Monday, December 13, 2004
HIV / AIDS & World Health Status report:
The HIV/AIDS pandemic is the worst catastrophe in history and is blighting childhood across the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations said Thursday. Advances in children's survival, health and education are being reversed by a "triple whammy" of AIDS, conflict and poverty, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. The disease is driving the destruction of basic services for 1 billion children and violating their right to grow and develop, said Carol Bellamy, the organization's executive director. "We believe AIDS is the worst catastrophe ever to hit the world," she told the Guardian. "It is just ripping up systems, be it health or education. Our children's childhood is being robbed from them."
But the agency and Bellamy have been strongly criticized by the editor of one of the world's leading medical journals, the Lancet. In an editorial published Friday, Richard Horton said UNICEF's "preoccupation" with children's rights meant that the fundamental right to survival was, "shamefully," not at the core of its work. "In sum, for almost a decade, child survival has failed to get the attention it deserves," he writes.
In UNICEF's 150-page annual report, "The State of the World's Children 2005," the agency paints a bleak picture of sub-Saharan Africa slipping further behind other developing regions such as southern Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Researchers also found that --
· Of the 15 million children orphaned by AIDS, 80 percent are African.
· One in six (90 million) children are severely hungry.
· One in seven (270 million) have no healthcare at all.
· Nearly half of the 3.6 million people killed in war since 1990 have been children. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/10/children_aids/print.html
Social Security ‘Big Lie’ Continues:
The system is headed towards bankruptcy down the road. If we do not act soon, Social Security will not be there for our children and grandchildren. -Bush, in weekly radio address
Like al-Qaeda and Saddam, the existence of wmd, etc., the Right / the Administration will tell this lie until a significant percentage of the population buys in. So, we (and the Democrats) have a responsibility to scream the opposite…NOW. Need specifics?: tell people that there’s enough in the system to pay out fully until 2045 and then pay 75% of promised benefits after that point, which would be equal to or higher in real dollars than current benefit levels. So, perhaps, some adjustments for 40 years hence need to be made, but that hardly justifies this crazed idea. We know the intention, to destroy the New Deal / the social “safety net”.
The media, unfortunately, are too often parroting the words of the Administration, noting that social security “reform” is necessary to respond to the “crisis.” Phooey on CBS, CNN, MSNBC.
From Media Matters for America:
Several cable and network news reports on President Bush's December 9 Oval Office meeting with Social Security trustees gave implicit support to the administration's plans to overhaul Social Security (which entails partial privatization) by repeating the crisis rhetoric of privatization proponents, suggesting that the Bush administration's plan offers a solution to the purported crisis, and bolstering the administration's plan through one-sided interviews with conservative guests. Some in the media have also mischaracterized the Democratic response to the administration's push for reform. http://mediamatters.org/items/200412100012
Note: Media Matters does terrific work and deserves our support. Besides, this week Bill O’Reilly ‘recommended’ them, terming Media Matters “the most vile, despicable human beings in the country.” A tax-deductible contribution can be made at https://mediamatters.org/etc/donate.html
Bill Moyers Tribute. He leaves PBS next week. Huge loss
At a time when TV networks--including PBS--were bowing to commercial and ideological pressures that were antithetical to journalism, Moyers created a program that many viewers recognized as the only reason to turn on the TV in the Bush era. NOW will carry on with the able crew that Moyers assembled. And whether or not the program thrives without Moyers, the legacy he created will remain. James Madison said, "A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both" and warned that "a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives." In a time of farce and tragedy, Bill Moyers did his best to arm the people with the power knowledge gives and to affirm that there's still a place for TV journalism that nurtures citizenship and democracy. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20041227&s=editors2
Kerik: What a nominee. Before letting him go, I’ll just note that there was controversy over alleged personal improprieties / abuse of power during his brief stay in Iraq and his time in Saudi Arabia, a bunch of lawsuits, ties to and gifts from a ‘mobbed-up’ construction company, and these reports, courtesy of the NY media. [The NY Times finally covered it on Monday, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/nyregion/13kerik.html?oref=login .] Bizarrely, the Administration asserts that only the nanny problem concerned them.
