Walmart‘s holiday season PR troubles now look to extend beyond a consumer backlash against the big-box retailers who’ve decided to begin their Black Friday sales at 8 PM on Thanksgiving day.

Last week saw more than one case of employees walking off the job in groups, and now an advocacy group called Making Change at Walmart–which operates with the support of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union– claims that this week will bring a series of protests by Walmart employees around the country. Organizers announced their plans to journalists on a conference call, predicting “a thousand store protests” from LA to DC.

Of course, the employees’ case doesn’t center on Walmart’s decision to open on Thursday evening–though some do claim that management told them about the updated Thanksgiving schedule “on short notice” and gave them no choice as to whether they wanted to work that day or not. Their primary concerns include low wages, increasing health care premiums and “alleged retaliation from management” in order to punish employees for lodging complaints and attempting to organize.

A Walmart spokesman called the planned protests “another exaggerated publicity campaign” and claimed that the employees are just looking to generate headlines, so it doesn’t look like company executives have any interest in negotiation.

We have little doubt that Walmart will succeed in its ongoing attempts to prevent employees from unionizing. But how can the company counter such a large and well-organized movement? If these protests go down as promised, we have a feeling the Walmart team will end up making a whole lot of sterile and ultimately ineffective public statements that will do nothing to satisfy the protesters.

Will these events eventually do significant damage to the business?

We love Ikea for its particleboard dorm-room tables, its interactive catalogs and its maze-like retail monoliths–masterpieces of psychological trickery designed to make it impossible for visitors to leave without walking past every single cupboard and toothbrush holder stocked in the company’s massive basement warehouses.

But this week we learned that Ikea hasn’t always been a group of good guys distributing meatballs and cheap full-length mirrors to Americans on a budget. While the company’s “official code of conduct” currently includes “zero tolerance for child and forced labor”, its European executives apparently didn’t feel any ethical qualms about utilizing prison labor in the 70’s and 80’s.

A recent report on Ikea’s past practices by auditor Ernst and Young–which the company requested after outside parties accused it of using slave labor–revealed that the workers who made some of the company’s signature furniture in its East German factories didn’t work by choice: they were prisoners who’d been sentenced to hard labor due to their political beliefs, which in most cases amounted to opposing the Soviet-backed Communist government after the post-war division of Germany. Seems like Ikea had a “don’t ask, don’t tell”-style arrangement with its Eastern partners.

Ikea can’t claim ignorance either; the Ernst and Young report found that company executives received tip-offs about the practice but did nothing to curb it.

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Sometimes the news is truly stranger than fiction—and sometimes karmic justice provides us with a much-needed laugh.

Today in PR fails that make us smile, The Taliban’s PR team (yes, that is a thing) sent out a press release last week…OK, yeah, let’s just consider that one for a minute: a press release from the Taliban.

Anyway, spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmedi wanted to forward an email from another Taliban spokesman to every contact on the terrorist organization’s email list. The problem? He mistook “carbon copy” for “blind carbon copy” and hit send—so everyone on the list could see the addresses of everyone else who received the message.

The list included more than 400 names; most were journalists, but the group also included quite a few members of the Afghan government in addition to some professors, political activists and even a few sympathetic warlords (who probably had Hotmail accounts). We know one thing: somebody’s Facebook pages are about to get hacked.

This isn’t just a PR fail for the Taliban—it’s also a stinging indictment of the Afghan government. All due to the kind of mistake our grandma might make while sending us one of those chain emails about the amazing numerical coincidences the will occur in the year 2011. Sounds like the Taliban needs a little help in the PR department, doesn’t it?

Any takers? No? We didn’t think so. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of guys.

It’s tough to peddle caffeine these days unless you brew coffee, isn’t it? This week brought controversy over “Jack’d Cracker Jacks” while last month saw the FDA issue a report tying Monster Energy Drink to at least five deaths around the country. N0w we hear of yet another report linking the popular 5-Hour Energy drink to even more fatalities.

The 13 deaths cited in this story easily top the five blamed on Monster, and the details are even more troubling: the popular wake-up shot with the awful commercials was mentioned in approximately 90 filings since 2009 and linked to everything from heart attacks and tremors to “a spontaneous abortion”. We’ll bet everyone at distributor Living Essentials and its parent company Innovation Ventures just loves that phrase.

As expected, the FDA tempered its reports with conditional statements–and a Living Essentials rep defended the company by claiming to be “unaware of any deaths proven to be caused by the consumption of 5-Hour Energy.” The fact that regulatory authorities classify the product as a “dietary supplement” further complicates the issue.

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BP‘s hopes of negotiating an out-of-court settlement regarding the disastrous 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill officially died today as the company agreed to pay a $4.5 billion dollar fine to the US government. That total includes reparations owed to government agencies like the SEC and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation along with $1.3 billion in criminal fines–the largest such penalty in history.

Perhaps even more significantly, the company also admitted its own culpability in the deaths of 11 rig workers as part of the agreement and confessed to lying to members of congress about the scale of the damage. And that’s not all: two BP employees will face felony charges of manslaughter relating to their roles in the deaths.

We can’t say we envy the firm responsible for dragging BP’s reputation out of the gutter. The company’s Olympics ads may have been surprisingly effective in boosting consumer perceptions, but we can’t imagine this latest development going over too well with an already skeptical public. BP won’t be getting past this you-know-what anytime soon.

Despite all the noise, BP still managed to make a $5.5. billion profit in the third quarter alone–so brace yourself for a glut of commercials starring oil-splattered birds, wrecked homes and Good Samaritans who just happen to be wearing BP logos.

