Category: news

Chelsea’s youngsters help them secure top spot in Group F as they come from a goal down to beat MSK Zilina.

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One of the first personal computers has fetched £110,000 ($174,000) in a sale at Christie’s auction house in London.

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Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn will receive a lifetime achievement prize at this year’s Dubai Film Festival, organisers announce.

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The education minister has announced she is investigating two school building contracts.

In the South Eastern board area, a potential fraud investigation is under way into the installation of second-hand parts in a heating plant at a Downpatrick school.

The contract is believed to be at De La Salle High school.

At the North Eastern board, there is an investigation into the contract for a new Magherafelt High school.

In a written statement to the assembly, Caitriona Ruane, said that during the procurement of a new building for Magherafelt High School, an arrangement was entered into with the contractor “without all the necessary approvals being in place with the department”.

She also said the board had made payment for work at the school, which included an element which had “not been approved by the department”.

Ms Ruane also referred to “serious concerns” around procurement practices in the South Eastern Education and Library Board (SEELB) area.

She said a file had been passed to the police regarding a “suspected fraud concerning the installation of a heating plant in a post-primary school”.

Ms Ruane said irregularities had also been identified in relation to the operation of a measured term contract for maintenance work in the SEELB.

She said she had commissioned a comprehensive investigation into the operation of the contract and wider procurement practice in the board.

In a statement, the SEELB said that it was “working closely” with the department to explore the “ramifications of a specific instance of suspected fraud, which involved a sum of under £7,000”.

“This ongoing work led by the Department of Education’s internal audit unit is focusing mainly on checking whether correct procedures have been followed in a range of other procurement actions in the same general area of activity over a number of years,” it said.

“The further review announced by the minister today will build on this work.

“It will give both the department and the board a clearer indication of what steps may need to be taken to improve our procurement processes and capacity.”

The board said it “fully shared” the department’s view that all procurement activities should be undertaken on the basis of the “highest possible professional standards”.

It said it would be co-operating with the review “to identify as soon as possible any further steps that may be necessary”.

The North Eastern Education and Library Board (NEELB) said it would also “co-operate fully” with the investigation of “all the circumstances around the procurement and work associated with the contract for Magherafelt High School.”

“The board has already conducted an internal enquiry into the circumstances of this contract and has made a detailed report available to the Department of Education and the Northern Ireland Audit Office,” it said.

“At all times, the board has endeavoured to work closely with its partners in the project to create a much needed secondary school to serve not only the town of Magherafelt, but also the whole district including Maghera where the secondary school has closed.

“The board, as always, has carried out its work in a spirit of openness and with integrity.”

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Legendary Hammer horror actress Ingrid Pitt, best known for starring in cult classics such as Countess Dracula, has died at the age of 73.

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The cause of “progressive” politics need not be set back by public spending cuts, Nick Clegg is to say, arguing the divide between him and Ed Miliband on how to make society fairer is widening.

He will accuse Labour’s leader of “outdated” views on tax, spending and how best to reduce inequality.

Helping the poorest at a time of austerity by protecting the NHS and schools spending is right, he will say.

Labour say coalition cuts are reckless and will hit the vulnerable hardest.

In a speech in London, the deputy prime minister will claim it is possible for the government to tackle poverty and promote fairness despite its planned £81bn budget cuts over the next four years.

“Certainly the crisis in the public finances means making some hard choices,” he will say in the Hugo Young memorial lecture.

“But it also forces us to be clearer about what it really means to be progressive. With less money, we need more focus.”

Mr Clegg will say he agrees with Mr Miliband – who announced a major internal policy review on Monday – that the UK is an unequal society and that for too many children the barriers preventing them from fulfilling their ambitions seem higher than ever.

But he will say he disagrees with Labour’s solutions for tacking inequality, saying they are stuck-in-the-past and too wedded to state action.

“The need to make choices is revealing an important divide in progressive politics,” he will argue.

“Between old progressives, who emphasize the power and spending of the central state and new progressives who focus on the power and freedom of citizens.

“Labour risk being on the wrong side of this divide. They are becoming the conservatives of British politics, defending outdated approaches rather than looking forwards to a new progressive future.”

The impact of deficit-reduction measures announced in June’s Budget and October’s Spending Review – including a rise in VAT rise and £18bn in welfare cuts – continue to be hotly contested, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies saying they are broadly regressive in their effect on different income groups.

But Mr Clegg will argue that those focused on “income-based snapshots” are ignoring the wider picture and the benefits that decisions such as protecting NHS spending, boost funding for early-years education and to invest in schools in the most deprived areas will have on the poorest families.

Labour say policies such as abolishing educational maintenance allowances and raising tuition fees, which the Lib Dems previously vowed to oppose, will make it harder for poorer children to get on in life.

But Mr Clegg will argue that, while it was in office, Labour pursued a narrow, target-driven approach to tackling inequality focused on “shifting money around rather than shifting life chances”.

“Social mobility is what characterises a fair society rather than a particular level of income equality,” he will say. “For old progressives, reducing snapshot inequality is the ultimate goal. For new progressives, reducing the barriers to mobility is.”

Many Lib Dem MPs have said the party needs to keep its options open in the run-up to the next election and should not rule out working with Labour in the event of another hung Parliament.

But Mr Clegg will claim Labour is struggling to engage with the new style of politics embodied by the coalition with the Conservatives – which is “working with integrity”.

“Labour is in danger of being left behind, of becoming stuck in an anti-pluralist rut,” he will add.

“When we practice plural, coalition policies, they cry foul. If you see every compromise as a betrayal, you will never understand plural politics and will certainly never be able to engage in it.”

