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Labour peer Baroness Jones of Whitchurch has criticised the government for scrapping the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) in England without first finalising the details of its replacement scheme.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Forty-six people who work for a safety glass company in Kilkeel, County Down, have been told they could lose their jobs.
Employees at Tough Glass have been given the statutory 30 days’ notification.
Management said the next step means the company could close.
Plant manager John Agnew said the rise in oil prices and cheaper imports from Turkey and China had hit demand for its glass products.
He paid tribute to the workforce but said the company had found itself “caught up in a set of circumstances beyond its control”.
The company is a leading independent manufacturer of toughened safety glass in the UK and Ireland.
Tough Glass closed in July 2008 with the loss of 60 jobs but was bought out of administration by its current owners, the Glasgow based company – Independent Glass Ltd.
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Lawyers for the group say the lecture was just an academic political debate Thirty-eight Zimbabweans arrested last month for discussing an Egypt-style uprising have been freed but eight remain in custody, their lawyer says.
They were arrested on 19 February after attending a lecture and watching videos of the unrest in Egypt which toppled long-term leader Hosni Mubarak.
Among those still in custody is former opposition MP Munyaradzi Gwisai, accused of organising the meeting.
They could face charges of treason, which could be punishable by death.
Human rights groups have condemned the arrests.
Defence lawyer Alec Muchadehama said the state had dropped the charges against the 38 due to a lack of evidence.
The defence says those arrested were taking part in an academic debate about African politics.
Some have said they have been tortured in detention.
How do you measure fear? A set of new statistics from Zimbabwe attempts to do just that.
The figures, compiled from a “nationally representative sample of 1,200 adult Zimbabweans” by an independent organisation called Freedom House, paint an alarming picture of a population, which after more than a year of growing confidence following the formation of a power-sharing government and the halting of the country’s economic collapse, is once again beginning to cower.
But prosecutors accuse them of discussing ways to oust a constitutional government.
“In their speeches, the accused noted that there was a long-serving dictator, authoritarian leader, general poverty, unemployment and capitalist practices where the general populace of Zimbabwe was suffering,” according to the charge sheet, as reported by the AFP news agency.
Political tension is mounting in Zimbabwe, with President Robert Mugabe calling for elections this year.
The most recent polls, in 2008, were marred by widespread violence, which prompted his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai to withdraw from the contest, saying he was trying to save the lives of his supporters.
The pair later formed a power-sharing government which halted the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy but the two men – and their parties – remain bitterly divided.
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Some Tunisians are calling for protesters to return to work and let the country recover Tunisia’s interim government has announced it is dissolving the country’s secret police service.
The agency had been widely accused of committing human rights abuses during the rule of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted on 14 January.
Interim Prime Minister Caid Essebsi has also announced a new government, which includes 22 ministers.
The interim government is running Tunisia until elections scheduled to take place on 24 July.
The country has struggled to restore stability since mass protests ousted Mr Ben Ali in January.
The victorious protesters have been demanding that the new leaders move faster to bring about the political and social changes they had been calling for.
Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi and six other ministers have resigned from the interim government in the past few weeks.
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David Haye will fight Vitali Klitschko if Wladimir fails to recover in time from an injury, the brothers’ manager reveals.
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Prince Andrew has been in the role since 2001 David Cameron has offered his full support to the Duke of York in his role as a UK trade envoy despite a growing row over the prince’s private life.
The prime minister’s spokesman said there was no review of his post and Mr Cameron had “full confidence” in him.
No 10 sources earlier suggested Prince Andrew might have to step down if any more damaging revelations emerged.
The prince has been criticised over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier.
Mr Cameron’s official spokesman said: “We fully support Prince Andrew in his role as trade envoy. Our position is very clear. There is no review of his role.”
“I am afraid he has now just become a national embarrassment”
Chris Bryant Labour MP
He said the prime minister would not comment on unattributable briefings and he did not know where they came from.
