British retailers start online sales early

 British retailers have brought forward their Christmas clearance sales online in the hope that shoppers will log on to buy bargains and offset lackluster spending in stores.
Marks & Spencer launched its sale online at midday on Monday, it said on its website, while department store John Lewis said it would cut online prices when its stores close at 1700 GMT. Debenhams has already started its online sale.
Retailers in recent years have started sales online on Christmas Day, ahead of the clearances in stores from Boxing Day, but are increasingly launching their online offers before Christmas after delivery deadlines for the day have passed.
Hard-pressed shoppers have been leaving it later to buy presents in the hope that retailers would slash prices, the British Retail Consortium said.
It was forecasting that 5 billion pounds ($8.1 billion) would be spent in the shops on Saturday and Sunday combined, the last weekend before Christmas.
Richard Dodd, the BRC's head of Media and Campaigns, said weekend trading had met expectations.
"Christmas, ultimately once all the final sums are done, will turn out to be acceptable but not exceptional," he said.
He said the sector expected a modest increase in cash spending against a year go, but not necessarily any significant increase in real terms once inflation was stripped out.
Many British families' budgets are stretched, according to a survey from Markit that showed the biggest deterioration in household finances for seven months.
Analyst Howard Archer at IHS Global Insight said the weakening in household finances could not come at a worse time for retailers, and it highlighted why many people appeared to have been careful in their Christmas shopping this year.
"The suspicion has to be that consumers will be especially keen to take advantage of genuine major bargains in the sales to acquire items that they cannot otherwise afford or are reluctant to make at the moment," he said.
"However, we suspect that people will likely to be more careful in buying - or reluctant to buy - items that they don't really want or need in the sales."

Read More..

China may require real name registration for internet access

 China may require internet users to register with their real names when signing up to network providers, state media said on Tuesday, extending a policy already in force with microblogs in a bid to curb what officials call rumors and vulgarity.
A law being discussed this week would mean people would have to present their government-issued identity cards when signing contracts for fixed line and mobile internet access, state-run newspapers said.
"The law should escort the development of the internet to protect people's interest," Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily said in a front page commentary, echoing similar calls carried in state media over the past week.
"Only that way can our internet be healthier, more cultured and safer."
Many users say the restrictions are clearly aimed at further muzzling the often scathing, raucous - and perhaps most significantly, anonymous - online chatter in a country where the Internet offers a rare opportunity for open debate.
It could also prevent people from exposing corruption online if they fear retribution from officials, said some users.
It was unclear how the rules would be different from existing regulations as state media has provided only vague details and in practice customers have long had to present identity papers when signing contracts with internet providers.
Earlier this year, the government began forcing users of Sina Corp's wildly successful Weibo microblogging platform to register their real names.
The government says such a system is needed to prevent people making malicious and anonymous accusations online and that many other countries already have such rules.
"It would also be the biggest step backwards since 1989," wrote one indignant Weibo user, in apparent reference to the 1989 pro-democracy protests bloodily suppressed by the army.
Chinese internet users have long had to cope with extensive censorship, especially over politically sensitive topics like human rights, and popular foreign sites Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube are blocked.
Despite periodic calls for political reform, the ruling Communist Party has shown no sign of loosening its grip on power and brooks no dissent to its authority.

Read More..

