EurActiv.com, 10/3/2008

Journalists are the least trusted when it comes to integrity and honesty, according to lobbyists surveyed for the European Centre for Public Affairs (ECPA). The poll also found Parliament to have "a strong civil society bias" while the Commission and Council are seen as more favourable to business arguments.

The Sunday Herald, Paul Hutcheon, 9/3/2008

Critics label PPP deals as tax avoidance vehicles

A FIRM based in an offshore tax haven stands to make millions of pounds in profit from a public private partnership (PPP) deal to refurbish schools in the Highlands.

3i Infrastructure Ltd, an investment company registered in Jersey, has a 50% equity stake in the consortium behind the 11-school plan.

But the firm will pay no UK tax on any profits made from the schools as its assets are held offshore - beyond the reach of the Treasury.

The New Scientist, 9/3/2008

A controversial nuclear club is taking shape. The UK has signed up to the Bush administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) just a few months after it was rubbished as unworkable by the US National Academy of Sciences. The UK joins several other recent recruits, including Canada, Senegal and South Korea.

Set up to keep radioactive material away from "rogue" nations, the GNEP promotes nuclear energy, while restricting access to fuel and know-how. "Iran has focused minds on this," says nuclear expert Wyn Bowen of King's College London.

Last week, a similar idea received a boost: Sweden offered $5 million towards a global nuclear fuel bank, which would limit production to existing nuclear nations. Previously, the US had been the only country to back the idea.

The Nuclear Age - Learn more about all things nuclear in our explosive special report.

The Los Angeles Times, Greg Miller, 9/3/2008

WASHINGTON -- After an acrimonious investigation that spanned four years, the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a detailed critique of the Bush administration's claims in the buildup to war with Iraq, congressional officials said.

The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.

But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.

The document criticizes White House officials for making assertions that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the underlying intelligence on Iraq, officials said. But the report acknowledges that many claims were consistent with intelligence assessments in circulation at the time.

Because of the nuanced nature of the conclusions, one congressional official familiar with the document said: "The left is not going to be happy. The right is not going to be happy. Nobody is going to be happy."

The report helps culminate a series of investigations that the committee has carried out in connection with the war in Iraq. The "statements report" was stalled repeatedly, in part because of the complexity of the task but also because of partisan disagreements among senators.

The findings are likely to be a source of political discomfort for the White House by reviving the controversy over the Bush administration's case for war. That issue has largely faded from view on Capitol Hill at a time when the White House is sparring with Congress over other intelligence-related issues: CIA interrogation tactics and the scope of the government's wiretapping authority.

The report could also become political fodder for the presidential race, which has focused on the differing positions of the remaining candidates on the decision to invade Iraq.

Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee had initially pushed for the report to focus not only on the prewar claims of the Bush administration but also on statements made by members of Congress, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who is vying for her party's presidential nomination.

"The statements report is clearly the most political of all the reports the committee has done," said a senior committee aide. "It's inherently problematic to try to climb inside the heads [of policymakers] and know what they knew at the time."

Officials said the report is divided into categories that focus on prewar claims about Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, as well as its supposed ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Each section includes a catalog of as many as 20 prewar claims, as well as a summary conclusion on whether the assertions were generally warranted.

"The whole purpose of this exercise is to answer questions about whether the administration was honest in its use of intelligence when it made the case for war," said a senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In many cases, statements that were later proven wrong -- such as President Bush's assertion in September 2002 that Iraq "possesses biological and chemical weapons" -- were largely in line with U.S. intelligence assessments at the time.

Prewar assertions about Iraq's nuclear program were more problematic because they were supported by some intelligence assessments but not others.

"They were substantiated," a congressional official said, "but didn't convey the disagreements within the intelligence community."

In August 2002, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that "Saddam [Hussein] has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." But by that time, the State Department's intelligence bureau was challenging the assumption that Iraq's nuclear program had been reactivated.

White House suggestions that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda were at odds with intelligence assessments that voiced skepticism about such a relationship.

The report marks the culmination of a multipart investigation that the committee launched in February 2004. The only remaining task is an investigation into the activities of a Pentagon office led by Douglas J. Feith, then undersecretary of Defense for policy and one of the architects of the Iraq war.

