Australia seeks world backing on tobacco legal fight

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AppId is over the quota

A woman smokes on a street in central Sydney April 7, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Daniel Munoz

By Rob Taylor

CANBERRA | Thu Oct 6, 2011 2:41pm EDT

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia is confident the world's toughest anti-tobacco laws will soon pass parliament, but the government warned on Thursday that the anti-smoking fight was not over and urged other nations to reject a possible WTO challenge backed by big tobacco.

Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the minority government was bracing not only for a court challenge to its plan to force cigarettes to be sold in plain packaging from 2012, but also an intellectual property dispute at the World Trade Organization.

"A tobacco company themselves can't bring a claim in the WTO. A state has to do that," Roxon told Reuters in an interview.

"I won't be surprised if tobacco companies are out there looking for a country to claim on their behalf, and we urge countries not to do that."

The new laws, expected to easily pass parliament next week with backing from the conservative opposition and Green crossbench senators, are being closely watched by New Zealand, Canada, the European Union and Britain, which are considering similar restrictions.

The legislation is in two parts, one of which mandates that cigarettes can only be sold in plain olive green packaging and another part restricting tobacco company trademarks.

The pathfinding plan has infuriated tobacco firms including Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco, which have threatened a High Court challenge. Tobacco nations like Nicaragua, Kenya and Ukraine also say the measures breach global trade rules.

Despite political unease at home over potential compensation claims that tobacco companies have said could mount to billions of dollars, Roxon has been a passionate advocate for the laws within the Labor government, which has a one-seat buffer with the backing of Green and independent MPs.

Her father, Jack, a one-time smoker, died of esophageal cancer at 42, when Roxon was just 10, leaving her pharmacist mother alone to raise three daughters.

"Big tobacco companies do have big tentacles that reach far and wide across the world. I've made very clear to my international colleagues that they need to look at this not only from a health perspective, but from a trade perspective," Roxon, now 44, said.

Australia says the new laws reflect its obligations under the World Health Organization's 2005 framework against tobacco, which urges states to consider plain packaging laws. The WHO estimates more than 1 billion around the world are regular smokers, with 80 percent in low and middle income countries.

Industry analysts say tobacco companies are worried that plain packaging could spread to emerging markets like Brazil, Russia and Indonesia, and threaten growth there.

In Britain, tobacco companies have been fighting in courts for the right to sell cigarettes in vending machines, while tobacco companies in the U.S. are challenging more graphic health warnings on cigarette packets, claiming the changes violate their right of free speech.

An Australia parliamentary committee looking into the legislation and possible grounds for a legal contest received submissions from as far afield as Europe and Kenya, and even cigarette retailers in Peru and Rio de Janeiro.

"We don't know how much (tobacco firms) seek to influence other players, but we certainly become suspicious when you see comments made by people apparently completely disconnected to Australia ... when the lines are exactly reflecting -- almost parroting -- tobacco companies," Roxon said.

Australia's tobacco market generated total revenues of around A$10 billion (U.S.$9.6 billion) in 2009, up from A$8.3 billion in 2008, although smoking generally has been in decline. Around 22 billion cigarettes are sold in the country each year.

Australia wants to cut the number of people who smoke from around 15 percent of the population to 10 percent by 2018. Health authorities say smoking kills 15,000 Australians each year with social and health costs of around A$32 billion.

Roxon said she had experienced enormous support from other health ministers at a recent United Nations health meeting in New York, and was sharing Australia's legal preparations with other nations likely to follow Canberra's plain-pack lead.

"Ultimately that's going to be worrying the tobacco companies, but that is absolutely going to be better for consumers and people who would otherwise be future patients," she said.

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Twitter 'offers world mood clues'

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AppId is over the quota
29 September 2011 Last updated at 18:43 GMT By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News The researchers say Twitter provides a real-time reflection of mood. Researchers have trawled through more than half a billion messages on Twitter, looking for changes in people's mood across days and seasons.

They said people start off brightly in the morning, but mood deteriorates throughout the day until a boost late in the evening.

Unsurprisingly, they found people tended to be happier on Saturdays and Sundays than during the working week.

Changes in the hours of daylight also had an effect.

It has been difficult for scientists to investigate changes in mood. The authors of this study argue that traditional laboratory tests are limited as they are based on university students self-reporting their mood.