In the 48 hours before his withdrawal as nominee for the nation's top security post, Bernard Kerik and his lawyer scrambled to keep damaging assertions about his past out of the public spotlight.A week after President George W. Bush announced the former city police commissioner as his choice for Homeland Security secretary, an array of charges and questions about Kerik's past were coming to a boil, threatening his crafted image as an American legend and portending a rougher Senate confirmation process than first predicted.On Thursday, the day before he took his name from contention, Kerik, 49, was forced to testify in a civil lawsuit about an alleged affair with a subordinate.The case, which involves Kerik's use of authority when he was city correction commissioner between 1998 and 2000, was brought against the city by a former deputy warden. Plaintiff Eric DeRavin III contends Kerik kept him from getting promoted because he had reprimanded the woman, Correction Officer Jeanette Pinero…
On Friday, Kerik was fending off other charges. Tacopina was in contact with at least one TV news organization in a bid to keep it from airing an interview with another ex-jail supervisor, sources said. The interview contained other allegations against Kerik, some of which have already been in print, the sources said. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-main12,0,240731,print.story?coll=ny-homepage-big-pix
Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik accepted thousands of dollars in cash and gifts without making proper public disclosures, a Daily News investigation has revealed. http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/261266p-223749c.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: 7 marines died on Sunday and we’re bombing the city (Fallujah) that we supposedly captured.
The ‘manpower’ shortage reaches new heights.
Dr. John Caulfield thought it had to be a mistake when the Army asked him to return to active duty. After all, he's 70 years old and had already retired - twice. He left the Army in 1980 and private practice two years ago.
"My first reaction was disbelief," Caulfield said. "It never occurred to me that they would call a 70-year-old." http://www.marionstar.com/news/stories/20041211/localnews/1731211.html
The Times-on-line adds,
"While insurgents draw on deep wells of fury to expand their ranks in Iraq, the US military is fighting desertion, recruitment shortfalls and legal challenges from its own troops.
…"Many experts say that America's 1.4 million active-duty troops and 865,000 part-timers are stretched to the point where President Bush may see other foreign policy goals blunted. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1397131,00.html
Payback time. Hardball with any and all who oppose this Regime.
The Bush administration has dozens of intercepts of Mohamed ElBaradei's phone calls with Iranian diplomats and is scrutinizing them in search of ammunition to oust him as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to three U.S. government officials.
But the diplomatic offensive will not be easy. The administration has failed to come up with a candidate willing to oppose ElBaradei, who has run the agency since 1997, and there is disagreement among some senior officials over how hard to push for his removal, and what the diplomatic costs of a public campaign against him could be.
Although eavesdropping, even on allies, is considered a well-worn tool of national security and diplomacy, the efforts against ElBaradei demonstrate the lengths some within the administration are willing to go to replace a top international diplomat who questioned U.S. intelligence on Iraq and is now taking a cautious approach on Iran.
The intercepted calls have not produced any evidence of nefarious conduct by ElBaradei, according to three officials who have read them. But some within the administration believe they show ElBaradei lacks impartiality because he tried to help Iran navigate a diplomatic crisis over its nuclear programs. Others argue the transcripts demonstrate nothing more than standard telephone diplomacy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57928-2004Dec11?language=printer
What’s Happening, Russia. Bush looked into Putin’s soul and this time…
The Bush administration is beginning a broad review of its Russia policy that could lead to a more confrontational approach toward Moscow over its treatment of neighboring countries and its own citizens, U.S. officials said.For the past four years, the administration muted its criticism of Russia's approach to democratic values as Washington tried to build a "strategic partnership" with Moscow to fight terrorism and weapons proliferation. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-usrussia12dec12,0,5084532.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Frank Rich on Sex. Gotta read this one, huh?
Empowered by that Election Day "moral values" poll result, it is pressing for a whole host of second-term gifts from the Bush administration: further rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights, pulchritude sightings at N.F.L. games and, dare I say it aloud, reproductive rights for women. "If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil." Such is the perceived clout of this Republican base at government agencies like the F.C.C. that it need only burp and 66 frightened ABC affiliates instantly dump their network's broadcast of that indecent movie "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day.
