Category: news

Patients with ME will no longer be able to donate blood in the UK under new safety guidelines coming into force in November.

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Take On Me, by A-Ha, entered the top 40 in the UK 25 years ago

The flickering, comic book-style animation of 1985 video Take On Me, by Norwegian trio A-ha, was a defining moment in the history of music promos.

Twenty-five years after the song entered the UK top 40, the combination of quirky video and insanely catchy song – driven by Magne Furuholme’s killer hook – remain the perfect pop package.

It was written after Furuholme and guitarist Pal Waaktaar – of Norwegian band Bridges – invited dashing acquaintance Morten Harket to go to London to form a new group.

They had yet to hear him sing.

“I went off with the other two to Pal’s parents’ house, we were still kids more or less, and in his room there was a shabby keyboard and a really bad acoustic guitar,” remembers Harket, now 51.

“And I said, ‘play me something, just let’s start somewhere’.

“That riff of Magne’s is the first thing I heard and I knew immediately that this was a big song.”

That riff, coupled with Harket’s falsetto plea to take him on, were to ultimately propel the first song they wrote together to number one in the US Billboard singles chart.

With a little help from that video.

The trio – who are to split after the release of a greatest hits album and some live dates – moved from Norway to London in January 1983, signing with Warner Bros in December.

But the release of a formative version of the song, complete with an early low-budget video, failed to chart.

A-ha, whose greatest hits album is out this week, will retire after a series of live dates. Credit Jason Joyce

They returned to the studio, this time with Barbara Dickson and Cliff Richard producer Alan Tarney, “and did Take On Me the way you know it”.

“The rest is history,” says Harket. “It was picked up by the Warner’s people in the US and they then introduced us to the video director, Steve Barron.”

“Warner’s said they had these young good-looking guys from Norway with a good pop song and that they really believed in them,” remembers Barron, whose CV included Ant Music, by Adam and the Ants, and Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean.

He was given a big budget as well as a rare commodity in promo making – time.

“They said, ‘we’ll give you as much time as you want and we’ll release it when you’ve finished it’,” says Barron, 54.

Warner’s in Los Angeles hooked him up with US animator Mike Patterson whose five-minute student film Commuter had made a big impression with executives at the label.

Short film Commuter, by Mike Patterson, was the forerunner to Take On Me

It was made using the rotoscope technique – drawing over live action frame by frame – and featured the fleeting, black-and-white living comic book style that was to become Take On Me’s calling card.

“Rotoscoping uses live action motion but my drawing style anyway was very loose and sketchy – no-one had really drawn anything like that style before,” says Patterson, 53, now an animation lecturer at the University of Southern California.

“Rotoscope was usually done in a dry kind of way, very static or very sterile looking.

“But mine is more about just deriving the motion and creating a feeling of energy.”

A concept was devised by Steve Barron, based on a comic book he read as a young child featuring “guys racing against each other on motorbikes and sidecars”.

The band and actors were shot on film before the tapes were handed to Mike Patterson who, over 16 weeks, sketched some 3,000 drawings over individual frames.

In the video, a girl reading a comic book in a greasy spoon cafe is attracted to a sketched version of Harket before she finds herself sucked into the animated world.

The pair are pursued by violent motorcyclists before the singer breaks out of the animation and the pair are finally reunited in the real world.

“I knew that it was going to look good but I had no idea it was going to be in heavy rotation on MTV for a year,” says Patterson, who worked on the video with wife Candace Reckinger.

Perhaps the most memorable scenes feature Harket and the girl looking in and out of the real and animated worlds through a mirror.

Patterson, who was 28 when he got the Take On Me job, says the video was “partly responsible for the revival of experimentation in animation” while Barron says it was one of his proudest achievements.

“Often in videos, you didn’t really get to work an idea through properly and I knew with this one, because we were given full time, that we would really be able to do it,” adds Barron.

Harket says the video was “unlike anything else and it gave the song the type of exposure that it needed”.

“The video bought us time because the song was not an easy, immediate pop hit.”

As Harket says, the song itself – with its simplistic chorus, synthesized drums and mock slap bass line – “has never been off American radios”.

“I think it’s quirky enough to be lasting because your other types of hit songs, in a way, fit so well,” says Harket whose band are playing classic album Hunting High and Low in its entirety at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Friday night.

“You get too used to them and you don’t hear them anymore so they fade away.”

Take On Me was on hit album Hunting High and Low

Despite the success of the video and sales of more than 500,000 copies in the UK, Take On Me sat at number two for three weeks behind The Power Of Love, by Jennifer Rush.

That the song only reached number one in the UK when it was covered by long forgotten boy band A1, in 2000, is sacrilege.

So needless to say, it’s the original video which remains a regular fixture of music video channels.

“What’s crazy for me is that I have students who were born after the video and they say it was their favourite video,” says Patterson, now 53.

“I can go anywhere on the earth, I’ve been in so many different continents, and wherever I go, everybody goes, ‘I love that video’.”

A-ha’s greatest hits album, 25, is out now. The band are playing a series of live dates in Europe throughout the rest of the year.