Some academics have begun looking at social networking sites to gather data on a wider and more diverse group of people.

Mood rhythm

The team at Cornell University, New York, argued that monitoring Twitter provides a real-time reflection of mood.

They looked at messages from 2.4 million people's public tweets from 84 countries and used language detection software to score positive and negative feelings.

Positive feelings started high, but began to fall in mid-morning and then picked up again in the evening. Generally, positive words appeared more at the weekend than during the week.

However, the researchers say work is not necessarily to blame as the shift in mood pattern "was similar on weekends and weekdays" which instead "points to sleep and the biological clock" as the cause.

Negative feelings were lowest in the morning and increased throughout the day. The researchers said: "This pattern also suggests that people may be emotionally refreshed by sleep."

Researchers said day length affected positive tweets, but not negative ones suggesting "that winter blues is associated with diminished positive affect but not increased negative affect".

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Twitter 'offers world mood clues'

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
29 September 2011 Last updated at 18:43 GMT By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News The researchers say Twitter provides a real-time reflection of mood. Researchers have trawled through more than half a billion messages on Twitter, looking for changes in people's mood across days and seasons.

They said people start off brightly in the morning, but mood deteriorates throughout the day until a boost late in the evening.

Unsurprisingly, they found people tended to be happier on Saturdays and Sundays than during the working week.

Changes in the hours of daylight also had an effect.

It has been difficult for scientists to investigate changes in mood. The authors of this study argue that traditional laboratory tests are limited as they are based on university students self-reporting their mood.

Some academics have begun looking at social networking sites to gather data on a wider and more diverse group of people.

Mood rhythm

The team at Cornell University, New York, argued that monitoring Twitter provides a real-time reflection of mood.

They looked at messages from 2.4 million people's public tweets from 84 countries and used language detection software to score positive and negative feelings.

Positive feelings started high, but began to fall in mid-morning and then picked up again in the evening. Generally, positive words appeared more at the weekend than during the week.

However, the researchers say work is not necessarily to blame as the shift in mood pattern "was similar on weekends and weekdays" which instead "points to sleep and the biological clock" as the cause.

Negative feelings were lowest in the morning and increased throughout the day. The researchers said: "This pattern also suggests that people may be emotionally refreshed by sleep."

Researchers said day length affected positive tweets, but not negative ones suggesting "that winter blues is associated with diminished positive affect but not increased negative affect".

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New Boom Reshapes Oil World, Rocks North Dakota

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AppId is over the quota
Enlarge Gregory Bull/AP

The North Dakota oil boom has produced a housing shortage — and workers are living in company-owned "man camps" like this one outside the town of Williston.

Gregory Bull/AP The North Dakota oil boom has produced a housing shortage — and workers are living in company-owned "man camps" like this one outside the town of Williston.

A couple months ago, Jake Featheringill and his wife got robbed.

It wasn't serious. No one was home at the time, and no one got hurt. But for Featheringill, it was just the latest in a string of bad luck.

"We made a decision," he says. "We decided to pick up and move in about three days. Packed all our stuff up in storage. Drove 24 straight hours on I-29, and made it to Williston with no place to live."

That's Williston, ND. Population — until just a few years ago — 12,000. Jake was born there, but moved away when he was a kid. He hadn't been back since.

"We came in right through the stretch of where the Badlands is," he remembers. "And then you come into the town. So many trucks. Semi trucks and four-wheel-drive pickups — for a mile straight. You've never seen so many trucks in your life."

Those trucks were in North Dakota for one reason — the same reason Featheringill had decided to move his wife and three kids to a remote section of western North Dakota.

Oil.

A $1,200 Parking Space

Two years ago, America was importing about two thirds of its oil. Today, according to the Energy Information Administration, it imports less than half. And by 2017, investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts the US could be poised to pass Saudi Arabia and overtake Russia as the world's largest oil producer.

Places like Williston are the reason why.

"For many years, they knew that there was oil in that area, but the technology wasn't available to get it out," the town's mayor, Ward Koeser, tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

But in the last few years, advances in such technologies as "fracking" and horizontal drilling have made, by some estimates, as much as 11 billion barrels of oil available in the Bakken formation under North Dakota and Montana.

"There's oil companies coming from all over the country now." Koeser says.

