation of a top European bureaucrat and prompted renewed calls to strengthen rules on undue business influence in Brussels.
Big Tobacco is fighting a multi-pronged battle to defeat a global wave of laws to force them to use graphic warning labels and plain packaging. It has won a major legal battle in the U.S. this month but it has lost in Australia.
The first of about 8,000 lawsuits blaming the health problems and deaths of Florida smokers on tobacco companies went to trial Tuesday. The key to the case is proving whether now-deceased Stuart Hess was addicted to cigarettes made by Richmond, Va.-based Philip Morris, a unit of Altria Group.
Swedish Match AB and Philip Morris International Inc. announced a joint venture Tuesday to market smokeless tobacco world-wide. The venture combines a world-wide giant in smokeless, Swedish Match, with the world's second-largest purveyor of cigarettes, PMI, an Altria Inc. spinoff.
The Federal Trade Commission is asking the Supreme Court to reject Altria Group Inc.'s argument that only that agency can regulate cigarette advertising, saying such an interpretation mischaracterizes the FTC's "scope and effect" on the issue.