Congressional officials said the panel is nearing completion of a report on that subject that will focus largely on a secret post-Sept. 11 meeting between two Defense Department officials who worked for Feith and an Iranian exile, Manucher Ghorbanifar, who had been a middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and was regarded by the CIA as unreliable.

The report focusing on the Bush administration's prewar statements is set to be delivered to members of the committee this week, officials said. But it could be weeks away from public release because members may push for changes, and much of the material cited in the report has yet to be approved for declassification by U.S. intelligence officials.

Dissatisfied with the scope of the report, Republicans on the panel are expected to attach a section outlining their objections and calling attention to prewar claims by prominent Democrats, including Clinton.

In an October 2002 speech on the Senate floor, Clinton said that if left unchecked, Hussein "will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."

 

The Daily Mail, Stephen Wright, 9/3/2008

Scotland Yard is fighting a legal battle to avoid disclosing whether the officers who killed Jean Charles de Menezes had opened fire in public before.

The force claims that revealing the information would "endanger the physical and mental health" of the two marksmen.

Officers said such a move might also prejudice the forthcoming inquest into the Brazilian's death.

The Daily Mail submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act questions to the Metropolitan Police Service over the Stockwell shooting.

The request followed speculation that one of the marksmen had killed on duty before.

This newspaper also sought information about the involvement of the armed forces in police operations on July 22, 2005. Mr de Menezes, 27, was shot dead that day by firearms officers who mistook him for a terrorist suspect while hunting for four London transport bombers.

The Met said details about the military were protected on national security grounds.

It said information about the methods of specialist police teams could prejudice the force's relationship with "external organisations".

It is a matter of public record, however, that a member of the armed forces was attached to each of two surveillance teams stationed outside Mr de Menezes's South London home before he was shot.

The Washington Post, Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung, 7/3/2008

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public, a step that caused an uproar when key judgments in an NIE about Iran were released in November.

The classified estimate on Iraq is intended as an update of last summer's assessment, which predicted modest security improvements but an increasingly precarious political situation there, the U.S. officials said.

It is meant to be delivered to Congress before testimony in early April by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, according to a letter sent last week by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell to Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.).

Since the Iraq invasion in 2003, the intelligence community has been more cautious than the military and the White House in assessing political, economic and security gains in Iraq. And the war's progress has been a prominent issue in the presidential campaign.

In his letter to Warner, McConnell said that separate estimates are also being prepared on the "terrorist threat to the homeland" -- focusing on al-Qaeda and Pakistan -- and on "the tactical and longer-term security and political outlook for Afghanistan." Both are scheduled for publication by early fall.

Warner requested all three estimates in January, describing them as key to upcoming policy discussions in Congress.

Intelligence officials said that the National Intelligence Board -- made up of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies plus McConnell -- will decide whether to release the Iraq judgments once the estimate is completed. But they made clear that they lean toward a return to the traditional practice of keeping such documents secret.

In internal guidance he issued in October, McConnell said that his policy was that they "should not be declassified." One month later, however, the intelligence board decided to publicly release key judgments from an NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program, saying that it had weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security against the necessity to protect classified information."

The estimate, which said Iran had halted the weaponization element of its nuclear program, appeared to undermine the Bush administration's position on Tehran's overall effort. With Bush arguing that Iran remained "a danger," McConnell publicly said the NIE judgment was poorly written because it emphasized a halt in the weapons program rather than Iran's continuing nuclear enrichment.

Key NIE judgments on Iraq had previously been made public, beginning with a highly controversial October 2002 assessment warning that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. That estimate was later proved wrong, with no such weapons discovered in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, and the matter led to charges that the intelligence community had been politicized by the Bush administration.

"Overall, professional life is less complicated if nothing becomes public, and one doesn't have to organize classified assessments always having in the back of one's mind, 'If this is ever leaked, how would it read' " in the news media, a former intelligence analyst said.

The Guardian, Terry Macalister, 7/3/2008

· Power firm E.ON in talks to buy British Energy sites
· Government wants to fast-track nuclear plants

The most wide-ranging sell-off of British nuclear assets was under way last night, with the private sector being offered everything from stockpiled uranium to atomic fuel manufacturing plants and land at 18 sites.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is nursing a £300m budget overrun for 2006-07 alone, is attempting to raise cash to help pay for a £72bn clean-up bill. It looks set to win bids from E.ON of Germany and other power companies that are keen to build nuclear generating plants next to some of the NDA's key locations, such as Sellafield in Cumbria and Wylfa on Anglesey.

