Six In The Morning

The unstoppable march of the tobacco giants

How the industry ruthlessly exploits the developing world – its young, poor and uneducated

By Emily Dugan Sunday, 29 May 2011

More than half a century after scientists uncovered the link between smoking and cancer – triggering a war between health campaigners and the cigarette industry – big tobacco is thriving.

Despite the known catastrophic effects on health of smoking, profits from tobacco continue to soar and sales of cigarettes have increased: they have risen from 5,000 billion sticks a year in the 1990s to 5,900 billion a year in 2009. They now kill more people annually than alcohol, Aids, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined.

Honduran police turn a blind eye to soaring number of ‘femicides’

Women are being murdered at the rate of one a day, yet a report by Oxfam accuses the police of ‘systematic indifference’

Annie Kelly in Tegucigalpa

The Observer, Sunday 29 May 2011  

According to those who loved her, Grace González was a hard-working, happy woman who liked to laugh too loudly and dress too brightly. Her enchiladas, she declared, were the best in the barrio. Last month, neighbours watched in silence as her bloodstained body was wheeled out of the front door of the small house she shared with her two daughters on the outskirts of the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.

Hours earlier, a man had come into her house and tried to rape her 15-year-old daughter, Rosa. When Grace tried to protect her child, he held her down and slit her throat.

Kung Fu Panda 2: Hollywood works harder to win Chinese audiences

Kung Fu Panda 2, which opened May 27 in China, includes references that will be familiar to Chinese audiences – part of a broader Hollywood effort to flourish in the booming marke

By Jonathan Landreth, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

A decade ago, as China closed in on membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), key negotiators now say, it wasn’t talk of opening a huge market to grain or machinery that threatened talks: It was haggling over movies, the ultimate soft-power export.

Today, Chinese consumer confidence has soared. That has lifted movie ticket sales, which jumped 64 percent in 2010 to $1.5 billion, thanks partly to a 3-D craze and a mushrooming of cinemas in China. But what’s also grown is official wariness of the influence of foreign media, so much so that Beijing – a WTO member since 2001 – has all but ignored a March WTO deadline to open film distribution to greater foreign participation, and has refused to discuss the annual cap of 20 imported films.

Industry wobbles in Zimbabwe’s second city

GODFREY MARAWANYIKA BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE – May 29 2011  

Empty factories are now a common sight in Bulawayo’s industrial district as the economy struggles to recover from a decade-long crisis, with firms downsizing, closing or relocating to the capital for better opportunities.

“Companies are closing here, Bulawayo needs money,” said Ruth Labode, who runs a textile mill.

“A banker openly told us that if they receive a loan application to fund a restaurant business from Bulawayo, they would not fund it.

India may approach NY court to prove ISI as terror group



PTI | May 29, 2011, 11.00am IST

NEW DELHI: India may approach a New York court to be a party to a lawsuit, filed by the family of 26/11 victims Rabbi Gavriel Noah Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, to declare Pakistan’s spy agency ISI as a terrorist group.

Armed with many documents, which prove the ISI’s links with terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, India may implead itself in the lawsuit filed in the federal court to help the petitioners as well as declaring ISI as a terrorist outfit.

Osama raid avenged CIA deaths, a secret until now

2 agents among 44 U.S. Embassy workers killed in 1988 bomb blast in Kenya

By ADAM GOLDMAN, MATT APUZZO  

For a small cadre of CIA veterans, the death of Osama bin Laden was more than just a national moment of relief and closure. It was also a measure of payback, a settling of a score for a pair of deaths, the details of which have remained a secret for 13 years.

Tom Shah and Molly Huckaby Hardy were among the 44 U.S. Embassy employees killed when a truck bomb exploded outside the embassy compound in Kenya in 1998.

Though it has never been publicly acknowledged, the two were working undercover for the CIA. In al-Qaida’s war on the United States, they are believed to be the first CIA casualties.