They say the firm considered manipulating some of its products in order to make them low-tar in the eyes of officialdom while they actually delivered high tar and nicotine levels to smokers.
Modern travel writers excite more hostility and awe than Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died in 2003. Despising the “drab uniformity of the modern world”, Sir Wilfred slogged across Africa and Asia, especially Arabia, on animals and on foot, immersing himself in tribal societies.
He delighted in killing—lions in Sudan in the years before the second world war, Germans and Italians during it. He disliked “soft” living and “intrusive” women and revered murderous savages, to whom he gave guns. He thought educating the working classes a waste of good servants. He kicked his dog. His journeys were more notable as feats of masochistic endurance than as exploration.
Yet his first two books, “Arabian Sands”, about his crossing of the Empty Quarter, and “The Marsh Arabs”, about southern Iraq, have a terse brilliance about them. As records of ancient cultures on the cusp of oblivion, they are unrivalled.
A primary draw at CUNY is a programme for particularly clever students, launched in 2001. Some 1,100 of the 60,000 students at CUNY's five top schools receive a rare thing in the costly world of American colleges: free education.
Those accepted by CUNY's honours programme pay no tuition fees; instead they receive a stipend of $7,500 (to help with general expenses) and a laptop computer. Applications for early admissions into next year's programme are up 70%.
FOR America's colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university's popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend.
One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, bucolic campuses and raucous parties (it doesn't even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.
Two exhibitions show how a pair of 18th-century painters, James Barry and Henry Fuseli, inspired the modern visual romance with the gothic .
THIS spring the bad boys of British art are making a comeback .Not Damien Hirst and his friends, but the original enfants terribles Henry Fuseli(1741-1825) and James Barry (1741-1806)—who aimed, above all, to depict extremes of passion and terror in what they called the new art of the Sublime.
KEEPING fit requires a combination of healthy eating and regular exercise. On the second of these at least, the world’s food companies can claim to be setting a good example: they have been working up quite a sweat in their attempts to fend off assaults by governments, consumer groups and lawyers who accuse them of peddling products that encourage obesity.
This week saw the unveiling of another industry initiative: five leading food producers—Danone, Kellogg, Nestlé, Kraft and PepsiCo—introduced a labelling scheme for the British market which will show “guideline daily amounts” for calories, fats, sugar and salt on packaging.
The new labels will start to appear on the firms’ crisps, chocolate bars, cheese slices *and the like over the next few months. A number of other food giants, such as Cadbury Schweppes and Masterfoods, have already started putting guideline labels on their products.
IN 2001 human-rights activists in China crowed that a little-known search engine called Google was the most important tool ever created to skirt state censors.
Users could retrieve content that Beijing banned by clicking to call up a “cached” copy of the web page, stored by Google. Soon, however, Google itself was being sporadically blocked. The firm was instructed to deactivate that particular feature, and for a short time its web address was even re-routed by Chinese network operators to the website of a local rival.
