Well, the British don't throw their newspaper publishers and editors into jail for disagreeing with Tony Blair, which is something the corrupt regime in Beijing enjoys doing regularly. Just the other day they sentenced Yu Huafeng and Li Minying, manager and editor respectively of the Southern Metropolis newspapers in Guangdong to 12 and 11 year prison terms. Their crime: breaking the SARS pandemic in China, and the scandal behind the government cover-ups. [Oh, yeh, we forgot about that little "lapse of ethics" on the part of these wonderful democratic leaders of China.] The newspaper also broke the story of the death in police custody of designer Sun Zhigang, but that was small potatoes compared to giving us a peak behind the Red Curtain of complicity that cost Canada and Toronto dearly.

As for LHR flights being overbooked, in most cases passengers do show up and have to be accommodated on other flights [that's why AC flies three and sometimes five flights a day from YYZ]. No shows may due to missed connections and other quite valid reasons. Or the passengers themselves may have bought a return ticket instead of the one-way they really wanted [but was much more expensive]. Lots of students and back-packers do this to and from Europe. They are not part of a vast network of TAs who flaunt the rules and triple book their clients.