Nic Careem, a London-based "public affairs consultant", recently proclaimed his interest in helping raise the profile of the President of the Maldives, Abdul Gayoom, on the issue of global warming. While Gayoom's government has been widely criticized for human rights abuses, earlier this year Careem gushed that he was "impressed with the humanity shown to prisoners." In response to recent criticism of his defense of the regime, Careem wrote that the "penal system" is "as good as anything in the western world" and explained that murders occurred in his own London suburb. In a pointed letter to the editor, a reader objected to the comparison: "Does Mr Careem know that we too have murder cases in the Maldives? The police torture and kill detainees to perpetuate the regime in this country." Last year, Tim Fallon from Hill & Knowlton's London office, was deluged with critical comments after defending his company's work for the Gayoom regime on his blog.

Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, recently had firsthand experience with search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that companies are using to suppress negative stories about themselves on the Internet. A company called "DONE! SEO" claims that it can "Displace -- push down -- the negative listings with favorable ones and ones that you can control or influence" to "make sure that your company and key executives are being portrayed favorably online by burying the negatives and maintaining a positive online image." One of the "problem sites" where it promised to perform this service was ConsumerWebWatch.org, the Internet arm of Consumers Union. Another company, called "Reputation Defender," offers what it calls "Google insulation," padding the web with friendly-sounding content about its clients and then pushing that content to the top of Google results so that negative information is harder to find.

The Gallup polling organization marked the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by publishing a thoughtful analysis challenging the assumption that "religious fanaticism fuels extremism and therefore replacing Muslims' worldview with Western liberalism is the path to victory against terrorism. ... As a starting point, Muslims do not hold a monopoly on extremist views. While 6% of Americans think attacks in which civilians are targets are 'completely justified,' in both Lebanon and Iran, this figure is 2%, and in Saudi Arabia, it's 4%. In Europe, Muslims in Paris and London were no more likely than were their counterparts in the general public to believe attacks on civilians are ever justified and at least as likely to reject violence, even for a 'noble cause.' After analyzing survey data representing more than 90% of the global Muslim population, Gallup found that despite widespread anti-American sentiment, only a small minority saw the 9/11 attacks as morally justified. Even more significant, there was no correlation between level of religiosity and extremism among respondents." Rather than religion, extremists are motivated by the belief that "occupation and U.S. domination" is threatening their societies. "The real difference between those who condone terrorist acts and all others is about politics, not piety," writes Dalia Mogahed.

In May of this year, the drug company Eli Lilly announced that it would post details of "all educational grant funding and other monetary contributions provided to U.S.-based organizations" into an online database. Tucked away amongst the numerous grants made in the first six months of 2007 are details of funds provided to patient groups, various research centres and a sprinkling of political groups. So, to save citizens and journalists from having to sift through the whole report, we have a created a page to make the highlights a little easier to find. If you'd like to help dig out the nuggets, just head over to the SourceWatch page for the project, where there are complete instructions, a couple of examples of interesting grants and an email hotline for support. If this is your first time editing on SourceWatch, you can register here, and learn more about adding information to the site here, hereand here. Have fun, and thanks for your help!