The Australian government yesterday hit out at British American Tobacco for using images of kangaroos to sell its cigarettes in Europe, telling the company to “get your hands off our icons.”
British American Tobacco, which is battling Canberra over moves toward plain packaging in Australia, is selling its Winfield brand overseas with a picture of a kangaroo on the front and a map of Australia on the back.
It is also using the slogan “An Australian Favourite” and Australian Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, the former health minister, was not amused.
“I think many Australians are going to be outraged that a big tobacco company all the way round the world is using Australia’s healthy lifestyle to market their deadly products,” she told reporters. “What I think it’s really showing is the sneaky levels that tobacco companies will go to to encourage people to buy their products.”
Australia is set to be the first country to mandate plain packaging to reduce smoking rates under a groundbreaking law passed in November.
Under the legislation, all tobacco products sold in Australia must be in drab, olive-brown packets with large, graphic health warnings showing diseased body parts and sick babies beginning on Dec. 1.
Brand imagery will also be banned, sparking a furious response from the major tobacco companies who have launched a constitutional challenge to the Australian High Court, claiming it infringes their intellectual property rights.
Despite her dismay at Australian images being used to sell cigarettes in Europe, Roxon said there was little she could do about it.
“Whilst it’s probably unlikely that we can do anything to stop these packs being sold in Europe, we certainly can call on British American Tobacco, as the Australian public can, to say: ‘Get your hands off our icons,’” she said.
“Don’t use them to sell your product which actually has nothing to do with Australia,” she added.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS