THE Argus story about how a message in a bottle from grieving Cwmbran mum Sarah Adams and her family was found by oil workers on the US Gulf Coast has now spanned the Atlantic.

Last week, news channel CNN interviewed Sarah and our reporter Alison Sanders, who broke the story. US channel CBS News was hot on their heels and Sarah has already been interviewed on NBC's Today programme.

Newspapers from Mississippi and Louisiana, Barbados and even the Times of India have carried the story which began when the oil workers who found the Sambuca bottle containing letters of love to the late James Prosser, killed in action in Afghanistan, read a story on the Argus website.

It's easy to dismiss the internet as a place where the terminally sad spend way too much time.

But it can be a huge force for bringing people together.

The oil workers said they felt like James was one of their own 'neighbourhood kids' when they read his mother's letter to him.

No doubt the family is amazed by the media coverage of the story.

Journalists are, by our natures, cynical beasts. But it is hard to be cynical with a story such as this.

I think part of the reason that it has touched so many people in so many countries is that it shows that even in the most devastating of situations, people choose to live in hope.

Throwing that bottle into the sea was the ultimate act of hope.

Sarah Adams hoped that whoever read the letters would ensure that James is never forgotten.

He won't be.

Thousands of people have now heard of him and his story.

IF ever there is a woman who dwells in naivete rather than hope, it is Naomi Campbell.

So usual is it for her to be presented at her hotel room door with a bag of 'dirty little stones' that she never thought for a second they could be blood diamonds.

Look, she's always being given little gifts of something or other, OK? People keep pressing them into her hands at the oddest of moments, you know.

Never for a moment did it cross her thoughts that the cost of the present she was being given could be someone's life because it could have been traded for arms.

Hopefully, the next present she is given will be a subscription to Newsweek so that she can catch up on world events and spare herself the 'inconvenience' of giving evidence at a war crimes tribunal at The Hague in future.

AND finally...

Two Germans are on an unusual summer holiday - a 500-kilometre swim down a river from central Germany to the North Sea with seven pet ducks.

Pia Marie Witt, 33, Wilfried Arnold, 58, and their companions will swim down the Fulda and Weser rivers, hoping to reach the North Sea port of Bremerhaven by mid-September.