From July 1st 2010 Australia will be the first country to ban logos, trademarked images and colours on cigarette packaging as part of a new anti-smoking initiative. The move comes after the Australian government raised the tax on cigarettes up by twenty-five percent on Thursday last week.
The new packet designs will feature large graphic images warning users against the negative health effects of tobacco use. Under the laws cigarette companies can only display their brand name using small, inconspicuous regulated fonts featured on the bottom of the packet.
Read more …

CNN’s Special Investigations Unit reveals internal company documents on Bextra and Pfizer’s health care fraud. Watch at 3 p.m. ET Saturday on CNN.

Imagine being charged with a crime, but an imaginary friend takes the rap for you.
That is essentially what happened when Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, was caught illegally marketing Bextra, a painkiller that was taken off the market in 2005 because of safety concerns.
When the criminal case was announced last fall, federal officials touted their prosecution as a model for tough, effective enforcement. “It sends a …

Organic cheater” body care brands were publicly shamed at a recent non-violent street protest by the Organic Consumers Association. Do you know which “organic” brands aren’t really organic?

These are the names of brands to boycott, according to the Organic Consumers Association:

Avalon “Organics”
Desert Essence “Organics”
Earth’s Best “Organic”
Eminence “Organic” (Except Few w/USDA Seal)
Giovanni “Organic”
Goodstuff “Organics”
Head “Organics”
Jason “Pure, Natural & Organic”
Kiss My Face “Obsessively Organic”
Nature’s Gate “Organics”
Physicians Formula “Organic” Wear
Stella McCartney “100% Organic”

Read more at:

OCA’s Coming Clean Campaign at: http://www.organicconsumers.org/bodycare/index.cfm
Natural News

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Katie Benghauser had no concept of all the forces that combined to bring the box of pills to the bottom shelf of her medicine cabinet. All she knew was that three years ago she went in for a routine checkup and her doctor told her it was time for her to take a test.
Not that there was anything in particular about Benghauser that suggested sickness. At 54 she exercised every day and could outrun most 20-year-olds. She was a model of health.
Still, because Benghauser was thin, white, female, in …

I’d be wishing everyone a happier New Year if it were easier to mail out greeting cards to friends on Facebook and colleagues on LinkedIn. I’d like to use knx.to, our free, real-time social address book, but their ‘privacy’ policies prevent us from downloading contact information, even for my own friends.
At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?
Wrong. …

Hordes of marketing “experts” are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools

For business, the rising popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media Web sites presents a tantalizing opportunity. As millions of people flock to these online services to chat, flirt, swap photos, and network, companies have the chance to tune in to billions of digital conversations. They can pitch a product, listen to customer feedback, or ask for ideas. If they work …

This morning we broke the news that Canopy Financial, no. 12 on this year’s Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies, is a complete sham.
And it’s no surprise that today, everyone is trying to point the finger at everyone else.
The company’s investment bank, Financial Technology Partners, which has represented Canopy Financial through at least two separate rounds of fraudulent fundraising, emailed to say:

“Hi there, I’d respectfully ask for some consideration here and would like to have our information / logos / screenshots taken off of your Canopy Financial posts. …

For Plymouth Rock team, money woes, questions crowding out hopes

David P. Kirkpatrick seemed to relish the role of big-shot Hollywood insider as he briefed state development officials about his bold plan to challenge Tinseltown at its own game.

And the former head of Paramount Motion Pictures certainly sounded like the right man to build a huge movie and TV studio in Massachusetts. He talked about how he helped bring “Forrest Gump’’ to life. He casually referred to Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston …

If you want to sell something to TechCrunch, or anyone, the best way of going about it isn’t to call people at their home number, accuse them of dishonesty, and then follow up with an email requesting a clearly unethical trading of services.
All those things happened to me in the last five minutes. An account executive from CDNetworks called on my home phone to discuss our content delivery needs. I said we were all set. I was asked if I traded content delivery for PR. I said “yes, we …

Times and Sun readers to pay as loss-making Murdoch declares end to free-for-all

The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch suffered the indignity of seeing his global empire make a huge financial loss yesterday and promptly pledged to shake up the newspaper industry by introducing charges for access to all his news websites, including the Times, the Sun and the News of the World, by next summer.
Stung by a collapse in advertising revenue as the recession shredded Fleet Street’s traditional business model, Murdoch declared that the era of a free-for-all in …

Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis.
Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general.
At Goldman Sachs, for example, bonuses of more than $1 million went to 953 traders and …

Graphic designers (UnderConsideration LLC), authors, and Internet instigators Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio recently closed their influential design blog Speak Up and left New York to set up shop in Austin, Texas. Besides the fact that their mortgage now nets them double the square-footage, not much has changed for the husband-and-wife team: They still run several blogs, including the popular branding blog Brand New, work for clients, and write books, including their newest, Graphic Design Referenced, published by Rockport. The highly-visual guide highlights the industry’s technical terms, historical moments, …

The App Store approval process has always been mysterious, slightly ridiculous and mildly infuriating. But with the summary execution of Google Latitude as well as every Google Voice app, it’s finally gone too far.
Until this past week, Google’s been the most privileged developer for the iPhone outside of Apple itself. I mean, Google Maps and YouTube come baked into the phone. Hell, Google even gave the iPhone voice search—a more powerful version, no less—before it delivered the feature to its own OS, very obviously using private APIs that would’ve …

Network Solutions is investigating a breach on its servers that may have led to the theft of credit card data of 573,928 people who made purchases on Web sites hosted by the company.
Networks Solutions notified 4,343 of its nearly 10,000 e-commerce merchant customers on Friday about the breach. It affects 573,928 cardholders whose name, address, and credit card number were exposed between March 12 and June 8, said Susan Wade, a spokeswoman for Network Solutions.
Mysterious code was discovered in early June on servers hosting e-commerce customer sites during routine …

It must be tough to wake up each morning these days and realize your name is Glenn Tilton and you have to report to work as president and CEO of United Airlines these days.
On the B2B side, you’re under attack from associations and now Congress for your attempt to scrub credit card merchant fees. On the consumer front, a band called Sons of Maxwell has pulled 4.2 million hits on its YouTube video titled “United Breaks Guitars.” Even worse, people are humming the tune that goes with “I should …

Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.
Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an …

This is the full copy of the research note written by Matthew Robson (aged 15 years and seven months), an intern at Morgan Stanley, which caused a stir after it was published by the bank

Radio
Most teenagers nowadays are not regular listeners to radio. They may occasionally tune in, but they do not try to listen to a program specifically. The main reason teenagers listen to the radio is for music, but now with online sites streaming music for free they do not bother, as services such as last.fm do …

Apparently all print subscribers haven’t been asked (this by way of a full disclosure), but the New York Times is asking its dead tree readers whether they’d be willing to pay to access the paper’s content online.
The numbers being floated are $2.50 a month for subscribers, and $5 a month for everyone else, according to Bloomberg.com.
Go for it, New York Times. Be Sparticus.

Nytimes.com is currently free, and a previous attempt to put some their columnists behind a paywall, Times Select, ended with great fanfare nearly two years ago with …