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Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai accuses President Robert Mugabe of violating the constitution and unilateral decision-making.

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Migrant workers still hit by the global recession

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The IB is offered in around 200 UK schools

The credibility of the International Baccalaureate (IB) has been questioned amid claims parts of its marking guides were plagiarised from Wikipedia.

The Times Educational Supplement (TES) reports that guides for three history papers are being investigated by the IB’s managing board.

The guides offer model essays and are used by examiners marking papers.

The A-level alternative is mainly taken in private schools, but ministers say other schools could offer it.

One IB examiner told the TES they were “shocked” to discover what was called “serious examples of academic dishonesty” in the guide for one of the papers.

He claimed information from 14 of 24 questions contained sections copied from websites such as Wikipedia.

A teacher who runs training workshops for the IB warned the programme had been put at risk and told the TES they were “livid” and “stunned”.

The IB diploma, taken by teenagers, is currently offered in more than 200 UK schools and is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to A-levels.

An IB spokesman told the TES: “The IB has always insisted on academic honesty throughout our examination system since the organisation was founded.

“We have always taken immediate and appropriate action when we discover any violation.

“The issue related to the history paper mark scheme is one of those cases, and our investigation of this matter is moving forward but has not yet been completed.

“As a general rule, for each exam session we investigate any and all allegations of malpractice.

“This includes deploying technology to screen and scan scripts, and conducting unannounced inspections of schools’ arrangements for the examinations to ensure compliance.”

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Mr Abdulmutallab graduated from UCL in 2008

A man accused of trying to blow up a transatlantic airliner was not radicalised while at a UK university, a report has concluded.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied at University College London before his alleged Christmas Day 2009 attack on a Detroit-bound jet.

But a report for the university said the Nigerian graduate had not turned to al-Qaeda while studying in London.

However, the panel said the risk of radicalisation could not be eliminated.

It also says the university should monitor those who speak on campus.

Mr Abdulmutallab is currently awaiting trial in the United States accused of the attempted bombing.

Passengers overpowered the former UCL student after he had allegedly attempted to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear.

He has indicated to the court that he will plead guilty to some offences at his eventual trial.

The student graduated from UCL in 2008, having spent three years studying engineering with business finance.

He then left the UK to study in Dubai – and later joined an Arabic language course in Yemen.

The UCL council asked a panel, chaired by an outside academic, to look into Mr Abdulmutallab’s time at the university.

The report, published on Friday, said: “There is no evidence to suggest either that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was radicalised while a student at UCL or that conditions at UCL during that time or subsequently are conducive to the radicalisation of students.”

The panel said a “consistent” picture had emerged from interviews with the former student’s contemporaries.

They all said he was modest, polite, well-spoken and friendly. Nobody had reported any significant change in his character or behaviour.

Some of his Muslim friends considered him an “unlikely terrorist” because he was well versed in the Koran.

However, the report raised concerns about how effective the university and students’ union had been at monitoring who was coming onto campus to speak at events.

In the wake of the arrest, a number of press commentators and think tanks attacked universities for not doing enough to stop extremist preachers speaking on campuses.

The UCL report said that both the university and the union should take steps to better monitor who was speaking at events – but said that there was no evidence that the students’ own Islamic society was extreme.

It said the university should formally scrutinise events on the fringe of the campus and review its own code on freedom of speech in the light of a separate review of the issue by Universities UK, the national umbrella body.

It added the risk of radicalisation cannot be “eliminated” without altering UCL’s educational mission and character.

Sir Stephen Wall, Chair of UCL Council, said: “In sections of the media it was implied or stated that UCL was in some sense complicit in what happened.

“The review panel have tested such claims thoroughly as set out in their report, and I hope that their work will serve to alleviate some of the more outlandish claims that have been made.”

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Hollywood film studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer begins plans to file for bankruptcy protection in an effort to rid itself of $4bn (£2.5bn) of debts.

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The talks came after the devolved administrations issued a joint declaration on cuts

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg pledged to look again at the level of spending cuts proposed in NI.

The commitment comes amid claims from ministers that a major raid on the region’s capital expenditure budget would break a deal struck during the peace process.

Mr Clegg held talks with the First and Deputy First Minister on Thursday.

Mr Clegg said he could not provide any assurances because decisions were still being made ahead of 20 October.

“The First Minister and Deputy First Minister raised with me in very clear terms their concerns about the possible impact of the deficit reduction plan we are setting out on capital expenditure in Northern Ireland,” he said.

“I have said that I will go away with colleagues in the coalition government to look at this.”

“We understand their concerns, we’ll look at them but obviously I can’t provided detailed assurances now because everything is still being decided upon before October 20.”

Mr Clegg met Democratic Unionist leader Mr Robinson and Sinn Fein’s Mr McGuinness hours after the Stormont Executive joined forces with the Welsh and Scottish administrations to warn the Treasury not to cut too much from their block grants too soon.

But Northern Ireland’s political leaders have also put an additional argument to the coalition, claiming a cut to their capital budget would break an £18bn ten-year investment pledge made by the last Labour government as part of the peace negotiations.

