Yet when the smoke settled, it turned out that Georgia, not Russia, had started the war by launching an artillery barrage against South Ossetia's capital city.
Figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) showed that 837,000 people had started the Work Programme since it was launched last year, but only 31,000 stayed in a job for six months.
For the past few big launches, they've started the shipping process days before the launch, only to have all the devices held at major shipping hubs until the big day comes.
Silvio Berlusconi has started the summer holidays by launching a blistering series of attacks on the Italian media.
Amid a barrage of grim predictions about the further "spiralling out of control" of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Barack Obama told delegates at the United Nations that while the world had started to launch its response, it was still lacking.
Last spring, long before the campaign season had started, he launched a new "movement" that sent volunteers across France to talk with citizens about what troubled them most.
In 2008 and 2009 all major mobile handset manufacturers and operating system providers jumped on the train Apple had started and launched their own mobile development and distribution platforms.
Russian Space Agency officials announced today that they had started launching preparations for the first element, an unmanned maneuver and storage unit named Zarya.
While there, he showed an increasing interest in my work – I was consulting at Gieves & Hawkes and had started work on launching the Casely-Hayford brand.
TB patients who visited these health facilities during the study period were enrolled in the study, excluding those below 18 years of age and those who had started treatment prior to launching the study.
The period 1974 1985 represented the latest possible prescreening era of equal length to the screening period 1992 2003: some CSF municipalities had started screening 1 year before the launch of the national programme.
