TY - JOUR T1 - Worldwide news and comment JF - Tobacco Control JO - Tob Control SP - 613 LP - 616 DO - 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2017-054087 VL - 26 IS - 6 AU - Marita Hefler Y1 - 2017/11/01 UR - http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/26/6/613.abstract N2 - In this issue, we look at reactions to the Philip Morris International (PMI) initiative ‘Foundation for a Smoke-Free World’. It is fitting to recall a quote from Robert Kennedy in his address to the first World Conference on Smoking and Health (as it was then called), held in New York in 1967, and sobering to realise these words are as applicable today as they were then:The cigarette industry is peddling a deadly weapon. It is dealing in people’s lives for financial gain. The industry we seek to regulate is powerful and resourceful. Each new effort to regulate will bring new ways to evade. Still we must be equal to the task, for the stakes involved are nothing less than the lives and the health of millions of people around the world. But this is a battle that can and will be won.We also examine new developments in New Zealand nicotine product regulation, lobbying on behalf of the tobacco industry by the British Ambassador in Bangladesh, Japan Tobacco’s recent history of mergers, acquisitions and product innovation and a UK member of parliament’s strange excuse for accepting hospitality from a tobacco company. Meanwhile, in the USA, the tobacco industry will finally be forced to air ads correcting its past lies, in a case that dates back to 1999.In September 2017, PMI announced that it will provide a total of almost $1 billion in funding to establish a new ‘Foundation for a Smoke-Free World’ (FSW), which it says is aimed at accelerating progress to end smoking. FSW follows a long line of now-discredited industry-funded research organisations, the existence and work of which have been used to obfuscate, confuse and delay effectively addressing the fact that cigarettes are the single most deadly consumer product ever made. However, the shocker this time was that PMI … ER -