In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the Murdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that, however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: The Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are dealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools.) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/12rich.html?oref=login
For those who didn’t get or read it, the Move-On message to the DNC
"For years, the party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base," Pariser wrote. "But we can’t afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers.""In the last year, grass-roots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the party doesn’t need corporate cash to be competitive," the message continued. "Now it’s our party: we bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back."
Electoral Cheating and the Media: Mainstream media getting on it? AP report:
As the Electoral College prepares to certify President Bush's re-election on Monday, concerns persist about the integrity of the nation's voting system — particularly in Ohio, where details continue to emerge of technology failures, voter confusion and overcrowded polling stations in minority and poor neighborhoods. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=14&u=/ap/20041210/ap_on_el_pr/unsettled_election
Gary Webb: You might remember this journalist from his 1996 reports about the CIA’s drug running in LA and using the profits to fund the Contras, the US-funded hooligans who opposed the government of Nicaragua. He had a powerful series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News and then a book, Dark Alliance. He was attacked by mainstream media and the CIA and the discovered imperfections in his articles were the basis for the media announcing that his story was “discredited.”
The NY Times ran his obituary today.
Gary Webb, a reporter who won national attention with a series of articles, later discredited, linking the Central Intelligence Agency to the spread of crack cocaine in Los Angeles, was found dead on Friday at his home in Carmichael, Calif., near Sacramento. He was 49.
The cause was an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/obituaries/13webb.html
Flights to Vietnam: If you're considering, don’t fly United. Vietnam Airlines is vastly superior.
The first commercial flight between the United States and Vietnam since their war 30 years ago landed yesterday to open a new chapter of cultural and economic exchange between the former foes.
United Airlines Flight 869, fully booked with 347 passengers on board, landed at Tan Son Nhat airport after an 18-hour journey from San Francisco.
The flight was sent on its way with an elaborate departure ceremony. An audience of invited guests and passengers gathered to listen to speeches from American and Vietnamese dignitaries.
Passengers disembarking in Ho Chi Minh City were greeted by Vietnamese women wearing traditional white tunics, or aodais, and holding lotus blossoms and silk lanterns. The flight will be followed by daily flights between the cities as United seeks to capitalise on the more than one million Vietnamese who live in the US, the largest number in a single country outside Vietnam. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1398047,00.html
-R
The HIV/AIDS pandemic is the worst catastrophe in history and is blighting childhood across the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations said Thursday. Advances in children's survival, health and education are being reversed by a "triple whammy" of AIDS, conflict and poverty, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. The disease is driving the destruction of basic services for 1 billion children and violating their right to grow and develop, said Carol Bellamy, the organization's executive director. "We believe AIDS is the worst catastrophe ever to hit the world," she told the Guardian. "It is just ripping up systems, be it health or education. Our children's childhood is being robbed from them."
But the agency and Bellamy have been strongly criticized by the editor of one of the world's leading medical journals, the Lancet. In an editorial published Friday, Richard Horton said UNICEF's "preoccupation" with children's rights meant that the fundamental right to survival was, "shamefully," not at the core of its work. "In sum, for almost a decade, child survival has failed to get the attention it deserves," he writes.
In UNICEF's 150-page annual report, "The State of the World's Children 2005," the agency paints a bleak picture of sub-Saharan Africa slipping further behind other developing regions such as southern Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Researchers also found that --
· Of the 15 million children orphaned by AIDS, 80 percent are African.
· One in six (90 million) children are severely hungry.
· One in seven (270 million) have no healthcare at all.
· Nearly half of the 3.6 million people killed in war since 1990 have been children. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/10/children_aids/print.html
Social Security ‘Big Lie’ Continues:
The system is headed towards bankruptcy down the road. If we do not act soon, Social Security will not be there for our children and grandchildren. -Bush, in weekly radio address
Like al-Qaeda and Saddam, the existence of wmd, etc., the Right / the Administration will tell this lie until a significant percentage of the population buys in. So, we (and the Democrats) have a responsibility to scream the opposite…NOW. Need specifics?: tell people that there’s enough in the system to pay out fully until 2045 and then pay 75% of promised benefits after that point, which would be equal to or higher in real dollars than current benefit levels. So, perhaps, some adjustments for 40 years hence need to be made, but that hardly justifies this crazed idea. We know the intention, to destroy the New Deal / the social “safety net”.