The government's clean-up agency confirmed yesterday that controversial fuel reprocessing plants such as Thorp and the Sellafield Mox Plant - as well as the fuel manufacturing facility at Springfields in Lancashire - could all be included in any sale. This is despite operating problems at the first two which are held largely responsible for the latest budget overrun.

The sell-off comes as John Hutton, secretary of state for business, dropped a commitment to maintaining at least a 29.9% stake in the nuclear generator, British Energy. He also made clear the government could eventually dispose of the full 39% holding it acquired when the company ran into financial trouble.

Hutton said he wanted to speed up the building of nuclear plants and saw them providing "significantly" more power over the next two decades than the current 19% of electricity that comes from the British Energy facilities. These are gradually being phased out and shut down. "If we can accelerate the timetable [of bringing new plants on stream in 2018], we should. We've got to be completely serious about this ... we should keep our foot down on the pedal," he told the Financial Times.

"Interest in building new nuclear power stations in the UK is strong. Planning applications are likely to focus on areas in the vicinity of existing sites and so it is welcome that the NDA is making its significant land and other assets available to the market," he said.

This does not pre-judge a government "strategic site assessment" that is going on, and most industry experts deem British Energy sites to be more in demand than the authority's ones.

Environmental campaigner Greenpeace expressed deep concern about the potential sell-off of uranium and plutonium stocks plus the Thorp and Mox complexes. "It is not surprising that the NDA is selling off sites but it beggars belief that the rest is being offered to buyers, given there has been no consultation at all about this," said Jean McSorley, the group's nuclear consultant.

Paul Golby, the chief executive of E.ON UK, confirmed he had been in preliminary talks with both the NDA and British Energy about potential sites and he hinted that uranium stockpiles could be sought, too. "We are not into fuel manufacturers but if there is a source of fuel for [new] power stations then of course we would be interested," he added.

Thorp has been largely out of action for three years after an accident. Malcolm Wicks, energy minister, admitted in a parliamentary question recently that the Sellafield Mox plant has produced barely five tonnes of reprocessed fuel since 2002, despite being billed as a plant that would have an annual throughput of 120 tonnes.

Bill Roberts, director of financing at the NDA, told a parliamentary select committee this week that shortfalls in income caused by plant failures had left the NDA with a £303m hole in its budget, though he said this could be made up with income from waste contracts once accounting procedures had been ironed out. The NDA has already been in talks about some assets with potential buyers but kickstarted the formal process yesterday by asking for expressions of interest by April 3.

Back story

Britain has some of the world's oldest nuclear sites, consisting of former Magnox power stations built in the 1950s and 1960s. The expected cost of taking them out of use has been rising steadily since they started to come off stream in the last century. Fourteen plants have closed and are being decommissioned.

The estimated cost of cleaning up Britain's ageing nuclear plants will be £73bn by 2010, according to a report by the National Audit Office.

The clearing of contaminated sites is behind schedule and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which promised to speed up the process, has had to put back work on several locations to concentrate spending on high-level contamination sites such as Sellafield in Cumbria and Dounreay in Scotland.

The audit office report said that five sites had suffered big cuts in their decommissioning budgets in the last year.

The Guardian, Richard Norton-Taylor, 29/2/2008

A former SAS soldier was served with a high court order yesterday preventing him from making fresh disclosures about how hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and American special forces were rendered to prisons where they faced torture.

Ben Griffin could be jailed if he makes further disclosures about how people seized by special forces were allegedly mistreated and ended up in secret prisons in breach of the Geneva conventions and international law. Griffin, 29, left the British army in 2005 after three months in Baghdad, saying he disagreed with the "illegal" tactics of US troops.

He told a press conference hosted by the Stop the War Coalition this week that individuals detained by SAS troops in a joint UK-US special forces taskforce had ended up in interrogation centres in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Guantánamo Bay. He had not witnessed torture himself but added: "I have no doubt in my mind that non-combatants I personally detained were handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured."

Referring to the government's admission that two US rendition flights containing terror suspects had landed at the British territory of Diego Garcia, Griffin said the use of British territory and airspace "pales into insignificance in light of the fact that it has been British soldiers detaining the victims of extraordinary rendition in the first place".

