Last week, a 19-year-old follower of the Yusuf Bey family shot and killed Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was working on an investigation of the group and its headquarters, Your Black Muslim Bakery. Fortunately, former East Bay Express reporter Chris Thompson's run-in with the group didn't end so grimly. In 2002, the Express published Thompson's investigative series alleging acts of torture, rape, and sodomy perpetrated by the group. After the stories were published, the retaliation began. "Someone smashed up the windows of [the Express'] offices, and Thompson received numerous death threats," according to the Village Voice, where he's currently a staff writer. "Men repeatedly tried to follow Thompson home, or staked out routes he took leaving the office." Express editor Stephen Buel tells the San Francisco Chronicle that the intimidation campaign forced Thompson to work in a different county for months, and shook the paper to the point that "we stopped writing about the group."
"The goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer," the New York Times reports. To do this, Digitas, a unit of the Publicis Groupe, plans to create thousands of digital versions of ads using low-cost offshore labor, and then will use data about consumers and computer algorithms to decide which message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or TV. The Times notes that Publicis is "trying to carve out a niche as a middleman" between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, and the consumer brand companies that buy advertising. "It's clear the three of those companies will have a huge share of revenues which will come from advertising,†says Maurice Levy, chairman and chief executive of the Publicis Groupe. "But they will have to make a choice between being a medium or being an ad agency, and I believe that their interest will be to be a medium."
On Friday, when the Senate finally got to vote on the OPEN Government Act of 2007 (S. 849), they unanimously approved the bill and advanced it to the House. The bill had been blocked from a floor vote for months by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who was acting as a legislative conduit of the Department of Justice, which had several objections to the FOIA reforms. The legislation would be the first major reform to FOIA in more than a decade if passed by the House, which already approved a similar bill (H.R. 1309) by an overwhelming vote of 308-117. "FOIA will still be far from perfect with these changes, but they do provide important new tools that will help requesters get public information faster and hold agencies more accountable when they don't comply with the law," says Dave Tomlin, associate general counsel for The Associated Press.
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