 |
Around the Nation
|
|
|
Around the Nation
|
Only three other times have juries awarded smokers damages in health claims against tobacco companies - and all of them were overturned on appeal. Until Wednesday, the biggest verdict was $1 million, in Florida.
Analysts suggested yesterday that cigarette makers' willingness to pay billions of dollars to settle state lawsuits has made the industry an easier target. The settlements are perceived as a public admission of guilt and a sign that the industry has lots of money to spend, experts said.
"When tobacco companies start offering billions of dollars of settlements, juries lose their sense of how much is a lot," said David Logan, a law professor at Wake Forest University who specializes in product liability.
That seemed to be the case in the lawsuit brought by Patricia Henley, who has inoperable lung cancer and accused Philip Morris of hooking her on cigarettes. It was the first case to go to trial since California repealed a ban on individuals' lawsuits against tobacco companies in 1997.
On Wednesday, the jury awarded her $50 million in punitive damages - more than three times what her own lawyer asked for. A day earlier the jury awarded her $1.5 million in compensatory damages.
Jury foreman George Loudis said some jurors wanted to go even higher.
"I accused a lot of them toward the end of losing touch with reality," he said. "One woman said she contemplated $1 billion. I mean, the numbers just flowed out of their mouths."
Philip Morris attorneys said the award stemmed from the "passion and prejudice" of the jury, and they plan to appeal.
Ms. Henley apparently benefited from having her case heard after cigarette makers agreed to pay $246 billion to settle claims by states seeking to recover the health care costs of treating sick smokers. As a result of those lawsuits, sensitive documents showing tobacco companies tried to hide the ill effects of smoking have been made public.
"This is the first real lawsuit where you've had the entire record available to the jury," Logan said.
President Clinton recently announced he would follow the lead of states and sue the industry to over the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses. Several foreign countries have also sued. And a class-action lawsuit on behalf of thousands of smokers is being heard in Florida.
Because of the size of Henley's award, analysts predicted many more lawsuits would follow, especially in California, which was among the first state to ban smoking in some public areas and has run an extensive campaign of public service announcements warning of the dangers of smoking.
"I would imagine that the tobacco executives are meeting at this very hour trying to figure out, 'Is it too late to clean up our act?"'said Richard Daynard, a Northeastern University law professor who has worked with states that sued the cigarette makers.
"I think really for the first time in their history they're going to have to sit down and say, 'Maybe we should go for safer cigarettes, maybe we should go to plain packaging."'
Tobacco stocks fell for a second day yesterday after the verdict, a possible sign of investor nervousness about the industry's future.
Jack Maxwell, an analyst with Davenport & Co., whose Richmond, Va., office overlooks a Philip Morris plant, counseled investors to steer clear of tobacco stocks. He said the industry is more vulnerable than ever, with more than 850 lawsuits pending.
"Everybody's taking a whack at them, from Clinton to the federal government, to trade unions," Maxwell said. "I'm sure a lot of them are going to be thrown out, but there are still going to be some that are going to go forward."
The closely watched developments involve a natural protein called endostatin. It and a sister protein called angiostatin both work - at least in mice - by blocking tumors' ability to sprout new blood vessels.
This makes cancer fall dormant or disappear altogether in lab animals. But no one knows if the same thing will happen in people.
The two proteins have been the subject of a roller coaster of speculation ever since an enthusiastic front-page story in The New York Times last May on Judah Folkman and his experiments. But doubts grew last fall when it was reported that scientists from the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Md., had not been able to reproduce Folkman's results.
This week,an NCI team said it had at last duplicated Folkman's work. The breakthrough using endostatin came only when the NCI scientists conducted the experiments at Folkman's laboratory at Children's Hospital in Boston.
Yesterday, another team of NCI researchers said it has begun designing endostatin studies in humans. The NCI wants to test the drug for safety in perhaps 10 to 30 patients with tumors of the breast,kidney,skin or other parts of the body.
"We are excited about this,"said Dr. James Pluda,an NCI senior drug investigator. "If all goes well,we hope to begin by the third quarter of this year and earlier,if possible."
Pluda said it will take about six months to design the study before it can be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for approval.
Endostatin and angiostatin are being developed by EntreMed Inc.,a small biotech company in Rockville,Md.,whose stock price has risen and plunged with each bit of news about the drugs.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.) sent a five-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno setting out their complaints and asking that Meissner be replaced "if she is unable to quickly address these enforcement problems."
Smith called INS "an incompetent government agency."