The Ministry of Defence said it did not comment on special forces' activities.

In a separate move, the media have been prevented by a court order from reporting a court martial of six SAS soldiers charged with a conspiracy to "defraud of a value of about £3,000".

The Guardian, David Batty, Martin Hodgson and Nicholas Watt, 6/3/2008

The government today announced a significant tightening of the law overseeing drug companies after an investigation found the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had held back evidence that a controversial drug increased the likelihood of suicide among teenagers.

The public health minister, Dawn Primarolo, said new legislation will be introduced by the end of the year to ensure drugs companies pass on results of clinical trials as soon as the alarm is raised about one of their medicines.

"Companies that conduct clinical trials should not compromise people's health by withholding information," she said.

The move comes after a four-year investigation by the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority (MHRA) into the way GSK withheld the full results of its trials of the antidepressant Seroxat on children.

The trial data, which was finally handed to the MHRA in May 2003, identified two problems of which the company had been aware as early as 1998: a higher risk of suicidal behaviour among under-18s using Seroxat rather than a placebo, and that the drug was ineffective in dealing with depressive illness among that age group.

Primarolo said GSK should have told the MHRA about the results earlier. But GSK will not face criminal prosecution because present legislation is insufficiently clear on whether and when drugs companies should inform the regulator.

The new legislation will place a greater obligation on companies to disclose the results of clinical trials.

In a written ministerial statement published today, Primarolo said: "The process of investigation has revealed weaknesses in EU legislation as it stood at the time, in terms of what safety information drugs companies were legally obliged to provide to the regulators.

"I have therefore asked that immediate steps are taken, as follows: to secure a strengthening of the law in this area, through changes to the EU directive and, in the meantime, amending the law as it applies in the UK; to make it clear to all pharmaceutical companies that, notwithstanding the limitations that may exist in the law, they should disclose any information they have that would have a bearing on the protection of health. The MHRA is writing today both to GSK and to pharmaceutical industry bodies to stress this point."

The MHRA investigation asked whether GSK had informed the regulatory body in reasonable time about the Seroxat results. It showed that the drug company had the information about the potentially suicidal effects of the drug and concludes that GSK should have informed the MHRA earlier. Nnonetheless it found that the company acted within the letter of the law by withholding the data.

The chief executive of the MHRA, Professor Kent Woods, said: "I remain concerned that GSK could and should have reported this information earlier than it did. All companies have a responsibility to patients and should report any adverse data signals to us as soon as they discover them. This investigation has revealed important weaknesses in the drug safety legislation in force at the time. We will take immediate steps to ensure the law is strengthened further, so that there can be no doubt as to companies' obligations to report safety issues."

Mental health charities condemned GSK for its failure to inform the authorities promptly of the risks Seroxat posed to children.

The Mental Health Foundation's chief executive, Andrew McCulloch, said: "It is totally unacceptable to hear that, when information can be made available at speed, young people may have taken their own lives due to a lack of transparency by a pharmaceutical company.

"The pharmaceutical industry has played a significant role in the treatment of people with mental health problems over the years – it has a duty to be transparent and rigorous; otherwise it is in danger of losing the public's trust."

The failure to take stronger action against GSK will anger the many critics of the regulatory body, who say it is not up to the job of policing the pharmaceutical industry. Patients and some doctors have been urging a tough line against GSK ever since the MHRA suddenly announced, in June 2003, that doctors must not give Seroxat to children and under-18s.

The agency said it was acting within two weeks of receiving the full set of data from the Seroxat trials. Those statistics showed the drug was no better than a placebo in alleviating depression in children and that patients taking it were more likely to develop suicidal tendencies than those on placebo. In one of the trials, 6.5% of children taking Seroxat became suicidal compared with 1.1% in the placebo group.

A leaked internal document from GSK, dated to 1998, said the company would have to "effectively manage the dissemination of these data in order to minimise any potential negative impact".

In the US, GSK was sued by the New York state attorney general, settling for a payment of $2.5m (£1.25m) and an agreement to publish all its trial results - negative or positive - on a publicly available database.

Critics have called for big changes to the MHRA. In its report into the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, the Commons health select committee expressed concern that the regulatory body did not get all the information it needed from manufacturers before it licensed drugs. It called for a new regime of random audits of raw trial data collected by companies and for more staff to be recruited.

