LOS ANGELES –– A jury awarded a record-shattering $28 billion in punitive damages Friday to a 64-year-old former smoker who sued Philip Morris Inc. for fraud and negligence. The Superior Court jury awarded the amount to Betty Bullock, who started smoking when she was 17 and was diagnosed last year with lung cancer that has since spread to her liver. ...

A Montgomery County ban on smoking in restaurants and bars takes effect today, forcing bartenders and servers to store their ashtrays, post no-smoking signs and refuse service to patrons who insist on lighting up. A county Circuit Court judge cleared the way for the law last night, turning aside a challenge by a coalition of restaurant owners. ...

New York law does not allow insurers to sue tobacco companies for deceptive practices and recover smoking-related health costs, the state's top court determined Tuesday. The decision removes the legal basis for a suit brought by Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield against cigarette manufacturers that resulted in a $17.8 million verdict against the tobacco industry in June 2001 by a federal court jury in Brooklyn. Based on their share of the cigarette market, Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds faced the largest payments under the verdict, more than $6 million each. ...

A pharmacology professor testifying in the U.S. government's $280 billion suit against the cigarette industry said on Monday he quit working as an expert witness for a tobacco trade group after it pressured him to be more of an advocate. ...

A tobacco industry lawyer sought to fend off accusations that cigarette makers waged a deceptive campaign to blunt concerns over secondhand smoke as he testified on Wednesday in the government's $280 billion suit against the industry. Industry lawyer John Rupp repeatedly denied allegations that he had helped orchestrate an effort to use industry-paid scientists to downplay the issue during the 1980s. ...

"I'd now like to show you United States Exhibit 85,518," the Justice Department lawyer said Wednesday as the witness took a deep breath and waited for more questions. And so it goes in the government's $280 billion racketeering trial against the tobacco industry: another witness, another exhibit. Lawyers from the Justice Department and the nation's leading cigarette companies have been at it six weeks now. They have examined 16 witnesses, and the government has put on barely a quarter of its case. ...

A decade has passed since a group of sick and angry cigarette smokers banded together in an unprecedented legal fight against the tobacco industry. A two-year trial produced the biggest award ever delivered by an American jury — $145 billion. ...

A federal judge has expanded the number of witnesses the U.S. government will be allowed to call for live testimony in its $280 billion racketeering case against cigarette makers. ...

Dealing a setback to the government in its $280 billion lawsuit against the tobacco industry, a federal appeals court made it more difficult for U.S. lawyers to use what could be a key piece of evidence. ...

Tobacco industry lawyers disputed the government's use of the word "addiction" to describe cigarette-smoking during testimony on Tuesday in the $280 billion racketeering case against the industry. Questioning a drug expert testifying for the government, lawyers for cigarette makers argued that use of "addiction", beginning with a 1988 Surgeon General's report, was vague and politically motivated. ...