Word: tanned
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With his shock of blond hair, deep tan and rakish English charm, billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson likes to portray himself as maverick of the business world. And, on Monday, he made a typically bold gesture, announcing that he would lead an investment consortium to rescue the ailing U.K. mortgage lender Northern Rock. In an open letter to Northern Rock customers entitled "A Fresh Start," he pledged to save the bank and declared that the company would soon be known as Virgin Money...
...Viet Tan identified its arrested members as Nguyen Quoc Quan, 54, of California and Leon Truong, 54, of Hawaii, both U.S. citizens born in Vietnam. French-Vietnamese writer and activist Nguyen Thi Thanh Van, 51, and ethnic-Vietnamese Thai national Khunmi Somsak, 58, were also arrested. The activists' respective embassies said they are now trying to find out what law they are accused of breaking...
...four of those detained are members of Viet Tan (Vietnam Reform), an organization of overseas Vietnamese working for political change in the motherland. According to the group, the banned materials the activists were distributing included a booklet called "From Dictatorship to Democracy," a summary of peaceful democratic movements from Eastern Europe to Indonesia and the Philippines. "This was simply a peaceful expression of these people's beliefs," says Duy Hoang, the group's Washington, D.C.-based spokesman...
...former investment banker who left Saigon in a boat with his family at age 12 - have been leading a p.r.-savvy campaign for Vietnam's hearts and minds, ditching anti-communist rhetoric in favor of pro-democracy advocacy and strenuously denouncing violence in favor of peaceful grassroots movements. Viet Tan, founded in 1982, uses mass emails to recruit new members inside Vietnam (it won't say how many) and coordinate them with dissident groups. It raises funds to funnel to sympathizers who hold democracy seminars inside the country. Members seek to convert Vietnamese studying in overseas universities to the cause...
...style pro-democracy groups have had difficulty making even the smallest political change inside Vietnam. Association with any overseas group - Hanoi still classifies most as terrorist organizations - is grounds for arrest; several of the Vietnamese activists put on trial this year had their links to overseas groups like Viet Tan used as evidence against them. "They are on the right side, advocating non-violent political change, but are they doing good?" asks Carl Thayer, a veteran Vietnam analyst who lectures at Australia's National Defence University. "Any action like that provokes repression. The key leaders of the pro-democracy movement...