The Boy Scouts of America is a very traditional organization. Despite the apparent hypocrisy of forbidding membership to gay men while battling a PR disaster over decades of child abuse cases effectively swept under the rug, we can’t imagine the Scouts revising their no-gay policies anytime soon.

Still, the group finds itself in the news again this week in a bad way: Intel and UPS released statements announcing their plans to refrain from giving donations to the Scouts organization as long as it maintains its old-fashioned resistance to reality. And this isn’t small potatoes: the two companies gave more than $300,000 to the Scouts organization in 2010 alone.

We can understand the BSA’s position and the appeal of traditionalism: a decision to abandon the anti-gay plank would probably lead to a serious schism among its biggest fans. And we shouldn’t forget that the Boy Scouts is in most ways an exemplary organization that provides assistance to thousands of Americans every year. But this is an emotional issue for many people. See, for example, this tumblr page featuring onetime Eagle Scouts who decided to return their badges in protest.

We wonder: at what point does intransigence no longer benefit the Boy Scouts? When will they have no choice but to adapt? And how should they go about it?

This week brings some unfortunate news from Sesame Street: Big Bird may be fine, but the future looks uncertain for Elmo. Puppeteer Kevin Clash, the voice behind the furry red monster and the subject of the award-winning 2011 documentary Being Elmo, stands accused of improper sexual conduct with a minor. The Sesame Workshop granted him an open-ended leave of absence to resolve related legal matters.

Clash, who is openly gay, acknowledges having a relationship with the man, now 23. The two differ, however, on the accuser’s age at the time of the affair. In a statement, Clash said that “I had a relationship with the accuser. It was between two consenting adults, and I am deeply saddened that he is characterizing it as something other than what it was”. The accuser has not denied the consensual nature of the relationship; he and his lawyer simply assert that it began while he was only 16 years old.

The Sesame Workshop first learned of the accusations several months ago and conducted an independent investigation. Yesterday a spokesman stated, “We met with Kevin, who denied the accusation. We also conducted a thorough investigation and found the allegation of underage conduct to be unsubstantiated”. The accuser’s law firm sees things differently, claiming that Sesame Workshop aims to “discredit the victim” in order to preserve the Elmo brand.

Clash’s publicist declined to comment further, and we can certainly see why: In order to clear his name, the puppeteer has no real choice but to let the legal case run its course. The story will almost certainly taint the public’s perception of Mr. Clash even if he’s vindicated–and it will certainly prove a big impediment to an otherwise charmed career.

But will it damage the Elmo character or the larger Sesame Street brand?

Well, OK, that headline may be just a tiny bit misleading. But we are somewhat amused to report that, as of right now, groups claiming to represent at least twenty states have created accounts on the White House’s official “open petitions” page in order to request the opportunity to secede from the USA and form their own governments.

We certainly don’t want to deny these overzealous patriots the right to have some fun. According to the “We the People” project started in 2011, the White House will respond to any petition that receives 25,000 signatures in less than 30 days. Several of these pages are already close to that number, so some lucky communications intern will be writing form emails to a bunch of would-be revolutionaries over the next few weeks.

Something tells us they won’t be satisfied.

We don’t want to make generalizations: Note, for example, that many of those who added their virtual signatures to the New York version of the “secession petition” don’t live anywhere near the state.

A hint, though, for the petitioners: One of the most popular answers to the question “How can we improve the economy?” in a 2009 voter participation survey was “legalize marijuana”, and the president just laughed at that one. So we’re saying that your approach won’t work. In the meantime, feel free to make the millions of other Americans who live in your respective states look clueless by association.

Apple may have a bit of a PR problem on its hands thanks to a former executive who doesn’t seem to mind voicing his very frank opinions of the company’s top brass to all interested parties.

David Sobotta spent nearly twenty years in sales at what is now the most valuable business in history. He started writing an Apple-centric blog after leaving the company in 2004, and last month he published “The Pomme Company“, an e-book offering readers a “look inside one of America’s most secretive companies” from someone who was there for the long haul.

Apple execs, however, are more concerned with an interview between the writer and Dan Lyons of Readwrite titled “What’s It Like to Work for Tim Cook“. Turns out Sobotta wasn’t a big fan!

Sobotta calls Cook “one of the three people directly responsible for saving Apple” and admires the chief’s chutzphah; he wasn’t surprised by the decision to cut two top execs loose last month in a management shake-up move. But he refers to the current CEO as a technological “lightweight” who has “no personal loyalty”. He doesn’t have anything good to say about Cook’s management style either, claiming that “The people I saw him hire were not good ones” and that “he is poor judge of character.”

His final proclamation? “It is going to get worse at Apple. It is not a sustainable business culture.”

Wow, that’s more than a little harsh, Dave. Tell us what you really think!

Will Sobotta prove to be a big problem for Cook and Apple, or this just more of the usual Silicon Valley infighting, best ignored by all but fanboys and tech bloggers?

We can understand why the Romney/Ryan campaign might forget to cancel the obviously automated publication of its official victory website after Tuesday’s election. In this case, the team’s oversight inspired little more than snickering and/or sadness among observers. But it also serves as a useful example of the headaches that automated content, messages and responses can create for PR teams.

Automation can be a great tool, especially in the world of social media. But real-world circumstances change quickly, and a failure to re-align one’s messages in the moment can amount to a big PR fail. Let’s review some recent examples:

• Progressive Insurance responded to a massive PR headache (taking a deceased client’s estate to court to contest benefits) by…sending out a series of automated responses on Twitter. There’s no better way to confirm your status as a heartless corporation than by responding to tragedy with robotic corporate messages. You can type “our heart goes out to…” all you want, but members of the public are surprisingly adept at calling out this sort of thing.

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