Earlier, Business Secretary Vince Cable said the Duke of York would have to judge his own position, although there would be “conversations” about his future role.
Ministers have defended the prince’s work, adding that it is regularly reviewed.
“I think we need to remember he is doing this as a volunteer, he is not a government appointee, he is not somebody who is appointed and sacked,” Mr Cable told the BBC.
“The assessment of the businesses I have seen that have worked with him is that he has been supportive and helpful.
“I think it is down to him to judge the position he wants to be in. Obviously there are conversations which will take place with him about what he’s to do in future.”
BBC political correspondent Gary O’Donoghue said a Downing Street source had conceded one more serious story could make the prince’s role untenable.
Our correspondent added that the prince was currently continuing in his job, but that the position was already reviewed on a regular basis.
One review took place last Tuesday when Prince Andrew met Sir Jon Cunliffe, the prime minister’s chief adviser on Europe and overseas business.
In public the cabinet has been supportive of Prince Andrew, paying tribute to the “valuable contribution” he has made to the British economy.
Business Secretary Vince Cable says he would not even have the power to fire the prince because he is a volunteer.
But behind the scenes, sources have briefed the papers that the role might be “downgraded” following one of the regular six-monthly reviews of how the job works.
And we are told that Prince Andrew met one of the prime minister’s business advisers last week.
And therein lies the story: why is there a difference?
It is probably because the relationship between politicians and royals is a tricky, delicate dance where neither partner can step on the toes of the other in public.
A cabinet minister calling for the brother of the future king to stand down would be considered a step too far.
The Downing Street source described the recent flurry of stories surrounding the Duke of York as the media trying to create “guilt by association” but added that one more serious story could change the situation overnight.
“It’s unlikely the government would actually sack Prince Andrew but may choose in the long run gradually to downgrade his activities, avoiding a damaging and embarrassing row between ministers and the Royal Family,” added our correspondent.
A spokesman for the UKTI, the government trade body, has said there is no suggestion at the moment that Prince Andrew’s role is being downgraded.
Meanwhile Labour MP and former Foreign Office minister Chris Bryant has reiterated his view that Andrew should no longer be used as a UK trade ambassador.
“I am sure there are some countries in the world where having a visiting royal makes a difference, it makes it possible to have some meetings which wouldn’t otherwise be possible,” he told BBC Breakfast.
“But I am afraid he has now just become a national embarrassment. My worry is that, sometimes when he goes on these trips, I am not sure whether he is helping us out or he is just helping himself.”
He added: “The truth is we shouldn’t be using him for these delegations any more.”
But royal historian Hugo Vickers said there had been “rather irresponsible” harassment of Andrew by the press.
Vince Cable said Prince Andrew throws a lot of time and energy into his role as a UK trade envoy
“I actually really disapprove very strongly of people being hounded out of a job, if he is doing a good job, by this sort of press coverage,” he said.
“I think if you actually examine the facts very carefully you will find that a lot of mud has been slung at him, some of it perhaps should have been, but… an awful lot of it shouldn’t.”
Foreign Secretary William Hague has also defended the prince’s work.
On Sunday he said Prince Andrew has done “a lot of good for the UK” in his role as trade ambassador.
Mr Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
Prince Andrew has been the UK’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment since 2001, with the job of promoting Britain’s business interests around the world.
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Rory Cellan-Jones shows how the system works
Facebook is launching a system that allows users to report friends who they think may be contemplating suicide.
The feature is being run in conjunction with Samaritans, which said several people had used it during a test phase.
Anyone worried about a friend can fill out a form, detailing their concerns, which is passed to the site’s moderators.
It follows reports of several cases where Facebook users announced their intention to commit suicide online.
The reporting page asks for the address (URL) of the Facebook page where the messages are posted, the full name of the user and details of any networks they are members of.
Suicide-related alerts will be escalated to the highest level, for attention by Facebook’s user operations team.
“When a report is made, they then assess whether they need to call the police immediately or forward it on to us,” said Samaritans’ Nicola Peckett.
