Category: news

Why do head teachers hate Sats?

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The trial of three ex-British Airways executives and one current employee on price-fixing charges collapses.

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Leading European shares jump after Europe agrees measures to try to stop the Greek debt crisis affecting other countries.

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A coalition of human rights groups has condemned a UN agency for planning to award a prize sponsored by Equatorial Guinea President Teodor Obiang Nguema.

The 28 groups say Unesco should end its association with "one of the world’s most infamous dictators".

Mr Obiang, who has led the oil-rich country for 30 years, has been accused of rigging elections and corruption. He has previously denied such charges.

The first $3m (£2m) Unesco-Obiang science prize is to be awarded in June.

A Unesco spokesperson told the BBC the agency had no comment to make because the decision had been approved by the organisation’s board in April.

Mr Obiang seized power from his uncle in 1979. He was re-elected last year with 95% of the vote.

Last year, a French court threw out a lawsuit against Mr Obiang and two other African leaders, accusing them of using public funds to buy luxury homes.

The court said foreign heads of state could not be sued.

The human rights coalition has written to Unesco, asking it to identify the source of the funds used to sponsor the prize.

"The prize’s $3m endowment should be used for the education and welfare of the people of Equatorial Guinea, rather than the glorification of their president," said Tutu Alicante of the human rights organization EG Justice.

Equatorial Guinea’s vast earnings from oil and gas should give its population of 600,000 people a theoretical income of $37,000 a year each.

But most Equatorial Guineans live in poverty after 15 years of plentiful oil production.

Human Rights Watch describes Equatorial Guinea’s government as one of the most abusive and corrupt in the world.

"The grim irony of awarding a prize recognizing ‘scientific achievements that improve the quality of human life,’ while naming it for a president whose 30-year rule has been marked by the brutal poverty and fear of his people and a global reputation for governmental corruption, would bring shame on Unesco," reads the letter.

Normally a secretive state, Equatorial Guinea made headlines in October with the pardoning of a group South African and British mercenaries headed by Simon Mann who had been jailed for attempting a coup.

In 2004, a US Senate investigation discovered that Mr Obiang, and members of his family, were the signatories to accounts at Riggs Bank in the US which had received millions of dollars in revenues from the central African country’s oil wells.

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Earth’s ongoing loss of biodiversity and ecosystems losses may soon begin to hit economies, a major UN report warns.

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A man has died after a fire at a house in the village of Carrowdore on the Ards Peninsula in County Down.

The fire, at the house on Manse Road, was reported at 0400 BST on Monday morning.

Police and fire crews attended the fire.

The police have said that they are investigating the circumstances surrounding the fire and enquiries are ongoing.

Jonathan Bell, the area’s DUP MLA, said the victim was an elderly man and that the police have told him the fire is not suspicious.

He added: "Carrowdore is a close-knit, caring community and there is a tangible sense of shock here this morning."

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The Spanish grave of a British World War I hero has been saved after an appeal to trace his relatives.

Authorities were threatening to exhume the body of Sir Gilbert Mackereth, who is buried in a San Sebastian cemetery, because of unpaid taxes on the plot.

Terry Dean, of the Western Front Association, spoke about the Salford-born soldier to the BBC on Thursday and had traced his cousin by that evening.

A national newspaper has paid the 330 euro (£287) tax owed on the plot.

Sir Gilbert, who commanded the 17th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, was awarded the Military Cross for his outstanding bravery during WWI.

In April 1917 he crawled into no man’s land in Saint Quentin in France to rescue a group of soldiers who were lost and in danger. He took control and saved them all.

Sir Gilbert’s wife died in 1979, 17 years after her husband. They did not have children. The couple had lived in Spain.

Mr Dean, who launched the search after being notified of the tax problem, said tracing a relative so soon was "beyond his expectations".

"On Thursday night I spoke on the phone to his first cousin John Sloane," he said.

Mr Sloane, who had no idea about the grave issue, accepted an offer from The Sun newspaper to get the tax paid.

"For the past three years I’ve been searching for a picture of Gilbert Mackereth in uniform and never in my wildest imagination did I expect to see the first photograph of him in The Sun," Mr Dean added.

"The important thing is that Sir Gilbert’s remains will now be reverently cared for – that’s the important thing."

