This is getting little or no coverage in the US, but Bono, working with Bobby Shriver of the Kennedy clan has launched a project to raise funds and awareness about AIDS in Africa called (Product)^RED. I read about it on the Independent (UK) site: Independent Online Edition: A red revolution on the high street

"What we couldn't figure out was why people said they wanted to do something to help - and then didn't." So says Bobby Shriver who, as a member of the Kennedy clan, is about as near as America gets to an aristocrat. He is the man who, with the singer and activist Bono, dreamt up Product RED to harness the power of the high street in the fight against the greatest threat to health in human history - the Aids pandemic which every day claims the lives of 6,500 men, women and children in Africa alone.

Tomorrow The Independent goes RED. But what does that actually mean? First that half of the money this newspaper earns that day will be given to Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. That sounds like a good bit of corporate philanthropy, the kind of idea you might expect a latterday aristo like Shriver to dream up.

But to think in those terms is to under-estimate the potency of the enterprise. What Shriver and Bono are about is a revolution that brings together two of the most powerful forces in the contemporary world - the appetite of consumers and the marketing intelligence of the corporate sector - to open up an entirely new front in the battle against Aids in the continent worst hit by this modern plague.

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