Cigarette

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

SACRAMENTO - Cigarette makers have a certified history of deception, distortion and lying. And let's not forget fraud and racketeering. Those aren't my words. Credit U.S. District Judge Gladys E. Kessler of Washington, D.C. She wrote in a landmark 2006 ruling that for more than 50 years the tobacco industry had "lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public, including smokers and the young people they avidly sought as 'replacement smokers,' about the devastating health effects of smoking.

Reporting from Sacramento -- The proposal is simple: Raise taxes on cigarettes to pay for cancer research. The push for it is quintessentially Californian, melding celebrity salesmanship and the whims of state voters, who have increasingly been called on to decide key policy questions. The pitchman for Proposition 29, which will appear on the June ballot, is seven-time Tour de France champion and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, who is asking voters to increase taxes on a pack of cigarettes by $1. On Wednesday, he announced a $1.5 million contribution from his Texas-based foundation to the Yes on 29 campaign.

Every morning when UC San Diego physicist Herbert Levine laces up his running shoes and chugs alongside Mission Bay, his earphones crackle with radio ads opposing a proposed $1-per-pack cigarette tax to raise money for cancer research. The ads are funded by the tobacco industry. They call Proposition 29, the tobacco tax that state voters will consider on the June 5 ballot, a bureaucratic boondoggle, an initiative that would raise mountains of cash for research but not a penny for treatment.

A Swiss company launched a cigarette named for Mikhail S. Gorbachev today, figuring that the popular Kremlin leader might be just the guy to knock the Marlboro man off his horse. The company plans to invade the U.S. market next with the cigarette, which it calls "Gorbatchow," enticing smokers with its slogan, "A Taste of Freedom." The medium-strength cigarette is a blend of 21 types of tobacco--some Soviet, some American.

Cigarette packages in the U.S. are about to be emblazoned with graphic, bordering on gory, images highlighting the dangers of smoking. But what really irks one tobacco giant is the prospect of gory but plain (i.e. brandless) labels, an anti-smoking measure about to be launched in Australia. Philip Morris Asia has threatened to sue the Australian government, saying its plan would hinder the company’s ability to differentiate its products from other brands, according to media reports . The Australian government counters that taking away brand-name appeal would cut down on smoking rates in the country and save money on healthcare.  The proposed laws, which would take effect in January, would require packaging to be a drab, olive green color with standardized font and colors for brand and product names.

Let me understand this: Once the Philip Morris recall is completed, cigarettes will be safe to use. Did I miss something? H. M. NACHENBERG Ventura

White House victories are rare these days, but President Obama can claim solid progress in his lonely battle to quit smoking. The president has gone nine months without sneaking a cigarette, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs reported Thursday. Every day is a struggle and there's no guarantee the president won't light up tomorrow, it seems. Still, for a president who has been trying to quit for years, the nine-month hiatus is a welcome sign that he's breaking the addiction.

For American smokers, her portrait is a glimpse of a future frightening to ponder and, for U.S. health officials, perhaps too powerful to foist on the public: an unsparing photograph of a person scarcely recognizable as a woman, her body wasted by cancer, her hair gone, her blue eyes fixed in a thousand-mile stare. She was Barb Tarbox, and she died on May 18, 2003, of lung cancer at the age of 42. From October 2002, two months after she was diagnosed, to the moment of her death, the Edmonton, Canada, homemaker set about making her ordeal a lesson to others about the dangers of smoking.

As a cigarette smoker, I want to commend David Lazarus for his article ("Fuming over cigarette butt litter," Nov. 30) regarding self-centered smokers who litter their butts wherever they feel like it. In public places, I make it a point to extinguish my cigarette and discard the butt in a trash can. The same applies to my automobile; my butts are never thrown out onto the highway. We smokers owe society cleanliness and courtesy. Aside from a hefty fine, a good punishment would be mandatory weekend litter cleanup in our parks and sidewalks for three months.

SACRAMENTO — Let's begin with the basics: Tobacco companies are inherently evil. They peddle poison that causes cancer and addicts people to their killer products. Second, smoking is nuts. Smokers know that. Spare the lectures. Can't stop, they say. Nonsense. Millions have. They'll stop eventually when the nurse thrusts the ventilator tube down their throat. I've been blessed. Never smoked. But for much of my generation, lighting up was a rite of passage.

