Public Relations

"In England, they shot the messenger," the Los Angeles Times' Robert Scheer writes, referring to the apparent suicide of British biological weapons expert David Kelly. The scientist, who worked for the British Ministry of Defense, found himself at the center of a battle between the British government and the BBC over a BBC report that the government "sexed up" a September 2002 intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons.

David Kelly, the scientist whose suicide marked a tragic twist in the unfolding controversy over British intelligence dossiers that supported the war in Iraq, was "ripped apart in the middle" of a "war of spin," said an editor at the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC has come under intense criticism for its reports alleging that top British officials "sexed up" the dossiers, and now it is being criticized on grounds that its reports may have contributed to Kelly's suicide. "Yes, we had a role in it," the editor said.

The U.S. State Department's new Arabic-language magazine hits newsstands in the Middle East this week. Hi magazine "will dispel misinformation and misconceptions about the United States by focusing on similarities between American and Middle Eastern cultures with articles about lifestyle, technology and health," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. "We're fighting a war of ideas as much as a war on terror," Tucker Eskew, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Global Communications, said during a visit to Atlanta.

"President Bush's stance on Africa should be evaluated on the basis of his administration's policies, not stage-managed trips,"