The media, unfortunately, are too often parroting the words of the Administration, noting that social security “reform” is necessary to respond to the “crisis.” Phooey on CBS, CNN, MSNBC.
From Media Matters for America:
Several cable and network news reports on President Bush's December 9 Oval Office meeting with Social Security trustees gave implicit support to the administration's plans to overhaul Social Security (which entails partial privatization) by repeating the crisis rhetoric of privatization proponents, suggesting that the Bush administration's plan offers a solution to the purported crisis, and bolstering the administration's plan through one-sided interviews with conservative guests. Some in the media have also mischaracterized the Democratic response to the administration's push for reform. http://mediamatters.org/items/200412100012
Note: Media Matters does terrific work and deserves our support. Besides, this week Bill O’Reilly ‘recommended’ them, terming Media Matters “the most vile, despicable human beings in the country.” A tax-deductible contribution can be made at https://mediamatters.org/etc/donate.html
Bill Moyers Tribute. He leaves PBS next week. Huge loss
At a time when TV networks--including PBS--were bowing to commercial and ideological pressures that were antithetical to journalism, Moyers created a program that many viewers recognized as the only reason to turn on the TV in the Bush era. NOW will carry on with the able crew that Moyers assembled. And whether or not the program thrives without Moyers, the legacy he created will remain. James Madison said, "A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both" and warned that "a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives." In a time of farce and tragedy, Bill Moyers did his best to arm the people with the power knowledge gives and to affirm that there's still a place for TV journalism that nurtures citizenship and democracy. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20041227&s=editors2
Kerik: What a nominee. Before letting him go, I’ll just note that there was controversy over alleged personal improprieties / abuse of power during his brief stay in Iraq and his time in Saudi Arabia, a bunch of lawsuits, ties to and gifts from a ‘mobbed-up’ construction company, and these reports, courtesy of the NY media. [The NY Times finally covered it on Monday, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/nyregion/13kerik.html?oref=login .] Bizarrely, the Administration asserts that only the nanny problem concerned them.
In the 48 hours before his withdrawal as nominee for the nation's top security post, Bernard Kerik and his lawyer scrambled to keep damaging assertions about his past out of the public spotlight.A week after President George W. Bush announced the former city police commissioner as his choice for Homeland Security secretary, an array of charges and questions about Kerik's past were coming to a boil, threatening his crafted image as an American legend and portending a rougher Senate confirmation process than first predicted.On Thursday, the day before he took his name from contention, Kerik, 49, was forced to testify in a civil lawsuit about an alleged affair with a subordinate.The case, which involves Kerik's use of authority when he was city correction commissioner between 1998 and 2000, was brought against the city by a former deputy warden. Plaintiff Eric DeRavin III contends Kerik kept him from getting promoted because he had reprimanded the woman, Correction Officer Jeanette Pinero…
On Friday, Kerik was fending off other charges. Tacopina was in contact with at least one TV news organization in a bid to keep it from airing an interview with another ex-jail supervisor, sources said. The interview contained other allegations against Kerik, some of which have already been in print, the sources said. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-main12,0,240731,print.story?coll=ny-homepage-big-pix
Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik accepted thousands of dollars in cash and gifts without making proper public disclosures, a Daily News investigation has revealed. http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/261266p-223749c.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: 7 marines died on Sunday and we’re bombing the city (Fallujah) that we supposedly captured.
The ‘manpower’ shortage reaches new heights.
Dr. John Caulfield thought it had to be a mistake when the Army asked him to return to active duty. After all, he's 70 years old and had already retired - twice. He left the Army in 1980 and private practice two years ago.
"My first reaction was disbelief," Caulfield said. "It never occurred to me that they would call a 70-year-old." http://www.marionstar.com/news/stories/20041211/localnews/1731211.html
The Times-on-line adds,
"While insurgents draw on deep wells of fury to expand their ranks in Iraq, the US military is fighting desertion, recruitment shortfalls and legal challenges from its own troops.
…"Many experts say that America's 1.4 million active-duty troops and 865,000 part-timers are stretched to the point where President Bush may see other foreign policy goals blunted. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1397131,00.html
Payback time. Hardball with any and all who oppose this Regime.