Facebook said that it had always been its policy to notify police if a user was at risk of imminent bodily harm.
The system had been operating in a trial mode, without publicity for three months, during which it received several genuine reports and no hoaxes, according to Samaritans.
It is hoped that the new reporting mechanism will help prevent cases like that of Simone Back, who died on Christmas day after taking a drug overdose.
The charity worker from Brighton had written about her intention to kill herself on her Facebook page.
Several of her friends commented on the message, however no-one raised the alarm.
Samaritans said that the new system was not launched in relation to one specific case, but to raise awareness of the ways in which people could get help.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Mr Gates’s visit has been overshadowed by last week’s civilian deaths US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has arrived in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on an unannounced visit.
He is due to meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai, US troops and allied commanders during his two-day visit.
Later this month, Mr Karzai will announce the schedule for the handover of security responsibility from foreign forces to Afghans.
The visit comes at a time when Kabul’s ties with its Western allies are strained over civilian casualties.
On Sunday, President Karzai told Gen David Petraeus, the US commander of foreign troops in Afghanistan, that his apology for the deaths of nine children in an air strike last week was “not enough”.
The children were killed in a Nato strike on Tuesday.
“This is not a decision-making trip,” news agency AFP quoted Geoff Morrell, Mr Gates’s press secretary, as saying.
“We are going to go south, we are going to go east, and he will come away from this visit hopefully with a better sense of how far we’ve come in the past three months,” he said.
The Obama administration has said it will begin withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan in July and the exercise will be complete by 2014.
But Mr Gates is yet to indicate how many of the 97,000 US forces in the country will be withdrawn.
The issue of civilian casualties is a source of widespread public anger and of tension between the Afghan government and the US.
Hundreds of people rallied on Sunday to denounce the killing of civilians.
The protesters condemned both Nato and the Taliban for killing civilians.
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The detention of a British diplomatic team in Libya was the result of a “serious misunderstanding”, Foreign Secretary William Hague has told the Commons.
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Hawk-Eye is used at Wimbledon when players challenge line calls Hawk-Eye, the UK company firm behind ball-tracking technology, has sold the firm to electronics giant Sony for an undisclosed sum.
The Winchester firm makes ball-tracking technology for tennis and cricket.
With Fifa agreeing to extend its experiments with goal-line technology there potentially may also be future openings in football.
Hawk-Eye inventor Paul Hawkins said the takeover by Sony created “immense opportunities for the sports industry”.
The device is also used in snooker.
The purchase includes all intellectual property rights, Hawk-Eye’s current full time staff as well as its technology, software and engineering.
Hawk-Eye was put up for sale last September by its owners, who include Mark Getty, a member of the wealthy US business dynasty,
They had hoped to attract a big company that could help the firm expand.
Despite its high-profile brand name, Winchester-based Hawk-Eye is a relatively small company with profits of £1.1m last year.
Last autumn, it said it expected to make a profit of £1.8m this year, reflecting expansion in the tennis world in particular.
Calls for goal-line technology in football increased after the World Cup tournament in South Africa when England’s Frank Lampard had a goal disallowed against Germany.
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Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell led the work on producing the document An attempt to spell out the conventions underpinning how government works is not a “first step” to a written constitution, peers have said.
The Lords Constitution Committee said the new Cabinet Manual should serve as a point of reference for civil servants but not “set in stone” the processes by which ministers reach decisions.
The document should not be formally endorsed by ministers and MPs, it said.
The manual was commissioned by former prime minister Gordon Brown in 2009.
At the time, Mr Brown asked the Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell to head up efforts to “consolidate the existing unwritten, piecemeal conventions that govern much of the way central government operates under our existing constitution into a single written document”.
The document covers a number of areas including the role and powers of the Sovereign, the executive, ministers, Parliament, processes of collective Cabinet decision making and government relations with the devolved administrations and the EU.