GSK has always rejected allegations that it improperly withheld Seroxat data. It said the drug had never been approved by EU or US regulators as a medicine for under-18s and that the company had therefore never marketed it for that age group. It also said its trial results had been submitted to regulators and were presented publicly in journals and on its website.

The Guardian, Katie Allen, 3/3/2008

Online communities are leaving advertisers with a headache - but helping PR to thrive through links and recommendations

Vast communities of online social networkers obsessed with sharing recommendations but increasingly averse to advertising have put public relations on a high, according to marketing behemoth WPP's chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell. Its host of PR firms are "firing on all cylinders", he says - and their growth last year massively outstripped that of its advertising businesses.

Public relations is growing ever more powerful, as companies wake up to the benefits of appearing in journalists' copy - and thereby weaving into the online world of links and recommendations, where products benefit from the viral-like recommendations that swirl around the web, their reputation boosted by the seemingly "independent" source of opinion. In many cases, PR is supplanting advertisers.

Sorrell calls it the "power of editorial publicity", which is driven by the rapid spread of social networking sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. Huge global audiences are spending growing amounts of time in virtual worlds and, infuriatingly for advertisers, they are increasingly difficult to reach with traditional marketing. (Facebook users revolted against the intrusive Beacon advertising system).

Buoyant mood

"I can't recall a time when PR has been as strong," says Sorrell. "Something has changed and the reason for the change is online activity, where personal recommendation and personal communication have become more important. And it's clearly editorial and it's clearly not advertising based."

Indeed, traditional display advertising has been shunned altogether by the social networking sites and web companies. Facebook and Google have spread by word of mouth, not billboards, pop-ups or adverts in newspapers.

Sorrell's media empire, which includes PR firms such as Northern Rock's agency Finsbury, revealed last week that public relations and public affairs was its fastest growing business area in 2007. At 8.2%, like-for-like revenue growth from public relations was almost double the rate for advertising, with headline operating profits for PR growing at four times the rate of advertising.

That growth mirrors a buoyant mood in the UK's burgeoning PR industry. The last extensive research into PR put annual turnover at £6.5bn. The industry employs some 48,000 people, and is second only to that of the US in size, according to a 2005 study for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. Growth has since been estimated at more than 10% a year, with predictions of more double-digit growth this year.

Of course, to claim PR as recession-proof is something only a PR man could do. But downturn or no downturn, PR agents are optimistic that, as the internet gives customers a growing field of sources to harvest, companies' obsession with being talked about online will only strengthen - as will their eagerness to keep a hold on their reputation; a second major driver for the PR industry.

With bad press translating into share-price falls for scandal-hit companies, "reputation management" is not just a term on the lips of fee-hungry PR firms. It is moving up the corporate agenda. "Chief executives now put reputation on the balance sheet alongside other assets," says Danny Rogers, the editor of PR Week. "Reputations can be badly hit at any time. The way you respond to a crisis makes a big difference in the long term."

The UK's largest public relations group, Chime Communications, says the obsession with reputation is driving spending on PR even as advertising comes under pressure. "Reputation management is now equally or more important than brand management and, as a result, there is a gradual shift of budget into public relations," says Chime's chief executive Christopher Satterthwaite.

Satterthwaite explains "reputation management" as finding the most read and responded-to blogs and articles and devising ways to react. In a high-profile crisis, it often means using search advertising to prioritise your message.

He cites the recent example of HMRC losing disks containing the personal details of 25 million people. "They should have thought about all the search terms people were going to put in, such as 'my personal bank account' and 'identity fraud' and they should have bought all the pay-per-clicks in the key search terms so that what the Inland Revenue was doing to protect people was evident. That is better than what they did, which was write to everybody, which arrived a week later. With search you can do it within the hour."

But while "reputation management" techniques connect directly with readers, the other driver of PR, what Sorrell terms "editorial communication", relies on some form of complicity from journalists - and therefore presents major ethical questions for news groups. There are also financial challenges.

Losing out on display advertising revenues is one thing for a newspaper. Having your journalists write up press releases that are designed by PR agents to act as a substitute for those adverts is more difficult to swallow.

Hidden agenda

Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust, which is developing a tool to allow the public to compare a news article with a corresponding press release on its Journalisted.com website, describes a spectrum of PR methods.

