it looks like a woman is about to be appointed Prime Minister - this woman is currently a legislator, formerly a cabinet minister overseeing a women's affairs department, highly involved in women's rights (obviously). Her husband is very involved in peace and anti-military work, spent time in prison and under torture during the Chun Doohwan and Noh Taewoo dictatorships. They're both Quakers, members of the only Quaker meeting in the country.

And the leader of the opposition political party, the conservative bunch? Also a woman - granted, the daughter of a former dictator, but very much her own woman and a reformer in her own way.

The US can't even get women on the op-ed page, and we look down upon a society like Korea for their patriarchal mentality. Ha!

stupid rhymes, and pop culture references. And often wrong - example - local baseball player of Korean extraction does well, gets name in paper with headline. The guy's last name is spelled 'Choi" but is pronounced 'Tcheh', for reasons rooted in missionary attempts to romanize Korean alphabet, a silly thing to do anyway. The headline writer, lazy creature, naturally came up with a rhyme for the wrong pronounciation.

methodology (see my excellent and ignored letter in response to the cancer genetics screening article a few days ago - *koff, koff*) - and you're right, I did a pubmed scrounge on JA Maloni and her friends, colleagues, and enemies - and there is no evidence for antepartum bedrest - even some against it.

However, here's my sad experience. I was a grad student with statistical facility in the mid-80s, and therefore in demand as a hired hand. One study I worked on, and even got co-authorship on, was Dave Luthy's randomized clinical trial (RCT) of electronic fetal monitoring (EFM) during labor. Why do this, you ask? Because there was no evidence it worked. There had been previous RCTs but in normal populations. SO the response was, well, of course, you need EFM to monitor those high-risk deliveries. Therefore, Luthy's trial, another one in DUblin and a third, I think at Brown, were set up. We enrolled mothers whose estimate of the weight of the baby when they came in for delivery was 1500gm or less. We randomized them to EFM or auscultation - mind you, we had to teach a number of younger docs how to auscultate - they didn't know how to put a stethoscope on a belly and interpret the sounds. Anyway, big trial, lots of money, and it came out in the end that for almost all bad outcomes the two methods were the same. The only exception was cerebral palsy, where auscultation was slightly protective. The Dublin trial and the Brown trial found the same thing. SO what happened? Well, the articles were hard to publish, but we found an advocate in the editor of the famous green journal, Obstetrics, who published our findngs in full. And what changed? Not a damn thing! I had opportunity to ask that editor about it a few weeks ago, and he's still bemused. He feels those articles should've changed the practice of obstetrics, and they did not. And there you have it.....