Williston has skipped the recession entirely. Unemployment there is less than 2 percent. The population, the mayor estimates, has grown from 12,000 to 20,000 in the last four years.

"We actually have probably between 2,000 and 3,000 job openings in Williston right now," Koeser says.

Oil workers like Jake Featheringill are fueling Williston's population growth. He's working as a shophand for Baker Hughes, making enough to support his wife and three children. But with such a sudden population increase, Williston's infrastructure can't keep up.

"When we came up here, we were told housing was tough but not impossible," Featheringill says. He and his wife got lucky and borrowed an RV from a family friend. "We got lucky again and got to park the RV in a place where we were rent-free. Most of the RV spots around here run $1,000 to $1,200."

That's $1,000 a month, just for a parking space. "Is that not amazing?" Featheringill says. "And that's in a 70-mile radius. Just to park your RV."

'Boom-Town Syndrome'

"It's the old boom-town syndrome," says Charles Groat says, professor of energy and mineral resources at the University of Texas in Austin.

A small town like Williston, he says, can be burdened by a sudden oil boom.

Enlarge Gregory Bull/AP

Ben Shaw hangs from an oil derrick outside Williston, ND, in July 2011. Williston's mayor, Ward Koeser, estimates that the town has between 2,000 and 3,000 job openings for oil workers.

Gregory Bull/AP Ben Shaw hangs from an oil derrick outside Williston, ND, in July 2011. Williston's mayor, Ward Koeser, estimates that the town has between 2,000 and 3,000 job openings for oil workers.

"All the workers. And then you have roads and trucks and pipelines. And then you have all the community services that have to be provided — law enforcement, education. So it turns into a real bonanza in terms of income, but it becomes an environmental effect that people aren't used to experiencing."

In Williston, many workers forgo prices as high as $2,000 a month to rent a small apartment and instead live in "man camps," massive group-housing provided by their companies.

"Just a little room with a bed and a TV," Mayor Ward Koeser explains. "And then they have recreation areas."

The boom in Williston, Charles Groat says, is happening in spots across America. New drilling technology is also fueling boom towns in Texas, Louisiana, and Colorado. New drilling technologies mean companies can extract oil and natural gas from shale rock that was previously thought unreachable.

"Horizontal drilling — accessing a huge area of reservoir — and then the fracking process, which props opens those cracks, and allows the liquid or gas to flow to the well," Groat says. "That's what's made shale gas and shale oil such a viable resource."

But those techniques also raise environmental concerns that Groat is studying.

"There is a danger, here – the fact that we drill so many wells," he says. "If you look at the numbers of wells that have been drilled in North Dakota, just in recent times, the numbers of wells are huge, which increases the opportunity for bad things to happen environmentally or procedurally in developing the resource. We also are not dealing, of course, with the question of greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide as we continue our hydrocarbon dependence."

Global Implications

Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice University says in the next decade, new oil in the US, Canada and South America could change the center of gravity of the entire global energy supply.

"Some are now saying, in five or 10 years' time, we're a major oil-producing region, where our production is going up," she says.

The US, Jaffe says, could have 2 trillion barrels of oil waiting to be drilled. South America could hold another 2 trillion. And Canada? 2.4 trillion. That's compared to just 1.2 trillion in the Middle East and north Africa.

Jaffe says those new oil reserves, combined with growing turmoil in the Middle East, will "absolutely propel more and more investment into the energy resources in the Americas."

Russia is already feeling the growth of American energy, Jaffe says. As the U.S. produces more of its own natural gas, Europe is free to purchase liquefied natural gas the US is no longer buying.

"They're buying less natural gas from Russia," Jaffe says. "So Russia would only supply 10 percent of European natural gas demand by 2030. That means the Russians are no longer powerful."

The American energy boom, Jaffe says, could endanger many green-energy initiatives that have gained popularity in recent years. But royalties and revenue from U.S. production of oil and natural gas, she adds, could be used to invest in improving green technology.

"We don't have the commercial technology now," she says, noting the recent bankruptcy of American solar companies like Solyndra.

"The point is you can't force a technology that's not commercial. Rather than subsidize things that are not going to be competitive, we need to actually use that money to do R&D to create technologies — the same way that the industries created these technologies to produce natural gas and it turned out so commercially successful."

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