The Bush administration has dozens of intercepts of Mohamed ElBaradei's phone calls with Iranian diplomats and is scrutinizing them in search of ammunition to oust him as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to three U.S. government officials.
But the diplomatic offensive will not be easy. The administration has failed to come up with a candidate willing to oppose ElBaradei, who has run the agency since 1997, and there is disagreement among some senior officials over how hard to push for his removal, and what the diplomatic costs of a public campaign against him could be.
Although eavesdropping, even on allies, is considered a well-worn tool of national security and diplomacy, the efforts against ElBaradei demonstrate the lengths some within the administration are willing to go to replace a top international diplomat who questioned U.S. intelligence on Iraq and is now taking a cautious approach on Iran.
The intercepted calls have not produced any evidence of nefarious conduct by ElBaradei, according to three officials who have read them. But some within the administration believe they show ElBaradei lacks impartiality because he tried to help Iran navigate a diplomatic crisis over its nuclear programs. Others argue the transcripts demonstrate nothing more than standard telephone diplomacy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57928-2004Dec11?language=printer
What’s Happening, Russia. Bush looked into Putin’s soul and this time…
The Bush administration is beginning a broad review of its Russia policy that could lead to a more confrontational approach toward Moscow over its treatment of neighboring countries and its own citizens, U.S. officials said.For the past four years, the administration muted its criticism of Russia's approach to democratic values as Washington tried to build a "strategic partnership" with Moscow to fight terrorism and weapons proliferation. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-usrussia12dec12,0,5084532.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Frank Rich on Sex. Gotta read this one, huh?
Empowered by that Election Day "moral values" poll result, it is pressing for a whole host of second-term gifts from the Bush administration: further rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights, pulchritude sightings at N.F.L. games and, dare I say it aloud, reproductive rights for women. "If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil." Such is the perceived clout of this Republican base at government agencies like the F.C.C. that it need only burp and 66 frightened ABC affiliates instantly dump their network's broadcast of that indecent movie "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day.
In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the Murdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that, however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: The Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are dealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools.) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/12rich.html?oref=login
For those who didn’t get or read it, the Move-On message to the DNC
"For years, the party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base," Pariser wrote. "But we can’t afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers.""In the last year, grass-roots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the party doesn’t need corporate cash to be competitive," the message continued. "Now it’s our party: we bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back."
Electoral Cheating and the Media: Mainstream media getting on it? AP report:
As the Electoral College prepares to certify President Bush's re-election on Monday, concerns persist about the integrity of the nation's voting system — particularly in Ohio, where details continue to emerge of technology failures, voter confusion and overcrowded polling stations in minority and poor neighborhoods. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=14&u=/ap/20041210/ap_on_el_pr/unsettled_election
Gary Webb: You might remember this journalist from his 1996 reports about the CIA’s drug running in LA and using the profits to fund the Contras, the US-funded hooligans who opposed the government of Nicaragua. He had a powerful series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News and then a book, Dark Alliance. He was attacked by mainstream media and the CIA and the discovered imperfections in his articles were the basis for the media announcing that his story was “discredited.”
The NY Times ran his obituary today.
Gary Webb, a reporter who won national attention with a series of articles, later discredited, linking the Central Intelligence Agency to the spread of crack cocaine in Los Angeles, was found dead on Friday at his home in Carmichael, Calif., near Sacramento. He was 49.
The cause was an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/obituaries/13webb.html
Flights to Vietnam: If you're considering, don’t fly United. Vietnam Airlines is vastly superior.
The first commercial flight between the United States and Vietnam since their war 30 years ago landed yesterday to open a new chapter of cultural and economic exchange between the former foes.
United Airlines Flight 869, fully booked with 347 passengers on board, landed at Tan Son Nhat airport after an 18-hour journey from San Francisco.
The flight was sent on its way with an elaborate departure ceremony. An audience of invited guests and passengers gathered to listen to speeches from American and Vietnamese dignitaries.
Passengers disembarking in Ho Chi Minh City were greeted by Vietnamese women wearing traditional white tunics, or aodais, and holding lotus blossoms and silk lanterns. The flight will be followed by daily flights between the cities as United seeks to capitalise on the more than one million Vietnamese who live in the US, the largest number in a single country outside Vietnam. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1398047,00.html
-R
