BACKGROUND The tobacco industry uses claims of state preemption or violations of the US Constitution in litigation to overturn local tobacco control ordinances. METHODS Collection of lawsuits filed or threatened against local governments in the USA; review of previously secret tobacco industry documents; interviews with key informants. RESULTS The industry is most likely to prevail when a c...

We introduce a family of operators for belief change that aim at making a new piece of information to be preemptive so that any former belief subsuming it is given up. That is, the current belief base is to be altered even in the case that it is logically consistent with the new piece of information. Existing operators for belief revision are inadequate for this purpose because they amount to s...

Rapid growth in subprime lending over the past decade has led to rising concerns about abusive practices by subprime lenders. By early 2004, those concerns prompted Georgia and more than 30 other states to pass laws designed to eliminate abusive or predatory lending practices by the financial services firms, including those with federal charters, operating within their boundaries. In 2003, the ...