PR Watch: Halliburton Screwing the Troops; Silencing Science in the US and UK

Selected articles from today's PR Watch Spin newsletter:

HALLIBURTON SUBCONTRACTOR TALKS TURKEY "Halliburton, which according to its just-released 10-K report hasearned $85 million on $3.6 billion in Iraqi work last year, has notyet paid the subcontractor that prepared the Thanksgiving Dayphoto-op of President George Bush serving the troops dinner in Baghdad International Airport," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. NBCNews reports Event Source, which serves 100,000 meals a day to soldiers in Iraq, says Halliburton owes it $87 million. Event Source CEO Phil Morrell told NBC news that the company has already laid off U.S. employees and may have to stop serving hot meals to troops because the company's short on money. Morrell also said that he believes Halliburton and its other food service contractors did overcharge, billing the government not for meals actually served, but for meals a facility could have served. Halliburton's Wendy Hall told O'Dwyer's that she cannot comment on PR firms used by Dick Cheney's former company because of "competitive" reasons. Hall did say that Halliburton "from time to time" hires outside PR firms for specific projects. SILENCING SCIENCE (AGAIN) "Two scientists from President Bush's top advisory board on cutting-edge medical research yesterday published a detailed criticism of the board's own reports, and said the board skewed scientific facts in service of a political and ideological cause," reports Gareth Cook. One of the scientists, Janet Rowley, is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. The other Elizabeth H. Blackburn, is a highly regarded biologist who was fired from the panel last Friday. Their critique charges that reports issued by the council have played down the potential of embryonic stem cell research, which is opposed by fundamentalist anti-abortion groups and by the Bush administration. GAGGING SIR DAVID Ivan Rogers, the principal private secretary to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "tried to muzzle the Government's top scientific adviser after he warned that global warming was a more serious threat than international terrorism," report Steve Connor and Andrew Grice. In a leaked memo, Rogers ordered Sir David King - a scientist at Cambridge University - to decline any interview requests from British and American newspapers and BBC Radio. The memo and other documents related to the controversy came to light after Sir David's personal press secretary, Lucy Brunt-Jenner, inadvertently left a computer disk in the press room at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle, where Sir David gave a lecture. "The disk was lying on the top of a computer in the press room and I popped it into the machine to see what was on it," said freelance journalist, Mike Martin. Documents on the disk included scripted answers from Rogers, instructing the scientist how to answer a list of 136 questions that reporters might ask him.