General Augusto Pinochet, 91, died on December 10, 2006, after nearly a decade of fighting prosecution on charges of gross violations of human rights. The charges stemmed from murders, tortures and disappearances of thousands of Chilean and other opponents during his 1974-1990 rule. In one of the general's most enduring images, he posed for a photograph in which he set a stark, sinister image behind sunglasses after a coup against the elected president Salvador Allende. In an interview for a 1999 biography, he explained the pose that obscured his eyes: "It was a way of telling things. Lies are discovered through the eyes, and I lied often."

"Across the country, half a dozen federal libraries are closed or closing," including several run by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA libraries helped "toxicologists assess health effects of pesticides and chemicals," and "federal investigators track sources of fish kills and identify companies responsible." The EPA's compliance office warned that the closures "could weaken efforts to enforce environmental laws." Regarding the Chicago EPA library's closing, one activist who conducted research there while campaigning against a proposed sludge incinerator said, "If I had known ... I would have chained myself to the bookcase." Also closing are libraries run by the General Services Administration, with information on "real estate, telecommunications and government finance," and by the Energy Department, with "literature for government scientists and contractors." "Officials say the cutbacks have been driven by tight budgets, declining patronage and rising demand for online services." Critics "fear that some publications will never be digitized because of copyright restrictions or cost," and say the loss of knowledgeable reference librarians will greatly hamper research efforts.

"Sir Richard Doll, the celebrated epidemiologist who established that smoking causes lung cancer, was receiving a consultancy fee of $1,500 a day in the mid-1980s from Monsanto," reports The Guardian. "While he was being paid by Monsanto, Sir Richard wrote to a royal Australian commission investigating the potential cancer-causing properties of Agent Orange, made by Monsanto and used by the US in the Vietnam war. Sir Richard said there was no evidence that the chemical caused cancer." Monsanto confirmed that Sir Richard worked for the company as recently as 2000, as "an expert witness for Solutia," a Monsanto spin-off. Sir Richard "was also paid a £15,000 fee by the Chemical Manufacturers Association and ... Dow Chemicals and ICI, for a review that largely cleared vinyl chloride, used in plastics, of any link with cancers apart from liver cancer -- a conclusion with which the World Health Organization disagrees." Colleagues defended the late Sir Richard, saying that he received the fees when "it was not automatic for potential conflicts of interest to be declared in scientific papers," and that he donated the money to Green College, Oxford.

U.S. Army soldiers in Mosul, Iraq

The Iraq Study Group's report states, "There is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq" by the U.S. military. The too-high "standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases," as well as news stories, according to Editor & Publisher. Examples of unreported attacks include "a roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel" and a "sectarian attack" by an unknown group. In addition, "a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack." On one day in July 2006, only 93 violent acts were officially recorded, when some 1,100 actually occurred, according to the report. "Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals," it concludes. One recommendation is to "institute immediate changes in the collection of data about violence and the sources of violence in Iraq to provide a more accurate picture of events on the ground."

Only a small proportion of annual corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports -- perhaps 15 to 20 percent -- provide "very thorough" accounts of real ethical problems faced by companies. Even that measure comes from within the CSR report industry, in interviews with writers Andrew Brengle of KLD Research & Analytics and Jeff Erikson of SustainAbility Inc. The two consultants point to Nike as a company that faced such bad ongoing publicity that it revamped its reports to provide concrete details and increased reporting on labor abuses. (Brengle has been a voluntary reviewer of Nike's reporting.) But more typical, they say, are companies like Hess Corp., an energy company, which described chemical spill problems in a recent report but omitted a federal bribery probe stemming from international operations. "It's more of a hard sell to get a company that isn't a household name, that is more able to hide in the weeds, to produce a sophisticated and in-depth report because they don't have that public pressure," said Brengle. Recent studies by the Ethical Trading Action Group and Oxfam/Hong Kong to improve global labor rights reporting can be viewed, respectively, here and here.

Margot Mackay, a former PR consultant to the gambling company Aristocrat, has pleaded guilty to three charges of insider trading. Mackay, who headed her own company Margot McKay and Associates, used family members to buy almost $150,000 in shares ahead of announcements to the stock exchange that she wrote herself. Kate McClymont reports that McKay "was hired by Aristocrat in 2003 to clean up its corporate image after a series of scandals involving some of its senior executives." Mackay was prosecuted after Aristocrat reported her share-trading to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.