Brand Fatale

Research has shown that a very limited, in many ways distorted, image of Israel and its people has been allowed to shape the standard perceptions in the United States and other Western countries.

This is in part because of the relentless circulation of a false view by Israel’s antagonists. It is also in part because of media outlets that find pictures of armed Israelis in uniform and of a concrete wall between Jerusalem and Bethlehem - and, let it be said, of black-clad bearded men in prayer next to the Western Wall - to represent the “typical” Israel. And it is in part because the friends of Israel and those making Israel’s case have not been fully conscious of the problem or of ways to address it.

The Senate overwhelmingly passed historic legislation Thursday that puts the tobacco industry under the regulation of the Food and Drug Administration.

Companies are weighing the impact of the bill, which they say also puts severe, perhaps unconstitutional, restrictions on advertising and packaging. Those limits, they worry, could undo business plans based on smokeless tobacco products, which they have been developing in anticipation of this day -- even as they were fighting to derail the legislation.

A couple from the United States got a shock when they learned their family photo was being used, unauthorised, on an advertising poster in Prague.

Danielle and Jeff Smith used the photo as their Christmas card, and also posted it on an internet blog.

A friend travelling in the Czech capital alerted them when he spotted the Smiths smiling at him, life-size, from a poster in a supermarket.

The dispute began to sizzle last week, when a local newspaper reporter in Memphis, Tennessee, noticed the signs outside two restaurants in the city and contacted the corporation to establish if the message represented its official viewpoint. Burger King's headquarters in Miami said it did not, adding that it had ordered MIC to take the signs down.

But a few days later readers of the Memphis paper said they had seen about a dozen Burger King restaurants across the state displaying the signs and that some had yet to be taken down

It's a skill that was born out of necessity. "I remember being at the final congressional hearing in 1994 to decide whether the US government would fund the building of an atom smasher outside Dallas that would be twice the size of that at Cern, Geneva," he says. "A physicist was asked, 'Will we find God?'. The reply came back, 'We will find the Higgs Boson [sub-atomic particle].' That answer cost US physics the £12bn project.

"Thinking back, I would have said, 'This machine will take us as close as humanly possible to his or her greatest creation - genesis itself. It will give us a window on the instant of creation.' Before 1990, physicists only had to say 'Russia' to get their hands on cash, but since the end of the cold war, we have had to learn the language of the taxpayer."