Word: tobacco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Still, some tobacco watchers think the innovation has the potential to transform the industry. Says Marc Cohen, a consumer-goods expert at the Sanford C. Bernstein investment firm: "The $64,000 question is: How will consumers react to it? Will smokers be satisfied? Will nonsmokers be satisfied?" If the answer is yes, the smoggy poker game, and other familiar scenes, could become a thing of the past...
...Tobacco industry officials have had little to cheer about of late, but they raised huzzahs last week -- and watched the value of their corporate shares climb -- in the wake of two important court cases. In Boston, a federal appeals court ruled that the Surgeon General's warning labels on every package of U.S. cigarettes shielded Liggett & Myers, based in Durham, N.C., in a $3 million lawsuit filed by the heirs of a lung cancer victim. Just four days earlier in Atlanta, another appeals court had made a similar ruling in favor of American Brands of Old Greenwich, Conn., the maker...
...both cases, the tobacco companies prevailed because the courts ruled that federal statutes held primacy over state laws. Specifically, the appeals courts declared that the federal disclosure law mandating cigarette package warnings, in effect since January 1966, takes precedence over the state laws on which the product liability cases were based. The federal warning provides uniform labeling of cigarettes, the courts reasoned, and was intended to balance concerns about the health of smokers against the economic benefits derived from domestic commerce in tobacco products. Said Judge John Brown for the first U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Palmer vs. Liggett...
...Tobacco stocks surged after the decisions. On the day of the Boston ruling, American Brands climbed by 2 1/8, to close at 56 5/8. Shares of Philip Morris, the largest U.S. cigarette firm, which makes the Marlboro and Merit brands, rose 6 3/4, to 119 7/8. (Shares of Liggett & Myers are not publicly traded.) The cases, however, may still be appealed to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, a host of similar cases are hanging fire; Liggett & Myers alone is the target of about 30. Of the estimated 125 product-liability cases pending against all tobacco companies, RJR Nabisco, manufacturer of Winston...
Steadiness may be a characteristic but not consistency: Watson's war wound, sustained in Afghanistan, wanders from shoulder to leg, depending on the plot. Holmes has a "catlike love of personal cleanliness," yet he keeps his "tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper," and unanswered letters "transfixed by a jerk-knife into the very center of his wooden mantelpiece...