Refugee children from Darfur (International Rescue Committee photo)Corporate sponsors of this summer's Beijing Olympics Games are increasingly nervous. Steven Spielberg recently "withdrew as an artistic adviser for the Beijing Games' opening and closing ceremonies, citing China's ties to the Sudan government." Even athletes are getting in the act, with more than 50 joining "Team Darfur, an organization of past and present Olympians who have pledged to use the Games to highlight what they see as genocide in Darfur." An unnamed "major public relations firm was busy yesterday providing advice to Olympic sponsors and advertisers," reports the Wall Street Journal. "While the firm was telling marketers to 'keep quiet' on the issue if at all possible, it was also advising them to develop a position on Darfur. One executive at the firm says he is likely to tell marketers to also pay attention to internal dynamics at their companies, including employee opinions." Major Olympics sponsors include Coca-Cola, McDonald's, General Motors and Eastman Kodak.

"Education is the key to stemming illegal downloads of music and other content," concluded a new study. "Teenagers are less likely to illegally download digital content when they are familiar with copyright laws." The study (PDF) was funded by software giant Microsoft and is being promoted by Weber Shandwick, one of the company's three PR firms. Microsoft's Sheri Erickson said the survey means schools can "prepare students to be good online citizens." But rather than wait for schools to consider the issue, Microsoft hired a "curriculum consulting firm, Topics Education, to develop a pilot program for copyright education in middle and high schools." Microsoft also set up two websites: one that asks teachers to "participate in a Field Test of this brand-new curriculum" and one that asks students to "mix, publish and share" cell phone ring tones created using the site -- after assigning intellectual property usage rights to them. One blogger accused Microsoft of trying "to retrofit 20th century copyright laws onto 21st century realities."

Disgraced U.S. lobbyist Jack Abramoff; graphic from the Village VoiceThe Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU), a coalition of over 140 groups in Europe, has taken the European Commission to task over its "European Transparency Initiative" (ETI), which is supposed to provide public information about the role of lobbyists in influencing decision-making by the European Union. The Commission has said it will begin publishing a register showing which organizations are engaged in lobbying. In an open letter, however, ALTER-EU complains that the register will not include the names of individual lobbyists or the dollar amounts spent lobbying. Without that information, the letter warns, journalists would be unable to use the register to identify and expose "Abramoff-style ... lobbying scandals. ... If the new EU lobbing transparency register does not allow the identification of individual lobbyists, it cannot serve as a tool to investigate 'conflicts of interest' and 'revolving doors.' Leaving out lobbyists' names would put the credibility of the European Transparency Initiative at stake. ... If the EU register will not answer simple questions like 'who are the lobbyists?' or 'how much money is spent on lobbying by whom?,' it would be useless."

Phil Mattera, the research director of Good Jobs First, reflects on the rise and fall of greenwashing during the 1990's and asks whether we are "now seeing a green business boom that will also turn out to be nothing more than hot air?" While a marketing consultancy company, TerraChoice, last year identified what it dubbed as "six sins of greenwashing", Mattera believes that Wal-Mart's attempt at a green corporate makeover involves two other sins. The first is that of "unclean hands." It is "difficult to avoid thinking," he writes, "that the company is using its environmental initiatives to draw attention away from its widely criticized labor practices." The second sin, he suggests, is the "sin of size." "There's a growing sense that true sustainability entails a substantial degree of localism and moderate-size enterprise. That rules out Wal-Mart, no matter what its CEO professes." Mattera also notes that some environmental groups form "partnerships with companies. Such relationships serve to legitimize business initiatives while turning those groups into cheerleaders for their corporate partners. Former Sierra Club president [and Greenpeace board member] Adam Werbach took it a step further and joined the payroll of Wal-Mart."

Waste Management, the U.S. waste disposal company that Rachel's Hazardous Waste News once called "the nation's largest polluter," has been trying to clean up its reputation. "For the last three years it has been spending $25 million to $30 million a year to run print and television advertisements highlighting the amount of energy it generates from burning trash each year (enough to power one million homes), the amount of acreage it has set aside for wildlife habitats (more than 17,000 acres), the number of trees it has saved by recycling paper (41 million last year)," reports Claudia H. Deutsch. The company has also painted all of its garbage trucks green and is circulating eco-slogans such as "Waste Management, helping the world dispose of its problems."

"Here's a recipe for academic controversy," observes Richard C. Paddock: "First, find dozens of hard-core teenage smokers as young as 14 and study their brains with high-tech scans. Second, feed vervet monkeys liquid nicotine and then kill at least six of them to examine their brains. Third, accept $6 million from tobacco giant Philip Morris to pay for it all. Fourth, cloak the project in unusual secrecy." At the University of California-Los Angeles, researchers have done exactly this in what they claim will be a groundbreaking study of addiction that may help people quit smoking. Anti-tobacco activists, however, wonder if Philip Morris may actually be hoping to use the research to design more addictive cigarettes. "It's stunning in this day and age that a university would do secret research for the tobacco industry on the brains of children," said Matt Meyers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "It raises fundamental questions about the integrity, honesty and openness of research anywhere at the University of California."