WXII12.com:
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company said Monday it will appeal a federal judge's decision to grant class action status to tens of millions of "light cigarette" smokers for a potential $200 billion lawsuit against tobacco companies.
RJR said it will ask the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay of all proceedings in the case pending an appellate review.
U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein in Brooklyn made the ruling on a 2004 lawsuit that alleges Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard Tobacco and other defendants duped smokers.
Of course they duped smokers. The tobacco industry has already lost $195,918,675,920 in settlements to states over its deceptive advertising and suppression of data that showed that tobacco use was inarguably linked to cancer. If this suit's successful, the tobacco industry will have lost more than $400 billion because of their denial of smoking's health effects.
So you'd assume that covering up the problems caused by your products would be seen as a bad business practice. Tobacco companies sat on evidence that showed a link to cancer and lied about their product. That turned out to be a big money loser.
So, let's turn our attention to another problem.
Associated Press:
The planet's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.
What does this have to do with tobacco lawsuits? Another industry is engaged in the same sort of PR coverup that cost the tobacco industry billions. Worse, it's the same bunch of idiots doing the same thing again.
Some people never learn.
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Tags: news politics environment global warming science oil business financial bullshit