"We have had the patience of Job," Gallegly said. "We have tried to work with Doris Meissner and we have tried and tried and tried again."
The White House said yesterday that Meissner continues to have President Clinton's full support and confidence.
"Throughout her tenure, Commissioner Meissner has demonstrated a firm commitment to strengthening the INS to increased service to immigrants and to tough, but compassionate, enforcement of this nation's immigration laws," White House spokesperson Amy Weiss said.
Smith and Gallegly said they hoped the letter would kill discussion at the INS of possibly releasing up to 1,500 illegal aliens convicted of such crimes as burglary, assault and drug offenses because of a shortage of detention space.
Smith said he was unmoved by reports that INS field managers would break their budgets unless they released some detainees to make room for offenders with the most serious criminal records. The agency's budget has doubled over the last four years, he said.
INS spokesperson Russ Bergeron said no criminal aliens had been released and no decision had yet been made on whether any would be.
"We are examining how best to meet the mandatory detention requirements of the law in the face of inadequate funding for bed space to detain these aliens," Bergeron said.
Gallegly and Smith said they also were alarmed over the way the agency handled announcements that it would suspend some deportation rules for Central American illegal aliens fleeing the devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch. Many Central Americans interpreted the announcement as a blanket invitation to come to the United States illegally, they said.
"As a result we are seeing a rising tide of Central American attempting to illegally cross out southern border," the letter said.
Bergeron said the INS has been working with U.S. embassies throughout Central America, U.S. and foreign media and the U.S. Information Agency to provide information on who qualifies for the lenient rules and who does not.
 |
Around the World
|
Women wept over lost sons and husbands. Old men struggled through the slush with their canes. A choir sang a traditional Albanian hymn, "Farewell," as the brown wooden caskets were lowered into muddy graves.
After speeches, the mourners had a minute of silence and shouted "Lavdi!" - Glory! - before silently walking away.
The burials took place 26 days after the bodies of 43 ethnic Albanian villagers were found in a gully following a Serb police attack of this village southwest of Pristina. The Serbs subsequently recovered 40 of the bodies but delayed releasing them to relatives.
"We wanted to take part in the funeral and to share the grief of families who had their loved ones killed," said Beqir Rushti, who walked with four friends from a village six miles away.
"And we wanted to show our enemy that our people want freedom."
More than 2,000 people have died and hundreds of thousands left homeless in a year of fighting in Kosovo, the southern province in Serbia, the main republic in Yugoslavia.
William Walker, the American diplomat who heads the monitoring team, has accused Serb forces of the Racak massacre. The government claims the victims were Kosovo Liberation Army rebels killed in battle.
Walker told the mourners there was "no justification for what happened here in Racak. The graves before me represent the madness, the waste, the futility of unrestrained violence."
Later, the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug denounced Walker's speech as "inappropriate to the occasion or to his position" and accused him of favoring ethnic Albanian rebels.
Messages of condolences also were read from prominent ethnic Albanians, including Hashim Thaci, part of the ethnic Albanian delegation to peace talks underway in Rambouillet, France.
"Racak and Rambouillet are directly connected," Walker said. "We must not lose sight of this hope for a better future."
Walker spoke after threatening to leave when two armed KLA rebels pushed their way toward him. Glaring at his Albanian interpreter, an angry Walker said, "Tell them to put the weapons down or I walk." The gunmen handed their weapons to another guerrilla, who carried them away.
As they left the burial site, some mourners were overheard expressing fear of arrest by Serb police. Later, the Serbian Media Center, which represents the Serbian government, said an ethnic Albanian family reported that two of its male members were abducted on their way home from the funeral.
The burials ended a weeks-long dispute over the bodies, finally returned late Wednesday from the morgue in Pristina following two weeks of autopsies and bureaucratic haggling. Serb authorities had insisted on releasing a few bodies at a time, apparently to avoid a highly publicized funeral during the Rambouillet talks.
From early in the morning, people streamed down a snow-covered dirt road to the now-uninhabited village, where the coffins lay inside the small mosque before burial.
Men of all ages, many wearing the traditional white skullcaps of Albanian elders, lined up in front of the mosque to pay their final respects. Outside, groups of women wearing white headscarves sobbed softly as friends and relatives sought to comfort them.
"I want my family to be strong and bear this grief," said Shefki Nur Hyseni, 89, whose son, Haqif, was slain. "He was my only son. I must now take care of the rest of my family. But I don't know how. We don't even have a roof over our heads."
The leader of Kosovo's Muslim community, Rexhep Buja, was among the Islamic clerics who offered prayers to the crowd, which drew people from across the province, where 90 percent of its 2 million people are ethnic Albanian.
