The final courtroom hearing in U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) long-running racketeering case [3] against major tobacco companies - including Philip Morris [4] and British American Tobacco [5] - is scheduled for this Thursday. "Despite the industry's dismal reputation, it is eager to avoid the stigma of a racketeering verdict — which would be the first such judicial finding against a major industry," the Los Angeles Times reports [6]. When Bill Clinton gave the go-ahead for the DOJ case in 1999 BSMG WorldWide [7] was hired by Philip Morris to hose down [8] potentially adverse reporting. Across the Atlantic, the Independent reports [9] that four top German public health experts were "funded for years by the German Association of Cigarette Manufacturers, mainly via innocuous-sounding medical foundations in an attempt by the industry to play down the dangers of smoking."