“It should not be endorsed by the Cabinet nor formally approved by Parliament”
Lords Constitution Committee
One draft chapter of the manual, on the processes for forming a government in the event of a Hung Parliament, was published in February 2010 – ahead of last year’s inconclusive election result – and was praised for explaining what should happen in such a situation.
But the cross-party Lords committee – whose members include former Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine, former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith and Lord Powell, a former senior adviser to Lady Thatcher – said it did not believe the rest of the manual was as useful.
Responding to the government’s consultation on the draft manual, it said the document should only seek to describe existing rules and practices and neither prescribe how ministers should act in any given situation in the future nor “set existing practice in stone”.
It expressed concern that the manual could be cited as evidence in judicial review of government decisions or other legal proceedings.
The document must be “entirely accurate and properly sourced” and all material not forming part of the laws, conventions and rules on government should potentially be removed, it added.
“In our view the Cabinet manual has limited value and relevance,” Baroness Jay, the committee’s chair and former Labour minister, said.
“We acknowledge that it provides greater transparency on certain aspects of the operation of government and it is to be welcomed in that context.
“However, this value has been given undue prominence by the helpful publication of chapter two in draft prior to the May 2010 general election; the benefits of the publication of that chapter do not, on the whole, extend to the rest of the manual.”
“We conclude that the manual is not the first step to a written constitution. It should be renamed the Cabinet Office manual and its greater relevance to officials than to politicians emphasised.”
In a statement, the Cabinet Office said it welcomed the committee’s submission and would “consider all comments received as we update the draft”.
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The space shuttle Discovery has undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) for its final journey back to Earth.
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Libyan government forces are advancing towards the oil port of Ras Lanuf, checking the rebels’ westward progress.
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Mobile phones are increasingly catching the eye of hi-tech thieves Google has used a “kill switch” to clean up phones hit by rogue Android applications.
Almost 60 malware-infected programmes were found on the Android Market on 1 March and estimates suggest they may have been downloaded by 200,000 users.
The malicious apps hid data-stealing code inside games, utilities and other programs.
The “kill switch” allows Google to remotely uninstall software from handsets running its operating system.
58 malicious applications were removed from the Android Market by Google soon after it was alerted to their presence.
It suspended the accounts of the developers who apparently uploaded the apps, and also contacted the police.
In a blog posting, Google said it had activated the remote application removal following an internal investigation.
The company plans to push out a security update, designed to close the loopholes that the malicious applications took advantage of.
It is not clear when this will arrive on handsets, as in many cases the timing will be under the control of mobile operators rather than Google.
The malicious code inside the applications used vulnerabilities in early versions of Android’s operating system to view and steal key information such as a phone’s unique ID number.
It also opened a backdoor onto the phone which would have allowed attackers to install any code they wanted.
Google’s action will not entirely remove the threat from the Android ecosystem.
This is because the malicious apps have been found on several unofficial versions of the Android marketplace where many more users may have downloaded and installed them.
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A series of public meetings to discuss a major shake-up of secondary and sixth form education in Powys start in Welshpool later.
They will be held at the county’s 13 high schools and three further education colleges over four weeks.
They were due to start last month, but when head teachers collectively raised concerns about the expected high turnout they were re-arranged.
Under plans by Powys Council, schools could merge and sixth forms could shut.
The local authority approved plans to radically transform secondary education last December, and it could mean that seven or eight schools could operate across 13 sites.
But the proposals are strongly opposed by union leaders who fear heavy job losses.
The proposals for post-16 schooling include stripping schools of their sixth forms and opening sixth form centres or working in partnership with the county’s further education college, Coleg Powys.
The council has said its options are a response to falling pupil numbers and the condition of buildings.
Councillor David Jones, who is responsible for schools, said: “The authority, schools and the college are facing serious challenges.”
But Newtown councillor Russell George, one of three board members to vote against the plans, has said he does not believe there is an economic case to justify the change.
“It is imperative we do nothing that harms the present provision,” he said.
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