We need help cleaning up existing articles in our new Tobaccowiki Biographies database. Tobaccowiki is a new project to mine information from tobacco industry documents now available online. The Biographies articles contain information on people affiliated with the tobacco industry, such as consultants, political allies, and employees. You can help by editing any of the articles - everything from reformatting to rewording sentence fragments to adding new information is very helpful! We're especially interested in strengthening articles on: Allen M. Brandt, the author of the new book Cigarette Century; Bing Crosby, who endorsed Chesterfield cigarettes; Albert Gore, the U.S. vice-president during major tobacco litigation; and Norma Broin, who launched a landmark legal case against cigarette companies. If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about adding information to the site here and here.

Is Al Gore aiding and abetting the world's largest greenwashers? The New York Times reports that "The brightest lights in the advertising business are gathering in Cannes, France, this week for an annual celebration. ... Mr. Gore is being accorded rock star status at the festival. ... The embrace of Mr. Gore shows how 'green' advertising has galvanized the marketing community. 'The consumer sentiment out there is just palpable,' said Hamish McLennan, chief executive of Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency that arranged Mr. Gore's visit to Cannes and helped him to develop the Save Our Selves (SOS) campaign for environmental awareness. ... Not long ago, it seemed, only oil companies touted their environmental credentials via big-budget advertising campaigns. But now green advertising is everywhere. ... The idea that consumers can continue to consume, making tiny changes in their behavior, is attractive to marketers, too. Not only can they keep promoting consumption, they can turn greenness into a selling point."

In his new role as co-chair of the PR firm Fleishman-Hillard's government relations (or lobbying) practice, former U.S. Senator Jim Talent will be "spearheading the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers' bid to torpedo the effort to raise fuel mileage standards to 52 miles per gallon" by 2030. Instead, the automakers are supporting a compromise measure from Senators Carl Levin and Kit Bond. "Talent cannot lobby for the Levin-Bond bill because of Senate rules," explains O'Dwyer's. "He can do media outreach on behalf of the carmakers."

One day after the mother of Chinese reporter Shi Tao announced she was suing the Internet company Yahoo for helping Chinese officials imprison her son, Yahoo said it was "dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet." Yahoo's brief statement did not mention Shi Tao, who received a 10 year jail sentence for "leaking state secrets" in 2005. He had forwarded an email describing media restrictions placed by the Chinese government. The court that sentenced Mr. Shi used information provided by a Hong Kong subsidiary of Yahoo to convict him. The new legal challenge is part of an lawsuit filed by the World Organization for Human Rights USA against Yahoo, its Hong Kong subsidiary and Alibaba.com, which runs Yahoo China.