Environment

"Chemical industry trade association the American Chemistry Council said it selected WPP Group's Ogilvy & Mather, New York, and its public relations unit Ogilvy PR for its $50 million advertising account," Advertising Age writes. "The trade group is looking to its agency to develop a more positive image for the chemical industry, which is battling negative views that have been stoked in part by war talk of chemical weapons and bioterrorism. The council wants the ad campaign to improve the public's perception of the contribution of chemicals to improve consumers everyday lives."

Ruth Ozeki's second novel, All Over Creation, is praised today in separate reviews in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. Her first novel, My Year of Meats, skewered the beef industry's PR efforts to promote its product in Japan and examined the health hazards of growth hormones. This time Ozeki again looks at food and PR, specifically the the genetic engineering of potatoes.

"Over the last six months, the
Republican Party has subtly refocused its message on the
environment, an issue that a party strategist Frank Luntz called 'the
single biggest vulnerability for the Republicans and
especially for George Bush' in a memorandum encouraging the
new approach. The Republicans, as the memorandum advised them, have
softened their language to appeal to suburban voters,
speaking out for protecting national parks and forests,

"If war again comes to Iraq, depleted uranium munitions will be a mainstay of the American arsenal. For years, the Pentagon has discounted reports that the shells and bullets, made of solid nuclear-waste byproduct and used for the first time on a large scale in the Iraq war, bore calamity. ... 'There just isn't any scientific foundation to draw a connection between exposure and the incidents of leukemia, other cancers or birth defects,' said Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of deployment health support at the Pentagon. ...