Shopkeepers caught selling cigarettes in the ISIS-conquered city of Mosul now face 80 lashes, more than two weeks in jail and a hefty fine. The 700,000 Iraqi dinar penalty is the equivalent of $580 — or enough to buy an iPhone 5S or Windows 7 laptop computer in the country. Anyone caught trying to import cigarettes into the northern Iraqi city also faces 80 lashes, as well as four months in jail and a fine of up to 4 million Iraqi dinar — the equivalent of about $3,300.

E-cigarettes contain 10 times the level of cancer-causing agents as regular tobacco, Japanese scientists said Thursday, the latest blow to an invention once heralded as less harmful than smoking. The electronic devices -- increasingly popular around the world, particularly among young people -- function by heating flavoured liquid, which often contains nicotine, into a vapour that is inhaled, much like traditional cigarettes but without the smoke.

Kim Jong-un has reportedly banned his aides and officials from smoking foreign cigarettes in the name of “patriotism”. The North Korean leader is an avid smoker himself, judging by official pictures, but has insisted that domestic cigarettes are good enough for all loyal members of the Workers’ Party. A source told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency that Kim has declared foreign imports unpatriotic and may attempt to prevent cigarettes coming into the secretive country.

The China National Tobacco Corp., which serves China’s 300 million smokers, is by far the largest cigarette maker in the world. In 2013 it manufactured about 2.5 trillion cigarettes. Its next largest competitor, Philip Morris International (PM), produced 880 billion.

Wall Street pressed S&P, Moody’s and Fitch to assign more favorable credit ratings to their deals and bragged that the raters complied. Now many of the bonds are headed for default.

Champix is suspected of playing a major role in the deaths of 44 patients — 30 of them by suicide — since the popular stop-smoking drug was approved in Canada in 2007, a Vancouver Sun investigation has found. The Pfizer drug has also been linked to more than 1,300 incidents of suicide attempts or thoughts, depression, and aggression/anger across the country in the past seven years.

Alarmed by the prevalence of tobacco use among teenagers, state Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina) introduced legislation Thursday that would raise the legal minimum smoking age in California from 18 to 21. Hernandez, who is an optometrist, has support for the bill from health groups including the California Medical Assn., the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Assn., but the legislation is likely to face strong opposition from the tobacco industry.

Years ago, children were warned that smoking could stunt their growth, but now a major study by an international team including the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University and the University of Edinburgh shows new evidence that long-term smoking could cause thinning of the brain’s cortex. The cortex is the outer layer of the brain in which critical cognitive functions such as memory, language and perception take place.

In his 1997 book The Selfish Brain, Robert DuPont, the first director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, describes marijuana’s impact on its users’ life prospects. “Unlike cocaine, which often brings users to their knees, marijuana claims its victims in a slower and more cruel fashion,” DuPont says. “It robs many of them of their desire to grow and improve, often making heavy users settle for what is left over in life…Marijuana makes its users lose their purpose and...

The first comprehensive evaluation of Australia's ground-breaking plain packaging tobacco laws shows they are working, the Victorian Cancer Council says. Fourteen separate studies on the impact of plain packaging in its first year were published today in a special supplement to the British Medical Journal. The research found after the laws were implemented, there was a "statistically significant increase" in the number of people thinking about and making attempts to quit smoking.

Scotland is to ban smoking in cars with children, bringing it into line with England and Wales, where legislation has been introduced to protect young people from secondhand smoke. The Scottish government announced it would back the smoking prohibition (children in motor vehicles) (Scotland) bill, which has been put forward by the Liberal Democrat MSP Jim Hume.

The soaring popularity of electronic cigarettes threatens to wipe out hard-won gains in the fight against teen smoking, a new government report says.

An intervention in the emergency department designed to encourage tobacco cessation in smokers appears to be effective. Two and a half times more patients in the intervention group were tobacco-free three months after receiving interventions than those who did not receive the interventions, according to a study published online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

China has over 300 million smokers and over a million Chinese people die from smoking-related illnesses every year. The Communist Party of China has approved the prohibition of smoking in public places in Beijing, the country’s capital city. The party gave in to pressure from various health groups and set aside another pressure from the tobacco industry.

A judge says the two-year-old should be adopted after a health visitor found he lived in the smokiest house she had ever seen.

North Korea is making a concerted effort to reduce the regime’s high cigarette-smoking rate by banning the act in public places as well as outlawing the sale of foreign cigarettes. “We have also prohibited people from using electronic cigarettes and smokeless cigarettes,” Choi Hyun-sook, a high-ranking official at the state-controlled health ministry, told the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Saturday.

When the e-cigarette first appeared, Big Tobacco dismissed it as a fad. Now they hope to find the safer cigarette themselves.

Hawaii will become the first state in the country to outlaw smoking for anyone under 21 next year after Gov. David Ige signed a bill raising the smoking age from 18 to 21 Friday. The measure bans the sale or use of cigarettes and electronic smoking devices for anyone under age 21. "Taking this step forward to prohibit anyone under the age of 21 of smoking, purchasing, possessing, is another step to reduce the impact that smoking...

Hawaii's governor on Friday signed a bill raising the legal smoking age statewide to 21, the first U.S. state to do so.

This is a funny ad, but a quality campaign nonetheless. It's eye-opening, realizing it would be silly for anyone to judge you for not wanting to smoke.