Tajikistan blocks scores of websites as election looms

 Tajikistan blocked access to more than 100 websites on Tuesday, in what a government source said was a dress rehearsal for a crackdown on online dissent before next year's election when President Imomali Rakhmon will again run for office.
Rakhmon, a 60-year-old former head of a Soviet cotton farm, has ruled the impoverished Central Asian nation of 7.5 million for 20 years. He has overseen constitutional amendments that allow him to seek a new seven-year term in November 2013.
The Internet remains the main platform where Tajiks can air grievances and criticize government policies at a time when the circulation of local newspapers is tiny and television is tightly controlled by the state.
Tajikistan's state communications service blocked 131 local and foreign Internet sites "for technical and maintenance works".
"Most probably, these works will be over in a week," Tatyana Kholmurodova, deputy head of the service, told Reuters. She declined to give the reason for the work, which cover even some sites with servers located abroad.
The blocked resources included Russia's popular social networking sites www.my.mail.ru and VKontakte (www.vk.com), as well as Tajik news site TJKnews.com and several local blogs.
"The government has ordered the communications service to test their ability to block dozens of sites at once, should such a need arise," a senior government official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
"It is all about November 2013," he said, in a clear reference to the presidential election.
Other blocked websites included a Ukrainian soccer site, a Tajik rap music site, several local video-sharing sites and a pornography site.
VOLATILE NATION
Predominantly Muslim Tajikistan, which lies on a major transit route for Afghan drugs to Europe and Russia, remains volatile after a 1992-97 civil war in which Rakhmon's Moscow-backed secular government clashed with Islamist guerrillas.
Rakhmon justifies his authoritarian methods by saying he wants to oppose radical Islam. But some of his critics argue repression and poverty push many young Tajiks to embrace it.
Tighter Internet controls echo measures taken by other former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where authoritarian rulers are wary of the role social media played in revolutions in the Arab world and mass protests in Russia.
The government this year set up a volunteer-run body to monitor Internet use and reprimand those who openly criticize Rakhmon and other officials.
In November, Tajikistan blocked access to Facebook, saying it was spreading "mud and slander" about its veteran leader.
The authorities unblocked Facebook after concern was expressed by the United States and European Union, the main providers of humanitarian aid for Tajikistan, where almost a half of the population lives in abject poverty.
Asomiddin Asoyev, head of Tajikistan's association of Internet providers, said authorities were trying to create an illusion that there were no problems in Tajik society by silencing online criticism.
"This is self-deception," he told Reuters. "The best way of resolving a problem is its open discussion with civil society."
Moscow-based Central Asia expert Arkady Dubnov told Reuters that Rakhmon's authoritarian measures could lead to a backlash against the president in the election. "Trying to position itself as the main guarantor of stability through repression against Islamist activists, the Dushanbe government is actually achieving the reverse - people's trust in it is falling," he said.

Read More..

Netflix suffers Christmas Eve outage, points to Amazon

An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.'s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.
The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles such as Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray players.
Evers said that the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services' cloud computing center in Virginia, and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users late on Monday.
"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Evers said.
"We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night," he added.
An outage at Amazon Web Services, or AWS, knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare in April of last year.
Amazon Web Services was not immediately available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company's contracts with Amazon.

Read More..

Netflix blames Amazon for Christmas Eve outage

An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc's streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas Day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.
The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles like the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray DVD players.
Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, California, has 30 million streaming subscribers worldwide, of which more than 27 million are in the Americas region that was exposed to the outage and could have potentially been affected, Evers said.
Evers said the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services' cloud computing center in Virginia and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored before 8:00 a.m. PST Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users by 11:00 p.m. PST on Monday.
The event marks the latest in a series of outages from Amazon Web Services, with one occurring in April of last year that knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare.
"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Evers of Netflix said.
"We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night," he added.
Officials at Amazon Web Services were not available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company's contracts with Amazon.

Read More..