Mr Dean, who laid a poppy and a note on Sir Gilbert’s grave last summer, was alerted to the eviction notice by a local resident.

He now hopes a memorial to Si Gilbert can be established at The Fusilier Museum in Bury, Greater Manchester.

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John Hurt is nominated for a TV Bafta for reprising the role of Quentin Crisp, which won him his first Bafta 34 years ago.

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At least nine people were killed in a wave of shootings across the Iraqi capital Baghdad, officials say.

Dozens of people were also wounded by the drive-by attacks at checkpoints in the city.

At least seven attacks were reported and one roadside bomb targeting a military patrol killed two civilians.

There was also a series of bombings in the mainly Sunni town of Falluja, west of Baghdad, which killed four people including a police officer.

The drive-by shootings in Baghdad took place in a two-hour period in the early morning.

Most of those who died were police officers.

In Falluja, the house of a police officer was bombed and he and his wife were killed.

Two other civilians were killed in another bomb attack.

Official figures show that 328 people were killed in Iraq in April, slightly fewer than a year ago.

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Four people have been killed as polls opened in local and national elections in the Philippines, after three months of intense campaigning.

Voters will elect a new president and vice-president, as well as more than 17,000 other positions.

Benigno Aquino, the son of the popular former president, Cory Aquino, has been leading the polls but former president Joseph Estrada is also in the running.

Dozens of people were killed during an intense three-month campaign.

The security forces are patrolling to try to prevent more bloodshed.

Determined to vote

A military spokesman said three people were shot dead and 10 others wounded when police clashed with supporters of a mayoral candidate in the southern province of Zamboanga Sibugay before dawn.

A cousin of the vice governor in North Cotabato province was shot dead while riding on a motorbike in a separate incident, local police said.

The latest deaths bring the toll over four months leading into the elections to 33 dead.

Those deaths are in addition to the 57 people killed in Maguindanao province in November when a group was trying to register candidacies for these elections in an area held by the rival Ampatuan clan.

Twelve members of the Amapatuan clan have been charged with involvement in the mass killing, but 10 of them are running for posts in these polls, as they remain innocent until proven guilty in court.

The BBC’s Philippines correspondent Kate McGeown is at the Nemesio Yabut elementary school in the capital, Manila, and says long lines have formed where hundreds of people who are waiting for a chance to vote.

She says some people have already been waiting for hours in the sticky heat but everyone still seems to be in high spirits.

Embarrassing

People take elections seriously in the Philippines – an estimated 85% of those eligible are expected to vote.

Glitches have already occurred with the country’s new automated voting system.

Even the election front-runner, Mr Aquino, had trouble voting at his home province of Tarlac because the ballot-counting machine had broken down.

"Hopefully, this is just an isolated incident. We are waiting for more reports… (but) if people can’t vote because the machines don’t accept their ballots, then certainly that is a problem," Mr Aquino said.

Throughout the campaign the issue that has also been dominating the headlines is the automated voting machines that will be used for the first time in this election.

Our correspondent says there are fears of what might happen if something goes wrong with the machines.

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A new mass grave thought to hold the bodies of about 250 Kosovo Albanians has been found in Serbia, the country’s war crimes prosecutor has told the BBC.

It said the information had come from the EU police mission in Kosovo, Eulex, and Serbia was sending investigators.

The victims are believed to have been killed during the 1998-99 conflict, when Serbian forces fought ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo.

The grave is in the town of Raska, near the border with Kosovo.

It is not the first time mass graves from the conflict have been found in Serbia. The bodies of more than 800 Kosovo Albanians were found in several locations in Serbia in 2001.

Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008 is challenged by Belgrade but is accepted by the US and many EU states.

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Lena Horne’s singing career spanned more than 60 years. With her passionate voice and good looks, she became the first black sex symbol in the 1930s.

She was born in Brooklyn. Her mother was an actress and her father ran a small hotel.

Horne’s parents separated when she was three, and she was boarded out. She did not live with her mother again until she was 15.

A year later she became a chorus singer in Harlem’s fashionable Cotton Club. Her mother used to chaperone her there every night.

At 19, she ran away from home, got married and went on to raise two children.