The proposal is pretty simple: Levy a $1-a-pack tax on cigarettes in California and spend most of the proceeds on medical research. Voters might base their decisions on the matter on questions as simple as whether they oppose any new taxes, or whether they're glad to see a revenue producer that, by raising the price of cigarettes, is sure to lower smoking rates. But it's also possible that Californians will ponder some deeper questions -- chief among those is whether they want to spend the money to fund research on cancer and cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases.

Aside from the fact that many Californians love to dump on smokers, there's a good reason for a cigarette tax to be popular in this state: The taxes reduce smoking rates. Even the opponents of the dollar-a-pack tax on the June ballot say so. And that, of course, is why major tobacco companies are spending some $20 million (so far) to stop Proposition 29 . Proponents point out that for a state that's ahead of the pack (sorry, couldn't resist) when it comes to laws that restrict when and where smokers can light up, California has relatively low tobacco taxes at 87 cents a pack.

Fat kids, dumb bill Re " A food truck stop? " March 4 The bill to limit food trucks from parking "within 1,500 feet of elementary, middle and high schools from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on school days" is simple lunacy and demonstrates what is wrong with society's focus on human problems. If food trucks are pushed away, will someone else propose to close down the doughnut shop directly across the street from the high school in our neighborhood? How about the fast food taco place on the other corner?

In the 1970s it seemed like we had problems we could never fix - and I'm not talking about white polyester disco suits and the band Air Supply. The '70s presented America with the residue of a catastrophic war, soaring inner-city crime rates, runaway inflation and subjugation to Middle East oil. To punctuate the dismal vibe, everybody smoked, or so it seemed if you were sitting on an airplane at the edge of the DMZ between the smoking and nonsmoking sections,...

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has blocked the federal government's plan to require cigarette manufacturers to cover half of each package sold with a graphic health warning. In his ruling, issued late Wednesday, Leon said the government mandate amounted to an "impermissible expropriation of a company's advertising space for government advocacy. " That decision confirms a temporary stay issued by Leon in November - a move that signaled his view that a suit brought last August by several tobacco manufacturers against the Department of Health and Human Services would likely prevail.

In 1992, Debi Austin had a laryngectomy after she was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. Austin had smoked her first cigarette at 13 and, even after surgery, remained a two- to three-pack-a-day smoker. The image of her smoking through the hole in her throat in a 1997 state-sponsored anti-smoking ad has remained indelible. In the ad she said: "They say nicotine isn't addictive. " She took a puff and asked: "How can they say that?" Austin, of Canoga Park, finally quit smoking months after the ad aired.

Teenagers might change their attitudes about cigarette smoking by what could be dubbed a "don't show, don't tell" policy that keeps tobacco products in stores out of sight, according to a new British study. Researchers in Ireland simply removed cigarette and tobacco items from store displays during a three-year survey that examined the effect on attitudes about smoking. The University of Nottingham's Centre for Tobacco Control Studies reports the number of teens who recalled the tobacco-driven ad displays dropped from 81% to 22%. Further, the study says, 38% of teens thought the coverup would make it easier to keep kids from smoking while 14% of adults thought it would make it easier to quit.

Reporting from Sacramento -- The proposal is simple: Raise taxes on cigarettes to pay for cancer research. The push for it is quintessentially Californian, melding celebrity salesmanship and the whims of state voters, who have increasingly been called on to decide key policy questions. The pitchman for Proposition 29, which will appear on the June ballot, is seven-time Tour de France champion and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, who is asking voters to increase taxes on a pack of cigarettes by $1. On Wednesday, he announced a $1.5 million contribution from his Texas-based foundation to the Yes on 29 campaign.

Without a single liquor store, and legally smoke-free for nearly three decades, the tiny hillside town of Loma Linda brims with pride about its devotion to health and spiritual well-being. So news that the first McDonald's was coming to town, with its special-sauce-slathered Big Macs and 500-calorie sheaves of large fries, has triggered enough political reflux to put City Hall on the defensive. A noisy group of doctors at the city's landmark Loma Linda University Medical Center definitely isn't lovin' it. Already, there are whispers of election day payback and crafting a ballot measure to choke off a proliferation of fast-food joints.