APNewsBreak: Texas cancer probe draws NCI scrutiny

The National Cancer Institute confirmed Friday that federal officials are taking a closer look at a troubled $3 billion cancer-fighting effort in Texas that is under a criminal investigation over a lucrative taxpayer-funded grant awarded by the state agency.
The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas touts its status as an NCI-approved funding entity — an exclusive group headlined by the nation's most prominent cancer organizations. The list is fewer than two dozen and includes the American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and federal entities like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The designation is a federal seal-of-approval that signals high peer review standards and conflict of interest policies. Yearlong turmoil within the Texas institute, or CPRIT, reached a new peak this week when the agency's beleaguered chief executive asked to resign and prosecutors opened cases following an $11 million grant to a private company that was revealed to have bypassed an independent review.
NCI spokeswoman Aleea Farrakh Khan told The Associated Press that officials are "evaluating recent events" at CPRIT. She said officials have not made decisions or contacted the agency directly.
Members of CPRIT's governing board did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
An NCI designation is not required for CPRIT to continue running the nation's second-largest pot of cancer research dollars, Khan said. But jeopardizing that status — and especially losing it — would be a severe blow to CPRIT's reputation, which already has been battered by sweeping resignations, internal accusations of politics trumping science and now a criminal investigation.
A recent internal audit at CPRIT discovered an $11 million funding request from Dallas-based Peloton Therapeutics was approved without the agency ever scrutinizing the proposal's merits. The revelation came only months after two Nobel laureates and other top scientists left the agency in protest over a $20 million grant some accused of being rushed to approval without a proper peer review.
While CPRIT is funded by taxpayers, donors to cancer nonprofits might look to an NCI designation for assurance that their money is in good hands.
"It says, 'If I'm donating money to this agency, if NCI is approving them, that means NCI says it's handling its money well,'" Khan said.
Khan added that CPRIT's inclusion on the list does not mean all of its funding mechanisms are NCI-approved.
There is no funding relationship between the NCI and CPRIT.
An entire page of CPRIT's website is devoted to boasting its NCI designation. The agency says the status is important because it means cancer centers in Texas seeking its own NCI designation — so as to reassure patients or bolster recruitment — can include CPRIT research dollars in their calculations to maintain levels needed to be NCI approved.
"This enhances Texas' ability to leverage additional federal funding for cancer research and raises Texas' profile as a center for cancer research," according to the website.
Executive Director Bill Gimson submitted his resignation letter Tuesday but offered to stay on through January. He has described Peloton's improper funding as an honest mistake and said no one associated with CPRIT stood to personally profit from the company's award.
Prosecutors have not made any specific criminal allegations. Launching separate investigations into CPRIT are the Texas attorney general's office and the Travis County district attorney's public integrity unit, which investigates criminal misconduct within state government.

Read More..

