Now that he is done prosecuting Bill Clinton, former independent counsel Kenneth Starr has gone back to work as an attorney for the tobacco industry. On Monday he represented Philip Morris in Los Angeles, asking a judge to overturn a jury's $3 billion punitive damage award to a smoker with incurable lung cancer.

In Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, we reported on the Environmental Protection Agency's PR campaign to rename sewage sludge as "biosolids" and use it as fertilizer. Now the Washington Post is finally reporting that there might be some problems with the practice. This story mentions complaints from people such as James Lear of Virginia, who woke up one morning last fall covered head to foot with mysterious boils that his doctor said might be connected to airborne bacteria from the treated sewage used as fertilizer on a nearby pasture.

Nike has created a website offering an online virtual tour of one of its factories in Vietnam, claiming that the tour demonstrates its commitment to continuous improvement in labor practices overseas. A year in the making, the video depicts a clean, well-run factory where workers are well-treated. But according to Jason Mark, a spokesman for San Francisco-based Global Exchange, a labor rights group, "It seems more like a publicity stunt than a genuine effort to make systematic changes across the board.