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The government will cap the number of non-EU skilled migrants allowed to enter the UK at 43,000 next year, Home Secretary Theresa May is to announce.

Staff transferred by their companies from another country will be exempt from the regulation if their salary is more than £40,000.

BBC political editor Nick Robinson said the figure had been agreed after tense talks between the Tories and Lib Dems.

The parties had promised different policies at the general election.

Tory leader David Cameron promised to cap levels, while his then Lib Dem rival Nick Clegg said the policy ignored the fact that most immigration came from the EU.

Our correspondent said that after weeks of behind-the-scenes tension, the coalition would produce its compromise when Ms May gives a statement to MPs on Tuesday.

The 43,000 cap from next April will be 13% lower than this year’s figure but the highest figure recommended by the independent migration advisory committee last week.

It recommended that the number of migrant workers coming to Britain from outside the EU should be cut by between 13% and 25% next year.

However, it added that even this would contribute only 20% to the government’s target of reducing UK immigration to “tens of thousands”.

The other 80% cut would have come from student and family migration, it added.

Committee chairman Professor David Metcalf said the number of visas for skilled workers issued under what is called Tier One and Tier Two needed to be between 37,400 and 43,700 for 2011/12.

This would represent a cut of up to 12,600 from the 50,000 in 2009, he said.

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Scientists have developed a technique to estimate the age of a suspect from blood left at a crime scene.

Experts say the profiling method could be put to immediate use by forensic scientists where age information can provide investigative leads.

The technique exploits a characteristic of immune cells carried in the blood known as T cells.

The work by a team in the Netherlands has been published in the journal Current Biology.

T cells play a key role in recognising foreign “invaders” such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, or tumour cells.

As part of the process these cells use to recognise these invaders, small circular DNA molecules are produced.

The number of these circular DNA molecules – known as signal joint TCR excision circles (sjTRECs) – declines at a constant rate with age.

Writing in Current Biology, the researchers said they had shown that this biological phenomenon could be used for estimating the age of a human individual “accurately and reliably”.

The approach enables scientists to estimate a person’s age, give or take nine years, the researchers report.

This would allow individuals to be placed into generational categories spanning about 20 years.

Predicting human “phenotypes” – a person’s outward traits such as hair colour or eye colour – from DNA information is a newly emerging field in forensics.

But only a few phenotypic traits can currently be identified from DNA information with enough accuracy to have practical applications.

Lead author Manfred Kayser of the Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam said his test currently had the highest accuracy of any designed to estimate a “phenotypic” human trait from DNA information.

“Conventional DNA profiling applied in forensics can only identify persons already known to the investigating bodies,” Dr Kayser said.

“Hence, every forensic lab is confronted with cases where the DNA profile obtained from the evidence material does not match that of any known suspect tested, nor anybody in the criminal DNA database.

“In such cases, it is expected that appearance information estimated from evidence material will help in finding unknown persons.”

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S4C is a “bloated” organisation which could be run much more efficiently, a Welsh independent producer tells MPs.

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Police have arrested 10 radical Islamists in three countries over a terrorist plot to attack Belgium, Belgian federal prosecutors say.

They were detained in police swoops in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany after a year-long investigation by police in the Belgian city of Antwerp.

An “international jihadist terrorist group” was allegedly plotting to attack an unspecified target in Belgium.

The police investigation also looked at funding for a Chechen militant group.

The 10 suspects were arrested in simultaneous operations on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for prosecutors said in a press release.

They include Belgians, Dutch people, Moroccans and Chechens, and most of the detainees are resident in Antwerp, the spokeswoman said.

They were due to appear before a specialist anti-terrorism judge in Antwerp later on Tuesday.

In the course of the investigation, a number of other people were also arrested in Spain, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

The Belgian prosecutors’ spokeswoman said police had investigated both the alleged a plot to attack Belgium, and alleged recruitment and fundraising for a Chechen militant group called “Caucasus Emirate”.

It was not immediately clear if this was a reference to the radical militants fighting to carve an Islamist state out of the Russian North Caucasus region.

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North Korea has fired artillery shells across its western maritime border, prompting return fire from South Korea, officials say.

Dozens of the shells landed on a South Korean island, from which plumes of smoke are rising. At least four soldiers are said to have been hurt.

South Korea has issued its highest non-wartime alert in response.

A BBC correspondent says this is one of the most serious incidents between the two Koreas since the end of the war.

Top leaders are meeting in an underground bunker in Seoul over the incident, Reuters news agency reported.

The incident comes days after North Korea revealed it had a modern uranium enrichment plant – potentially giving it a second route to a nuclear weapon.

Earlier, the US ruled out more denuclearisation talks while Pyongyang continued to work on the facility.

South Korean officials said artillery rounds landed on Yeonpyeong island, near the disputed inter-Korean maritime border to the west of the Korean Peninsula.

“A North Korean artillery unit staged an illegal firing provocation at 1434 PM (0534 GMT) and South Korean troops fired back immediately in self-defence,” a defence ministry spokesman told AFP.

A resident on the island told the agency that dozens of houses were damaged, while television pictures reportedly showed plumes of smoke rising above the island.

“Houses and mountains are on fire and people are evacuating. You can’t see very well because of plumes of smoke,” a witness on the island told YTN television station.

“People are frightened to death and shelling continues as we speak,” the witness said.

South Korea had deployed fighter jets to the island, Yonhap news agency said.

This western maritime border has been the scene of numerous clashes between the two Koreas in the past.

In March, a South Korean warship went down near the border with the loss of 46 lives.

International investigators say a North Korean torpedo sank the ship, although Pyongyang denies any role in the incident.

Since then relations between the two neighbours – who have not signed a peace treaty since the 1950-53 Korean War – have been very tense.

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