On Monday, December 27, 2010, Noor Atika Hasanah, a petite 28-year-old secretary in Jakarta, updated her Twitter feed. From her bed at the Jakarta Respiratory Centre clinic, she wrote: “To smoking parents, please do smoke as far as possible from your children … so that they won’t get lung cancer.”

Atika’s own lung problem had her down again, recalled her brother Faisal Rizal. Her parents had checked her into a clinic. Later, Atika wrote that she was still waiting for a transfer to a bigger hospital.

On Thursday at 5:35am, the move happened and Atika notified her Facebook friends: “Noor just checked in @PROF. DR. SULIANTI SAROSO hospital.” A friend wrote back, “Please don’t stay too long …. Get well soon sis!”

Noor Atika Hasanah passed away later that day.

Five months after Noor Atika Hasanah’s death, Rizal said Atika Hasanah’s passing was “because of God’s will. The cigarette smoke is only the pelengkap penderita.” He used a Bahasa Indonesia grammatical term which means “direct object.”

Atika’s chronicling of her illness offered friends and family an unusual glimpse at the consequences of runaway tobacco consumption in Indonesia, yet her death to tobacco-related disease is not unusual in one of the world’s last holdouts against signing the World Health Organization's treaty to limit the tobacco industry’s influence by restricting tobacco advertising and raising excise taxes.

With a population of around 240 million and weak government regulations, Indonesia is one of Big Tobacco’s smoking giants. As of 2009, 28 percent of Indonesian adults were smokers and more than half of men smoke, according to the World Lung Foundation.

Around 200,000 people die each year in Indonesia because of smoking-related sickness. At least 25,000 of the dead are like Atika — young, female and passive smokers, according to the WHO.

In post-Soviet Russia, the right connections can mean success in business. And in the country’s lucrative retail tobacco trade, Igor Kesaev has set a new standard for success.

Kesaev runs the multifaceted Mercury Group, with interests in everything from weapons manufacturing to real estate. Now he’s also Russia’s cigarette king, with an unprecedented 70-percent share of the distribution business, selling the popular brands of some of the world’s largest tobacco companies, Philip Morris International, Imperial Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International.

Last fall Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin outlined a new policy for reducing smoking: tobacco advertising will be totally prohibited in 2012; there will be no smoking inside some public buildings and on public transportation; and by 2015, excise taxes can go up 10 times the current levels. This, the government has said, helps Russia comply with the World Health Organization’s international treaty on tobacco control. But ties Kesaev has forged with key government agencies, through strategic charitable contributions, have Russian anti-tobacco activists and government transparency advocates skeptical that they can win meaningful smoking reforms and curb government spending on tobacco-related death and disease.

Dmitry Yanin, head of the Confederation of Consumer Associations, which promotes tobacco-control policy, said the relationships between cigarette distributors like Kesaev and Russia’s security services weaken tobacco reform efforts in Russia.

The country today “is profitable for tobacco business — distributors, producers — but not for reducing the number of smokers,” Yanin said.

Here in California, it’s possible to pass within a mile of the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex and never once suspect it’s there. East of the Palos Verdes Hills, the port’s surrounding warehouses easily obscure the mass of steamers that daily arrive studded with stacks of containers bearing international cargo.

Yet the complex is the busiest in America, the arrival point for nearly half the volume of all U.S. imports. And it’s here that, like so many other smugglers, Charles and May Liu first struck gold.

By all accounts, the Lius were not extraordinary. After emigrating from China around 1980, the pair settled into the Washington, D.C., suburb of Gaithersburg, Maryland. Charles was quiet, a student in political science at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University, where he received a master’s degree. At age 67, he had a professorial look, with chinos and sweaters his preferred attire. May was a romantic, someone the agents who arrested her would later describe as a “true lady,” one who loved ballroom dancing, wore pantsuits, and fastidiously watched her weight.

But the pair wasn’t quite what they appeared. By the time the FBI arrested them in August 2005, the Lius had led a team of agents straight into the heart of a vast Chinese smuggling network — one that sold, among other goods, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, fake $100 bills, and weapons from North Korea. And then there was their real gold mine: cigarettes. Low-grade, brand-name counterfeits. Over a billion of them, all told — more than enough to supply every man, woman, and child in America’s 50 largest cities with a pack.