Mental health toll emerges among Sandy survivors

The image of his brother trapped in a car with water rising to his neck, his eyes silently pleading for help, is part of a recurring nightmare that wakes Anthony Gatti up, screaming, at night.
Gatti hauled his brother out of the car just in time, saving his life at the height of Superstorm Sandy. The two men rode out the hurricane in their childhood Staten Island home and survived. But weeks afterward, Gatti still hasn't moved on.
Now he's living in a tent in the backyard, burning pieces of furniture as firewood, refusing to leave until the place is demolished. Day and night, he is haunted by memories of the storm.
"My mind don't let me get past the fact that I can't get him out of the car. And I know I did," Gatti said, squeezing his eyes tightly shut at the memory. "But my mind don't let me think that. My mind tells me I couldn't save him, he dies."
As communities battered by Sandy clear away the physical wreckage, a new crisis is emerging: the mental and emotional trauma that storm victims, including children, have endured. The extent of the problem is difficult to measure, as many people are too anxious to even leave their homes, wracked by fears of wind and water and parting from their loved ones. Others are too busy dealing with losses of property and livelihood to deal with their grief.
To tackle the problem, government officials are dispatching more than 1,000 crisis counselors to the worst-hit areas in New York and New Jersey, helping victims begin the long work of repairing Sandy's emotional damage.
Counselors are assuring people that anxiety and insomnia are natural after a disaster. But when the trauma starts to interfere with daily life, it's probably time to seek help. And in a pattern that played out in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, symptoms may only get worse as victims transition from the initial shock to the disillusionment phase of the recovery.
"Folks are starting to realize that they may be in this for the long haul," said Eric Hierholzer, a commander in the U.S. Public Health Service. "And things aren't necessarily going to get better tomorrow or next week."
At St. John's Episcopal Hospital in Far Rockaway, the psychiatry department has recorded a 20 percent increase in walk-in patients since the storm hit, with residents reporting the whole gamut of stress-related symptoms. Anxiety. Insomnia. Panic attacks.
Local schools have referred 25 percent more children than usual to the hospital's outpatient mental health programs.
"The children are very, very traumatized," said Fern Zagor, who runs the Staten Island Mental Health Society. "They have a hard time making sense of this sudden change in their world. It's frightening to them."
A 5-year-old girl who was pulled from floodwaters clinging to her father hasn't been able to attend kindergarten since the storm, Zagor said, because she's too traumatized to be parted from him now. An 11-year-old boy is working with counselors after floating in water up to his neck on the second floor of his home for several hours before being rescued.
"This child has said he worries about rain," Zagor said. "He worries about whether he'll ever want to swim in a swimming pool again."
The society is among many mental health providers who are working with Project Hope, a New York crisis counseling program funded by an $8.2 million Federal Emergency Management Agency grant that has just begun sending counselors to local communities. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office estimates the program will help more than 200,000 people.
Project Hope Counselor Yomira Natera has been seeking out storm victims who don't speak English as their first language.
"We've seen an increase in substance abuse with folks who may have language barriers," she said, "who may be frustrated with the system, who find it difficult to communicate."
At least 20,000 people have so far made contact with counselors from the New Jersey Hope and Healing Program, which has dispatched hundreds of state-trained disaster crisis response counselors into the storm zone. The state also launched a hotline for people to call and talk to a counselor.
In Union Beach, N.J., a working-class enclave on Raritan Bay, Kathy Parsells volunteered at a FEMA recovery center on a recent afternoon, helping to coordinate deliveries. Her daughter and grandchildren had to be rescued during the storm.
"I'm OK," she said, stifling tears. "My grandsons have nightmares. My grandson, the first night, was screaming: 'It's coming up the stairs.'"
Jeannette Van Houten, who lost her home in Union Beach, said in a telephone interview that she feels like she's going through the same stages of grief that she endured when her niece was murdered in 2008.
"I have days that I can't put a thought together. Like you start talking and you forget what you're saying," said Van Houten, who sleeps just two or three hours on a good night nowadays. "And the numbness, like you look at things that are happening around you, but you're not part of it."
The Rev. Matthew Dowling, a pastor at the Monmouth Church of Christ in Tinton Falls, N.J., volunteered as a crisis counselor in the days after the storm and heard a lot of survivor's remorse from people who were more fortunate than their neighbors. But there was also a great deal of frustration.
"When FEMA arrives, they think everything is going to be fixed," Dowling said. "The reality is it's going to take months and months to get back to normal. Just like the steps of grief there's anger at the new normal."
Distress calls to LifeNet, New York City's local crisis hotline, doubled during the first few weeks after the storm hit, averaging more than 2,000 calls per week from people who were angry and worried that basic needs — food, clothing, shelter — had not been met.
Officials are now preparing for a new wave of calls from people struggling with depression and other mental health issues, said Christian Burgess, director of the Disaster Distress Helpline, a national crisis hotline run by the federal government that provides a network of trained counselors in the aftermath of a major disaster.
Coming to grips with the loss of everything she owned has been difficult for Carol Stenquist, who stood outside borough hall in Union Beach, nervously dragging on a cigarette and crying.
"I have anxiety over it. Even when I lay down at night I feel my heart palpitating with the loss of everything," said Stenquist, whose home was destroyed. "I was there for 20 years."
She thinks she needs to talk to a professional counselor, but hasn't sought one out yet.
"I'm kind of afraid that the emotional stuff I feel now is just part of what I'm going to feel when it's over," she said. "I've had my breakdowns, cries, feelings of depression. I've had all of that."
On Staten Island, volunteers have been quietly stopping by Anthony Gatti's tent to check in on him during his long vigil, dropping off boxes of cereal and cans of coffee. A volunteer therapist tried to talk him into leaving, but to no avail. He spends his days patrolling the property for looters and gazing at photos of the storm's destruction on his laptop.
"I keep trying to make him understand. It's a lot of wood and metal and pipes, that's all it is," said his mother, Marge Gatti. "You've got to get numb. You gotta get tough. If I'm not numb, I can't function.

