AS NEWS spread that cigarette prices were on their way up, a tobacconist in St Marys saw a few more faces than usual.

''We really got busy'' in the afternoon, said the manager of the tobacconist Free Choice, Harshad Vekaria. ''People started knowing then.''

From midnight last night, the government increased tobacco taxes by 25 per cent, adding about $2.16 to a pack of 30 cigarettes.

Over four years the government expects this will generate an extra $5 billion, which it has pledged to invest in hospitals.

The head of the International Monetary Fund has warned that the crisis in Greece could spread throughout Europe.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that every day lost in resolving Greece's problems risks spreading the impact "far away".

World financial markets, recovering slightly on Wednesday, have been badly hit by fears of contagion from Greece.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8648029.stm

------------------------

As a reminder of the unchastened status quo, Blankfein remains the gift that keeps on giving.

...

But for Goldman and other banks, a road map to the right ratings wasn’t enough. Analysts from the agencies were hired to help construct the deals.

In 2005, for instance, Goldman hired Shin Yukawa, a ratings expert at Fitch, who later worked with the bank’s mortgage unit to devise the Abacus investments.

Mr. Yukawa was prominent in the field. In February 2005, as Goldman was putting together some of the first of what would be 25 Abacus investments, he was on a panel moderated by Jonathan M. Egol, a Goldman worker, at a conference in Phoenix.

ABOUT 20,000 Australians, whose travel plans have been thrown into chaos by the Iceland volcanic eruption, face confusion over their travel insurance.

The director of the multi-insurer travel insurance website Travel Insurance Australia, Walter De Angeli, said the big insurance providers such as QBE and Alliance were offering to cover all reasonable expenses such as accommodation, meals and cancellation fees incurred after European flights bans last week.

By DONALD KENNEDY

Stanford, Calif.

NOW that Congress has pushed through its complicated legislation to reform the health insurance system, it could take one more simple step to protect the health of all Americans. This one wouldn’t raise any taxes or make any further changes to our health insurance system, so it could be quickly passed by Congress with an outpouring of bipartisan support. Or could it?

Gay rights activists have criticised a Vatican official who sought to link homosexuality to paedophilia when commenting on child sex abuse scandals.

The UK's Stonewall group said it was astonishing gay people should still be dealing with "such an offensive myth".

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone had said homosexuality, not celibacy, lay behind the child sex abuse scandals.

The cardinal, the Vatican's foreign minister, was speaking in Chile, where his comments were also condemned.

Neither the judges, Leach nor the gallery are troubled by the similarity.

''There are some key differences there,'' Leach, 37, said. ''Quite clearly I'm quoting that original work … I'm not sort of ashamed or worried about it.''

As for the Wynne's rule that the landscape be Australian, that wasn't a problem, either.

Leach, who also took out this year's Archibald Prize, pocketing $75,000 for the two wins, said his Wynne painting was ''a projection into some kind of idealised future'' and that people saw landscapes ''through a certain kind of constructed idea of what a landscape should be''.

In fact Reuters was shown the Apache video by the US military shortly after the killings, but raised no stink. Requests for public release under the Freedom of Information Act were denied. Finally whistleblowers handed the video to Wikileaks.