Musical numbers edited

By now she had begun to sing regularly on radio and toured with Noble Sissle’s orchestra in the mid-1930s, and sang with the Charlie Barnett band in the early 1940s.

After conquering New York’s Cafe Society club, she was snapped up by Hollywood on the coming of sound.

She appeared in a cluster of musicals including Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, the title song of which became her signature tune.

Her mixed ancestry – she was part white, Blackfoot Indian and Senegalese – affected her career.

During a period when black women were cast as menials, not stars, Lena Horne found many of her numbers edited out of the versions shown in southern states.

The studios lightened her appearance with special white make-up. But she refused to play stereotyped roles.

On one occasion for a film musical, she refused to be cast as an exotic Latin American.

"I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become," she later said. "I’m me, and I’m like nobody else."

On tour, she often slept on the coach when hotels refused to rent her a room. She became active in the civil-rights movement and was blacklisted in the McCarthy era.

In the 1960s she became increasingly vocal, once throwing a lamp at a fellow customer in a Beverley Hills restaurant for making a racial slur.

Horne also marched on Washington DC in 1963 along with 250,000 other people to hear Martin Luther King deliver his "I have a dream" speech.

Catalogue of tragedy

She was happily married for 24 years to a white man, Lennie Hayton, musical director of MGM in Paris. But this only added to her emotional pressure.

By the 1950s, in musicals like Jamaica, black artists were beginning to gain acceptance.

Lena Horne went on to win international fame, finding her niche giving jazz renditions to popular songs such as Honeysuckle Rose and The Lady is a Tramp.

For 13 months in 1971-72 she suffered a catalogue of tragedy. First she lost her father. Then her son from her first marriage died of kidney failure. Soon afterwards, Lennie Hayton had a fatal heart attack.

Shattered, she went into retirement but, after a time, friends persuaded her to resume her career.

It reached a late climax in 1981 when her one-woman show, the award-winning The Lady and her Music, based on her life and career, ran for more than a year on Broadway and, subsequently, in London.

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US singer and actress Lena Horne has died in New York at the age of 92.

Renowned for her beauty and sultry voice, Horne battled against racial segregation to become Hollywood’s first black sex symbol.

In 1943, she played Selina Rogers in the all-black film musical Stormy Weather, the title song of which was to be a major hit and her signature tune.

Her career spanned more than 60 years. Later she embraced activism and became a voice for civil rights in the US.

‘Unique’

In the 1940s, she became one of the first black performers to sing with a major white band and have a Hollywood contract.

When asked about her success, Ms Horne once said: "I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept.

"I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."

In 1981, her one-woman show, the award-winning The Lady and her Music, based on her life and career, ran for more than a year on Broadway and in London.

Her success gained her a special Tony award, while Horne’s recording career resulted in two Grammy awards.

When actress Halle Berry became the first black woman to win an Oscar in 2002, she cited Lena Horne as one of the pioneering entertainers who had paved the way for her breakthrough.

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The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are to resume a third day of talks. Is getting the deal right more important than getting it done quickly?

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Chancellor Alistair Darling says the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats must decide on Monday whether or not they will form a government together.

The two parties are set to enter their third day of talks about a potential power-sharing agreement after Friday’s inconclusive election result.

"I just think there comes a point where you have to decide if there is a deal or no deal," Mr Darling told the BBC.

The public and markets wanted to see a "government in place", he added.

Negotiating teams from the Tories and Lib Dems are set to meet for the third successive day as the two sides discuss possible arrangements to put together a government.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg met his Conservative counterpart David Cameron twice over the weekend but also held a meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has said he is ready to discuss a possible deal of his own with the Lib Dems should the talks break down.

Mr Darling, who remains as chancellor for the time being, said he believed the Tory-Lib Dem talks could not continue for ever.

"I don’t think it would do any good to let this process drag on," he told Today.

"I hope by the end of today they will decide whether they can do a deal or not. I am not saying that tomorrow’s the end of the world but I just make the general observation that there does come a point in any negotiations – either you can do a deal or you can’t.

He added: "If there’s not a deal, no doubt they will talk to us. The key thing everybody would expect, whether you’re a market or more importantly in some ways from the point of view of people at home, we want to see a government in place."

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