Read More..

GlaxoSmithKline wins U.S. approval for new flu vaccine

U.S. health regulators have approved a new four-strain seasonal influenza vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the company said on Monday.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Fluarix Quadrivalent to immunize children age 3 and older and adults against flu virus subtypes A and B contained in the vaccine.
It is the first intramuscular vaccine to protect against four influenza strains. Three-strain flu vaccines currently administered help protect against the two most common A virus strains and the B strain expected to be predominant in a given year, the company said.
Since 2000, however, two B virus strains have circulated to varying degrees each season, meaning patients infected with the B virus not contained in the vaccine were not immunized.
Fluarix Quadrivalent helps protect against the two A strains and adds coverage against a second B strain, the company said.
Three-strain vaccines "have helped protect millions of people against flu, but in six of the last 11 flu seasons, the predominant circulating influenza B strain was not the strain that public health authorities selected," said Dr. Leonard Friedland, head of clinical development and medical affairs for Glaxo's North American vaccines program.
"Fluarix Quadrivalent will help protect individuals against both B strains and from a public-health standpoint, can help decrease the burden of disease."
Glaxo said it will make the vaccine available in time for the 2013-14 flu season and plans to fulfill orders for its trivalent, or three-strain, vaccines. Healthcare providers traditionally order flu vaccines about a year in advance of each flu season.
Fluarix Quadrivalent is not currently approved or licensed in any country outside of the United States.

Read More..

Inherited colon cancer risk tied to certain foods

Among people who have a genetic susceptibility to colon cancer, those whose diets are heavy in junk food have an even higher risk, according to a new study.
"These patients have this very high risk because of this (genetic) mutation they have, but it might be that they could reduce the number of (tumors) by having a more healthy lifestyle," said Akke Botma, the lead author of the study.
Botma's study is just the first to find a link between certain foods and a higher colon cancer risk in this group, and it can't prove that the diet is to blame.
All of the people in the study had Lynch syndrome, a genetic disorder that predisposes people to cancer at younger ages and that affects up to one in 660 people.
In Western countries, colorectal and endometrial cancers are the dominant cancers to turn up in people with the syndrome, while in Asia it's mostly stomach cancer, Botma said.
Up to 70 percent of people with Lynch syndrome will develop colon cancer. Among people without Lynch syndrome, such cancers are thought to be influenced by diet, particularly alcohol and red and processed meat, the authors note in their study, published in the journal Cancer.
Botma and her colleagues at Wageningen University in the Netherlands contacted 486 people with Lynch syndrome from a national database of families with inherited risks for cancer.
At the beginning of the study they surveyed the participants about what they ate, and they ranked each person on whether he ate low, medium or high amounts of foods within four dietary categories.
The food groups included one that was dominated by fruits, vegetables and whole grains; another that was high in meat and coffee; a third dietary group that resembled a Mediterranean diet - fish, leafy greens, pasta, sauces and wine; and a fourth group that was heavy on fried snacks, fast food and diet soda.
Botma and her colleagues found that, over 20 months of follow up, 56 of the participants -- or 12 percent -- screened positive for tumors in the colon, a precursor to cancer.
Of the four dietary groupings, only the junk food category showed any link with a different risk for developing colon tumors.
Of the 160 people who scored low on the junk food diet, 17 developed tumors, while 18 out of the 160 people who ate the most junk food developed tumors.
The numbers initially seemed similar, but after taking into account smoking and other risk factors, the researchers determined that those in the high junk food group were twice as likely to develop colon tumors.
HOW TO MANAGE RISKS?
"It's hard to say why" junk food is linked with a greater risk for these tumors, said Dr. Mala Pande, an instructor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who was not involved in the research.
She said some researchers have suggested that high fat might have something to do with it, but it's impossible to conclude that from this study.
Although the findings are too preliminary to be used in making dietary recommendations to people with Lynch Syndrome, the study was valuable in launching research into the possible role of certain foods on cancer risk, said Christopher Amos, a professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College.
"People with Lynch Syndrome are at higher risk, and we'd really like to know how to manage their risks better," Amos, who was not part of the study, told Reuters Health.
Certain foods have been shown to be linked with different types of cancer, but many of those studies contradict each other and sow confusion (see Reuters Health report of December 5, 2012 here: http://reut.rs/YPuDcs).

