"As the 2008 U.S. election starts to sizzle, the Indian outsourcing firms have returned to win Washington over as veritable insiders, slicker and better connected than ever," reports Anand Giridharadas. Nasscom, a trade group that represents Indian outsourcing firms, has hired Robert Blackwill, a Barbour, Griffith and Rogers lobbyist also working for former Iraq prime minister Ayad Allawi. Indian executives have "met with aides to all the major presidential hopefuls," while their lobbyists have met with more than 100 U.S. Congressional offices. The Indian outsourcing firms are working "with research firms like the Brookings Institution to generate sympathetic research," and are "waging proxy battles through local front organizations, which spare them from appearing to be foreigners with an agenda. They provide facts, figures and arguments to trade groups like the Information Technology Association of America and to Indian-American political groups. Then they watch as those groups arrange for seemingly neutral voices to champion their causes in the newspapers or before Congress."

In a review of SourceWatch editor Bob Burton's new book, "Inside Spin: The Dark Underbelly of the PR Industry," New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager writes that "its hair-raising stories help us see what is reasonable and what is harmful and unethical." Hager, who in 1999 co-authored "Secrets and Lies" with Burton, notes that "although media and the public feel negative towards PR, many of the tricks of the trade work anyway. PR companies get away with manufacturing news, closing down unwanted news, helping clients slide out of responsibility for wrong-doing, causing trouble for or silencing their clients' political and commercial opponents, and generally manipulating events in their clients' favour." The best antidote to PR spins, he writes, "is understanding and recognising them when they occur."

Two weeks ago we told you about the "Wikipedia Scanner" - a new tool that scans the anonymous edits made to Wikipedia and can identify those made from the computers at places like the CIA, Wal-Mart and political campaign headquarters. The Wikipedia community has done a solid job of rooting out the attempts to add spin and misinformation to the encyclopedia, but at SourceWatch we want to make sure those additions are preserved as part of these companies' and organizations' permanent records. You join the citizen journalists and CMD staff in this effort by taking the Scanner for a spin and logging your results into SourceWatch. The full details, instructions and tips are at this participatory project's homepage on SourceWatch - no technical expertise is necessary.

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.

The Australian supermarket company Woolworths has withdrawn a range of tissue products after being outed by an anonymous blogger for using a "Sustainable Forest Fibre" logo on products sourced from a notorious Indonesian forestry company. In its most recent corporate social responsibility report, Woolworths states that a "key element of our 'Corporate Social Responsibility' (CSR) commitment is transparency." The packaging on Woolworths' "Select" tissues claimed they were sourced "from a certified environmentally managed company that is environmentally, socially and economically responsible." However, environmental groups had never heard of a "Sustainable Forest Fibre" certification scheme. In a statement, NSW Greens member of parliament John Kaye said consumers "should treat such claims as greenwash and spin." Following widespread reporting of Asia Pulp and Paper's track record in logging Indonesian rainforests, Woolworths withdrew the product range.