ADVERTISING tobacco is not easy. According to the World Health Organisation, smoking is responsible for 25% of all male deaths in the developed world (the figure for women is around 10%). Thanks to decades of public-health advertising, cigarettes are linked in the public mind with horrible images of tar-clogged lungs, mouth cancers and emphysema sufferers kept alive by portable oxygen cylinders.

But Natural American Spirit, an enterprising tobacco company owned by Reynolds American, thinks it has the answer. The company’s cigarettes are marketed as “100% natural” and “additive-free”–descriptions more commonly associated with organic food and faddish quack medicines. …

EVEN in the best of conditions, the period around China’s lunar new year holiday poses immense logistical challenges. Tens of millions of people–students, white-collar city-dwellers and rural migrant workers–head home for family reunions. This year, sadly, conditions could hardly be worse. Severe weather in much of the country has disrupted air, road and rail transport, causing dozens of deaths and leaving millions of travellers stranded.

Worst affected are travellers in the south, especially in the city of Guangzhou, in Guangdong province, where 23m migrants work for most of the year. The massive crowd waiting for trains at Guangzhou’s station, forced to make do for days in makeshift camps, was estimated by the government at more than 500,000-strong. Many more have been stuck elsewhere in Guangdong, and in Hunan and Hubei provinces, along the trunk line to northern China. By mid-week tempers had frayed and the government had started taking more aggressive crowd-control measures. …

Based on a design by a mechanical engineer who writes a column for over 100 national newspapers, here’s a way to increase the heat in a cold room using nothing but the sun’s energy!

ONE of the high points of the recent boom in the art market has been the single-nation sales now held by all three major auction houses, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams. Over the past two years Greek, Russian and South African paintings, in particular, have attracted a wave of record-shattering bids from buyers made rich by the booming shipping industry and the worldwide rise in commodity prices.

So successful have these sales become that few auctioneers will now admit in polite company that much of what they are selling is derivative and downright dull, works that are recognisable principally for being copies of more famous works–if not copies of copies. …