Read More..

Global malaria battle stalls as financing gets tight

Global funding for the fight against malaria has stalled in the past two years, threatening to reverse what the World Health Organisation (WHO) says are "remarkable recent gains" in the battle to control one of the world's leading infectious killers.
After rapid expansion between 2004 and 2009, funding for malaria prevention and control leveled off between 2010 and 2012 - meaning there were fewer life-saving steps taken in hard- hit malarial regions such as sub-Saharan Africa.
"If we don't scale up vector control activities in 2013 we can expect major resurgences of malaria," said Richard Cibulskis, lead author of the WHO's World Malaria Report, which was published on Monday.
"Vector control" means stopping transmission of the disease with tools such as treated mosquito nets. The report found that deliveries of such nets to endemic countries in sub-Saharan Africa dropped from 145 million in 2010 to an estimated 66 million in 2012.
"This means that many households will be unable to replace existing bed nets when required, exposing more people to the potentially deadly disease," the report said.
Malaria is caused by a parasite carried in the saliva of mosquitoes and kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, mainly babies and children under the age of five in Africa.
According to WHO data, the disease infected around 219 million people in 2010, killing around 660,000 of them. Robust figures are, however, hard to establish and other health experts say the annual malaria death toll could be double that.
GLOBAL TARGETS
An estimated $5.1 billion a year is needed between 2011 and 2020 to get malaria medicines, prevention measures and tests to all those who need them in the 99 countries which have on-going transmission of the disease.
"Essentially, with the tools that we've got, we need to make sure that we continue the investments in the control measures that we have," Cibulskis told a news conference in Geneva.
"If we don't do that, malaria will bounce back. As soon as you take bed nets away, malaria will come back. If you stop indoor residual spraying, it will come back, and with a vengeance. So yes, we need to keep on investing in malaria ultimately until new tools are developed."
The WHO says while many countries have increased financing for malaria, the total available global funding remained at $2.3 billion in 2011 - less than half of what is needed.
"Global targets for reducing the malaria burden will not be reached unless progress is accelerated in the highest burden countries," Robert Newman, director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme, said in statement with the report.
"These countries are in a precarious situation and most of them need urgent financial assistance to procure and distribute life-saving commodities."
The WHO report found that by far the greatest impact of malaria is concentrated in 14 endemic countries which account for an estimated 80 percent of malaria deaths.
Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the most affected countries in sub-Saharan Africa, while India is the hardest hit in South East Asia.
WHO director general Margaret Chan wrote in a forward to the report that there is now an urgent need to identify new sources of funding to boost and sustain malaria control.
"We also need to examine new ways to make existing funds stretch further by increasing the value for money of malaria commodities and the efficiency of service delivery," she said.
The Roll Back Malaria Partnership, which includes the WHO, UNICEF and the World Bank, said it was already exploring several options, including financial transaction taxes, airline ticket taxes and a potential "malaria bond" to encourage more involvement from private sector investors.
Fatoumata Nafo-Traore, executive director of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, said Mozambique and one other African country were preparing to pilot such a bond in 2013, with the hope that other countries would follow their example.

Read More..