n Ethics of widespread practice called into question by some

The unions’ battle for Obama (BBC News)
Stephen Sackur talks to Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO, the largest US federation of unions, about the US election.

Hitchcock?s Birds (Especially the Blond Ones) (New York Times)
The final volume in Donald Spoto?s three-part biography of Alfred Hitchcock surveys the director?s fraught relations with those ice-blond leading ladies he favored.

Tommy Smothers gets due for censored show (San Francisco Chronicle)
“No comedian’s wife thinks he’s funny,” Tommy Smothers says as he surveys the panoramic vista from his hilltop home and vineyard in the middle of Sonoma’s Valley of the Moon. “The first few years of the marriage, maybe. I was funny as hell the first couple…