Villagers grimly recounted the events of Jan. 15, the day of the killings.
"The Serbs locked the women in the cellar," said Mihrije Jakupi, 52, who lost her husband and 16-year-old son in the attack. "They took the men up the hill behind the houses where Walker found them."
Jakupi said she escaped by climbing out a basement window and taking refuge with her brother in a nearby village.
"The children were screaming," she said. "They took my husband and my son and I never saw them again."
The warning from First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Maslyukov, first made in October, that Russia could lose its nuclear capability, has produced rare unanimity among the country's bitterly divided political factions.
Communists, nationalists and liberals alike agree that Russia must stake everything on its nuclear forces if it wants any claim to be a world power and have any kind of credible military.
Yet, the huge arsenal of rockets, planes and submarines that once terrified the world is falling apart and there is no money to maintain it or build large numbers of replacements.
"The only thing for which Russia is respected in the world and which makes us worthy partners...is our strategic rocket forces," said Alexander Lebed, a former general and a leading presidential candidate.
Russia's nuclear arsenal of 6,000 warheads could soon shrink to just a few hundred, analysts say. Early-warning radar and satellites vital to protect against pre-emptive attacks and prevent premature missile launchings are also falling apart, they add.
"By the year 2010, the number of Russia's nuclear warheads will fall 10-fold to 600 to 800," predicted Alexander Pikayev, a top expert in arms control with Moscow's branch of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
Russia could be eclipsed as a nuclear power by China, which once lagged far behind Moscow, he said.
Analysts paint a gloomy picture of Russia's crumbling nuclear triad:
- The navy's nuclear missile submarines are in the worst state. During the Soviet-era, dozens of submarines were on patrol, lurking under the waves with batteries of nuclear missiles ready for instant firing. Scores of submarines have been decommissioned and no more than three are thought to be on patrol at any one time now. Even the working boats rarely leave harbor.
And if a nuclear war starts, the submarines wouldn't be able to sail out immediately because they don't have food supplies on board.
- The air force's mainstay Bear bombers are more than 40 years old. Pilots only get a few hours flying time each year, far below the level at which they can operate effectively, analysts said. Lebed said the air force has only 20 modern nuclear bombers.
- The land-based rocket forces, always the strongest part of the Soviet nuclear triad, are in better shape. But many of the most powerful missiles are well past their operational lifetime, officials admit.
Nuclear weapons have a limited lifespan because of their atomic warheads and corrosive fuel. Beyond that lifespan they often are incapable of working or function defectively.
"The strategic nuclear forces' command systems are also expiring, and that may result in loss of control over them," Lebed wrote in a Jan. 21 article in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper.
It would cost $3 billion a year to maintain existing missiles, according to Roman Popkovich, head of the defense committee of the Duma, the lower chamber of parliament. Russia's full budget for 1999 is $25 billion, and officials concede much of the money exists only on paper.
With the economy in a nose dive and conventional forces collapsing, Russia's military has become increasingly dependent on its still massive Soviet-era nuclear forces.
Whatever money the government can scrape together for the military is being funneled into nuclear forces, but analysts say it's too little, too late.
The navy designed a new nuclear missile submarine - the Yuri Dolgoruky - but only one is under construction. "It's really difficult to say how many nuclear submarines Russia will have on duty by 2010 - two, four, five or seven," said Pavel Felgenhauer, a leading analyst.
The air force does not have any plans for a new long-range nuclear bomber or cruise missiles, analysts said.
The land forces alone have a new weapon - the Topol-M - a single-warhead missile, 10 of which were deployed for the first time in January.
But even if Russia meets its goal of building between 35 and 40 Topol-Ms a year, analysts say the nuclear forces will still drop drastically. Some officials advocate building multi-warhead missiles, but this would break the proposed START-2 agreement with the United States.
The Communist-dominated Duma repeatedly has refused to ratify the treaty, which was approved by the U.S. Senate in 1996 and would reduce each side's nuclear arsenals to between 3,000 and 3,500 warheads by 2007.
Government officials say Moscow must accept START-2 and seek a START-3 treaty to cut both sides to about 1,500 nuclear warheads as the only way to give Russia a kind of parity.
Such drastic cuts are "dozens of times more important for our country than for the United States," said Popkovich, warning that Russia cannot afford any kind of arms race with Washington.
02-12-99
| Previous Article | Next Article |
should be sent to: daily.letters@umich.edu | should be sent to: online.daily@umich.edu |