John Kerry's presidential campaign has adopted and dropped several slogans, including a "better set of choices," "safer, stronger, more secure," the "courage to do what's right for America," "the real deal," "bring it on," "change starts here," "build a stronger America," and a "lifetime of service and strength," reports the New York Times.

Franklin Foer has written a lengthy and unflattering profile of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, less than a week after an editors' note in her newspaper criticized some of her Iraq-related reporting. Foer identifies former Executive Editor Howell Raines as the key enabler for some of her shoddiest work.

Secret documents reveal that British-American Tobacco has spent millions of pounds funding university research to back the controversial theory of "genetic predisposition," which argues that some people are more susceptible to lung cancer than others because they have "bad genes." The environmental group Gene Watch has obtained internal memos from BAT showing that research into "bad genes" was by far BAT's largest area of university funding in the early 1990s.