Advertising, Entertainment & Media

A Pentagon contractor that paid Iraqi newspapers to print positive articles written by American soldiers has also been compensating Sunni religious scholars in Iraq in return for assistance with its propaganda work, according to current and former employees. Read More

Chronology of accounting practices and federal investigations of Qwest Communications International Inc.: 2001: --June 20: Morgan Stanley downgrades Qwest stock after analyst questions accounting practices. Qwest Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Nacchio later disputes the claim. 2002: --Feb. 11: Qwest cooperates with government subpoena concerning its swap of fiber-optic network capacity with Global Crossing Ltd. --April 4: Qwest says SEC has begun formal inquiry into its accounting practices. Read More

A former top executive of Qwest Communications International Inc on Wednesday pleaded guilty to wire fraud, avoiding a five-week trial that had been set to start on Tuesday. Read More

Susan Finston of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a conservative research group based in Texas, is just the sort of opinion maker coveted by the drug industry. In an opinion article in The Financial Times on Oct. 25, she called for patent protection in poor countries for drugs and biotechnology products. In an article last month in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal, she called for efforts to block developing nations from violating patents on AIDS medicines and other drugs. Read More

When fakes of a GlaxoSmithKline anti-malarial drug turned up in Africa, authorities assumed the drug giant would want to know. Instead, they learned about a huge, evil trade in fake drugs -- and about an industry that doesn't want the truth to get out. Read More

The pashmina bubble that buoyed the garment industry in the late 1990s has burst. Fashion trendsetters have moved on, leaving a glut of cheap Chinese knock-offs in their wake. Read More

Satellite television operator DirecTV Group Inc. agreed to pay $5.3 million to settle charges it repeatedly violated rules against telemarketing to consumers whose names were on a national do-not-call registry, the Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday. Read More

Six current and former employees of Best Buy filed a race- and sex-discrimination lawsuit Thursday against the consumer electronics chain in federal court in San Francisco, accusing it of denying better-paying sales and managerial jobs to African Americans, Latinos and women in favor of white men. Read More

Wal-Mart is taking a page from the modern political playbook. Under fire from well-organized opponents who have hammered the retailer with criticisms of its wages, health insurance and treatment of workers, Wal-Mart has quietly recruited former presidential advisers, including Michael K. Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan's image-meister, and Leslie Dach, one of Bill Clinton's media consultants, to set up a rapid-response public relations team in Arkansas. Read More

According to a proposal, PhRMA was to pay Phoenix a six-figure sum for the marketing and production of a written-to-order fictional thriller. The plotline was what Hollywood would term high-concept - a group of shadowy terrorists conspires to murder thousands of Americans by poisoning the medicine they're importing from Canada to beat U.S. drug prices. PhRMA subsequently pulled the plug on the deal. Read More