One end of the spectrum is reasonably transparent, he says, such as a recent survey about how many men would give up sex for a flat-screen TV, sponsored by electrical retailer Comet. "The other end is a lot darker, when it's not apparent to journalists that the information comes with a very hidden agenda attached."

He cites the example of a 2006 cancer campaign, which was exposed by the Guardian's health editor Sarah Boseley as being entirely funded by Roche - the maker of Herceptin and Avastin - although it was presented as a joint effort by a coalition of doctors, nurses and patients.

The company's PR firm, Weber Shandwick, was used as the secretariat for Cancer United, and heavily promoted it to clinicians and journalists.

The solution for journalists, says Moore, is to state it clearly if they get a story from a PR firm. "Many journalists partly feel as though it's a dirty little secret. But one reaction is to be more explicit, being clear about the source of articles."

The challenges are certainly set to increase. According to Colin Farrington, the director general of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, PR is well-placed to weather any economic downturn even if those City agencies relying on big mergers and acquisitions projects could feel the effects of the credit crunch this year.

"The economic outlook for the next 12 months is uncertain and we may well see very different results in different sectors and regions," he says. "Unlike during the slowdowns in the 1990s, I sense that we in public relations have more confidence as a profession."

"PR is more recession-proof. People want to interconnect, want more of a dialogue, and people are very concerned about their reputations."

International Herald Tribune, 3/3/2008

A journalist who works for a U.S.-funded radio outlet has been convicted by an Iranian court of spreading anti-state propaganda and sentenced to one year in prison, her company said Monday.

Iranian-American Parnaz Azima was not in Iran during the court action Saturday. She now has the difficult choice of deciding whether to return to Tehran, where she had to forfeit the deed to her mother's home to raise the bail needed to be released from custody.

Azima, who is based in Prague, was found guilty by Tehran's 13th Revolutionary Court of "spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic" by working for the "anti-revolutionary" Radio Farda, the Persian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the broadcaster said.

In an e-mail statement sent to The Associated Press, the broadcaster said three other charges against Azima had been dropped: acting against Iran's national interests, earning illegitimate income and owning a satellite receiver.

"She is guilty of nothing more or less than doing her job as a professional journalist," said Jeffrey Gedmin, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

PR Week, Clare O'Connor, 28/2/2008

Multibillion-pound power company GE Energy has brought in Europe-wide PR support as part of an aggressive green strategy.

GE Energy has drafted in Paris-based Hopscotch PR and its sister company Hopscotch Europe in One with a full media relations programme in five European markets, including the UK.

Hopscotch Europe in One will promote the company and its technologies to the UK energy, environmental and business media from its Dublin headquarters.

Hopscotch Europe in One MD Patrick Frison-Roche, a former Text 100 PRO, will lead the UK part of the account from the agency's Irish office. Frison-Roche will report to EMEA director of comms and public affairs Frank Farnel, with a dotted line report into internal comms head Donna Mischefski at GE Energy's Bracknell office.

The agency will focus on promoting new GE technologies, including its Arklow Bank wind turbine park off the Irish coast.

'Our overall objective is to promote the European implementation of GE,' said Frison-Roche. 'The company is still perceived as a large US corporation, so what we are doing here is ensuring stakeholders, influencers and other audiences are clear about its importance in Europe.'

Despite being based in Ireland, Frison-Roche said Hopscotch Europe in One would not be outsourcing any of its UK media relations work for the energy giant. 'This is our specialty: international PR without being locally based,' he said.

Hopscotch has also been briefed to promote GE Energy as an ideal employer. 'We wish to communicate the diversity of opportunities GE Energy offers, by being as close as possible to our customers and to our potential employees,' said EMEA comms head Farnel.

GE Energy works in all areas of the power industry, with interests in coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy and many renewable resources.

Reuters, Peter Kaplan, 3/3/2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Federal Communications Commission official is seeking an inquiry into the blacking out of a politically charged segment of the CBS News magazine "60 Minutes" by a local television station in Alabama.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said he had asked the chairman of the FCC to open an inquiry into the February 24 incident at WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Alabama, in which civil rights footage from the 1960s was blacked out.

"The FCC now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here," Copps said at a luncheon with media watchdog groups. "Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?"

