Tobacco, Smoking | featured news

Smoking rates are declining or flat in much of the world. But they're rising in Africa, where even a child can afford the cost of a single cigarette... On the sunny side of a dusty township street, next to the metal gates of a school, Lucas Moyana's little shop is just a board propped on four plastic crates like a child's lemonade stand.

Indonesian men rank as the world's top smokers, with two out of three of them lighting up in a country where cigarettes cost pennies and tobacco advertising is everywhere.

Colleges increasingly are banning smoking or tobacco products altogether from campus. The University of Oklahoma, the University of Oregon and Montana State University are among those which have enacted campuswide bans this year. The University of California system announced in January that by 2014 all of its campuses would ban use or sale of cigarettes and chewing tobacco.

Australia's highest court upheld the world's toughest law on cigarette promotion on Wednesday despite protests from tobacco companies that argued the value of their trademarks will be destroyed under new rules that will strip all logos from cigarette packs....

A federal appeals court has upheld a law requiring new, bigger graphic warning labels on cigarette packs.

A judge on Monday blocked a federal requirement that would have begun forcing tobacco companies next year to put graphic images including dead and diseased smokers on their cigarette packages.

Four of the five largest U.S. tobacco companies sued the federal government Tuesday over new graphic cigarette labels that include the sewn-up corpse of a smoker and a picture of diseased lungs,...

Tobacco giant Philip Morris launched legal action on Monday against the Australian government over the country's plans to strip company logos from cigarette packages and replace them with grisly images of cancerous mouths, sickly children and bulging, blinded eyes.

Health officials on Tuesday will unveil nine graphic warning labels showing harmful effects of smoking that must be on cigarette packages and in advertisements starting in October 2012.

China's latest push to ban smoking in indoor public venues came into effect Sunday, but the vaguely defined rules were not expected to dramatically reduce the country's heavy tobacco addiction.