Category: News This Week

The newly-appointed European Commissioner for health and consumer affairs, Dr. Tonio Borg, is said to have forwarded the proposed new Tobacco Products Directive to the Commissioner’s College for vetting and approval, according to a Malta Today story of December 2.

This may pave the way for the proposal and previous directive drafts to be seen, before too long, by MEPs. In a question to the Commission, MEP, Kartika Tamara Liotard, had asked:

1.         ‘Can the Commission – upholding the principle of Commission transparency – forward to Parliament the new Tobacco Directive or a draft thereof, in the form in which it existed when Commissioner [John] Dalli resigned?

2.         ‘How many previous provisional versions of the Tobacco Directive were there, and can the Commission also, as a matter of urgency, forward these previous versions to Parliament?’

On Tuesday last week, the Commission replied that, so far, neither the members of the Commission nor their respective services had discussed the upcoming proposal to revise the directive.

‘The Commission inter-service consultation has not yet taken place and no draft has been submitted to the College for adoption,’ said the written reply. ‘In these circumstances, the Commission considers that transmission to the European Parliament of internal drafts by the Directorate general for Health and Consumers is premature.’

Welcoming the imposition in Australia on Saturday of mandatory plain packaging for tobacco products, an anti-tobacco campaigner said there was still more that could be done, according to an Australian Associated Press (AAP) story.

From December 1,Australiahas required that all tobacco products be sold in ‘plain packaging’ – packaging designed on behalf of the government to be as ugly as is possible. Packs are hugely dominated by graphic health warnings, are otherwise a standardized olive color, have no logos or other design features, and have brand and variant names in a standardized font and position.

Protecting Children from Tobacco Coalition co-ordinator, Stafford Sanders, described plain packaging as an important part of a comprehensive strategy to reduce smoking uptake but said there was still work to be done.

“We could reach virtually zero prevalence in 10 or 15 years if we were determined enough,” he told AAP.

Among the measures proposed were regulating the cigarette’s contents by prohibiting tobacco flavourings and additives, reducing nicotine or introducing a “cut-off birth year” that would prohibit retailers from selling tobacco to anyone born after that year.

“We are also concerned that the federal coalition parties continue to accept tobacco company donations,” Sanders said.

A number of Imperial Tobacco’s Ukraine-based employees have spent a weekend sprucing up a park in the capital Kiev as part of an ongoing community investment partnership.

Around 30 Imperial people from different functions came together for the urban rejuvenation project in the Golosiivsky district, near to Imperial’s offices on the outskirts of the city.

Imperial paid for new lighting, benches and a decorative floating water fountain to be installed, and the volunteers helped by clearing away rubbish and planting flower beds.

Earlier this year Imperial signed a partnership agreement with the local authority to support community projects in this rundown area of the Ukrainian capital.

“We employee around 800 people inKievand this district is very close to our office and the factory,” said Eugene Walsh, general managerUkraine.

“As a responsible business we are happy to support improvement projects such as this which help us to give something back to the local community.”

A new Black Box is due to be unveiled during an exhibition at the Flacon Club in Moscow on Thursday.

For almost two years, Iggesund Paperboard has been running the Black Box Project, which has challenged well-known international designers and design companies to fill a black box of a specified format with contents that in some way test the limits of Iggesund’s Invercote paperboard.

Six designers have taken part in the project so far and their works have been unveiled at exhibitions in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Milan and New York.

When the doors open at the Flacon Club on December 6, a new box will be unveiled with contents created by the Swedish photographer and film director, Jens Assur.

Assur began his career as a photographer for the daily press and, in the 1990s, he became Sweden’s top award-winning photojournalist.

Later, he gradually left the daily press and began focusing on filmmaking. His films, such as The Last Dog inRwandaand Killing the Chickens to Scare the Monkeys, have won multiple international awards.

Partly as a result of this recognition, at the beginning of 2012 he was the first Scandinavian to win the Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award, the Sundance Festival’s prize for promising filmmakers.

Nevertheless, he didn’t hesitate for a second when asked to take part in the Black Box Project. “As a creative artist, it’s rare that I have the opportunity to work so freely and at such a high artistic level in projects developed by customers,” he said. “But in this case we could do so on both a conceptual and intellectual level.”

Carlo Einarsson, director market communications at Iggesund Paperboard, was said to be ‘very pleased’ with Assur’s participation in the project. “We’re looking for creative individuals who really push the limits of what can be done with Invercote,” he said.

“But the project is also a tribute to all the designers who have chosen over the years to make fantastic creations using Invercote as their starting point. We’re especially pleased by the great interest our exhibitions have received from designers and the graphic industry in many parts of the world.”

Reynolds American Inc’s board of directors has declared a quarterly dividend on the company’s common stock of $0.59 per share ($2.36 per share annualized).

The dividend is payable on January 2 to shareholders of record on December 10.

RAI said that this was the 34th consecutive quarterly cash dividend that it had declared since it became a public company on July 30, 2004.

RAI’s stated policy is to return about 80 per cent of its current-year net income to shareholders in the form of dividends.

Starting next month, anyone caught smoking, drinking, camping, blasting music or engaging in any other illegal activities at Boulder Creek parks, California, is to be fined heavily, according to a story by Kimberly White for the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The fines, which are referred to also as ‘fees’, will range from $160 for infractions, such as possessing an open container of alcohol, to $484 for misdemeanors, such as consuming alcohol. And no matter how the offense is classified, a third violation within one year will cost nearly $900.

The fees gave law enforcement another tool to keep order in public spaces, said Tess Fitzgerald, who is on the board of directors of the Boulder Creek Recreation and Park District.

The fees are related to an ordinance the board adopted two years ago, listing about 20 prohibited activities, which, in addition to smoking, drinking, playing loud music and camping, include hunting, fishing or harming animals, introducing dogs and cats, lighting fires and damaging district-owned property.