Copps is one of two Democratic appointees on the five-member FCC. The chairman of the agency, Kevin Martin, is a Republican.

Martin responded by saying he would look into the matter but has not indicated yet whether he would issue a letter of inquiry to the station, a source close to the commission said.

The "60 Minutes" segment centered on the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who was convicted in 2006 on charges of corruption.

The program made the case that Siegelman had been wrongly convicted on the basis of a politically motivated case built by Republican prosecutors and White House political advisor Karl Rove.

The Telegraph, Robert Winnett, 3/3/2008

More than 50 MPs have laid off members of their staff after the Derek Conway expenses scandal, it emerged yesterday.

The researchers being dismissed by MPs are largely thought to be family members and the mass exodus suggests that many MPs are unwilling to publicly defend or justify their employment.

It comes amid claims that new disclosure rules are being delayed to allow MPs to clean up their financial affairs.

The Times, James Hider, 1/4/2008

An Israeli minister gave warning yesterday that the Gaza faces a “holocaust” if Islamist militants there do not end their daily barrages of home-made Qassam rockets, and their increasing use of Iranian-built Grad missiles.

“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” Matan Vilnai, the Deputy Defence Minister said.

The use of the term "holocaust" is usually restricted to descriptions of the Nazi genocide of the Jews in Europe in the Second World War, and many Israelis resent its use in any other context. Mr Vilnai’s deployment of the word appeared to show Israel’s growing frustration that Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza refuse to curb their attacks, despite heavy tolls inflicted in Israeli air strikes and tank raids.

As Israeli media relayed his controversial comments, Mr Vilnai’s spokesman was forced to issue a clarification. “The minister used the Hebrew term 'shoah' which means 'catastrophe' and in this context does not refer to the 'the Shoah' - the Holocaust,” he said.

The Financial Times, Andrew Bounds, 4/3/2008

Members of the European parliament have rejected a draft ruling that they should publish how much they pay their staff and claim on expenses in a move set to fuel the debate over their use of taxpayers’ money.

Several deputies have recently attacked the assembly’s authorities for suppressing a report detailing abuse of the system for paying their assistants.

The Telegraph, 2/3/2008

There is an iron law of political power, a law confirmed daily by the behaviour of thousands of politicians the world over: funded by other people's money, and living in a cossetted world subsidised by the taxpayer, politicians lose touch with the concerns of ordinary people, and find it impossible to distinguish between actions which work to their own benefit and actions which are in the public interest. They start behaving as if tax-payers' money is rightfully theirs to use as they please.

The only device known to stop that corruption of the public interest is the constant vigilance of the people: our determination to identify, and to shame, every politician who starts on the downward slope. But to perform that role, we need information on how politicians are spending our money, and in particular how they spend it on themselves.

The Telegraph, Ben Leapman, 2/3/2008

There are worried faces around Westminster. The Information Tribunal's ruling last week that full details of MPs' second-home expenses must be disclosed could end a few careers.

A lax expenses regime has tempted MPs into making claims that break the spirit, or even the letter, of the rules. Now they face a day of reckoning. As ex-MP Michael Portillo put it: "It's terrifying because everyone is in peril."

The tribunal's decision is a victory for the public. And for me it is personal, because it was my Freedom of Information request that led to the ruling - with the Commons authorities, led by Michael Martin, the Speaker, resisting disclosure every step of the way.

PublicTechnology.net, 28/2/2008

The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has ordered the Cabinet Office to release the minutes of Cabinet meetings where military action against Iraq was discussed. He does not believe, however, that the disclosure of these minutes will necessarily set a precedent in respect of other Cabinet minutes.

Toni Solo, March, 01 2008, ZNet

Cuba was ranked at 51 in the 2007 UN Human Development Index. One place above Mexico. You will never read that fact in corporate mainstream reporting on Cuba. Nor will you read that around 90% of those eligible voted in Cuba's recent elections. Nor will you read a thorough comparison between Cuba and similar countries like, say, Jamaica or the Dominican Republic.

The Human Development Index is a comparative measure of standard of living among UN member countries. In last year's Human Development Index, Jamaica sits at 101 and Dominican Republic at 79. Among Caribbean countries only the Bahamas, at 49, and Barbados, at 31, do better than Cuba. Among Central American countries only Costa Rica, at 48, does better.