The 2006 St Andrews Agreement, which paved the way for the DUP and Sinn Fein to share power, incorporated a joint deal between the British and Irish governments to fund infrastructure projects in the region.

While the Dublin authorities insist they remain committed to the multi-billion package, despite the country’s severe economic woes, there has been no such undertaking from Downing Street, which has questioned whether Gordon Brown made a promise he couldn’t keep.

While Mr Clegg’s remarks will have given them a degree of comfort tonight, the tone he struck moments later would suggest they shouldn’t bank on a positive outcome.

After praising those involved in the peace process for their extraordinary courage he said the problem needed dealing with sooner rather than later.

“I think in economic terms the worst thing to do would be for this generation to say it’s all too difficult to deal with this deficit, we’ll get our children and grandchildren to pay off our debts.

“At some point someone has to wipe the slate clean, otherwise all we’ll be asking our children and grandchildren in Northern Ireland and elsewhere is to pay off debts for which they are not responsible – and I don’t think that’s right.”

After the meeting Mr Robinson again stressed the need to treat Northern Ireland differently.

“During our meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister, we once again reiterated our position that Northern Ireland faces a particular set of challenges which differ from the rest of the UK.

“The Coalition’s proposed cuts will, I have no doubt, have a far greater effect here that any other region.”

Mr McGuinness added: “In the course of our discussions, the First Minister and I again reiterated our call for the British Government to fulfil their obligations under the St Andrews Agreement and we will continue to make that case through every avenue possible.”

Earlier the three devolved administrations issued a joint statement warning that projected cuts to the block grants would have a long-term negative impact on the regional economies.

The statement, signed by Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness, along with their Scottish and Welsh counterparts, Alex Salmond and Carwyn Jones, goes on to say that significant cuts should only be implemented when the recovery was well established.

They urged the government to share its thinking before the spending review on 20 October so that their budgets could be organised as effectively as possible.

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Dancing stewardesses, a very big book and President Obama’s podium malfunction. It’s the week’s weird and wonderful video stories in Newsbeat’s Odd Box with Dominic Byrne.

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Bird-brained: Analysing search data found that the parrot cage market was under-served

What do you do if you’re a successful search marketing agency, running global paid ad campaigns for high-profile clients such as the Hilton hotel group, and you want to expand your expertise?

Move into the parrot cage business, of course.

This isn’t a Monty Python sketch. Forward 3D are part of the Forward group, which in 2009 had revenue of £57m. The group includes companies such as Uswitch and Omio. As well as running paid search ad campaigns for clients, Forward 3D are also responsible for InvisibleHand, a price comparison plug-in for browsers.

The ‘enterprise’ parrot cage: The JustShops group of sites offers more than 4,000 products

So how did they end up as the UK’s largest importer of parrot cages?

Martin McNulty is the company’s general manager. He says, “We’ve built technology that allows us to process and understand tens of billions of interactions that happen online.

“What do I mean by that? Consumers interact with web-pages, they see adverts and adverts drive them to websites, and within those websites they may or may not choose to transact.

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“The net effect of this is that we have technology that allows us to profile demand on the internet, and crucially it allows us to profile profitable demand on the internet.”

The company wanted to test an idea they’d had to expand the services they offered to their clients.

So they looked for popular search terms that didn’t attract much in the way of paid advertising on Google – working on the assumption that this could signify a gap in the market.

In-depth analysis of massive amounts of click data threw up a lot of pet supplies queries, and in particular parrot cages. They tested the water by buying keywords using Google AdWords, and building a simple ecommerce site using a third-party product, Shopify.

The JustCages website went live – without the ability to actually buy the cages, to gauge demand before sourcing stock.

Within two weeks it became clear the appetite was there. Orders were fulfilled initially by so-called drop shippers; these are manufactures or wholesalers who will ship goods on behalf of vendors directly to the customer, bypassing the need to hold inventory, minimising risk.

Once profitability was proven, the company developed a more sophisticated website, and ultimately began to warehouse inventory. Just over a year later and they operate 10 niche outlets selling cages and pet homes for a range of animals and fish.

Mr McNulty says that “what we absolutely didn’t do was build a beautiful website on day one. What we really did was figure out the demand side first.”

In the days before e-commerce and the internet, product availability was controlled by the needs of bricks and mortar retailers to invest in stock that was guaranteed to sell. With limited shelf-space and the high cost of holding inventory in warehouses, providing a wide range of niche items with potentially limited appeal to shoppers in a defined geographic area was fairly risky.

Martin McNulty: “What you shouldn’t do is go out and build a website tomorrow and buy a load of stock.”

The web brought a paradigm shift in retailing. Big online stores such as Amazon, freed from the constraints of bricks and mortar, were able to stock not just best-sellers, but a wide-range of less popular, niche items. And it turned out that some of these harder-to-find items sold well enough over the internet to create a significant revenue stream.

This is the ‘long tail’, a phrase coined by , and subsequently laid out in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

Asked to define it, Mr Anderson says, “The nutshell definition is the world beyond the blockbuster.”

“It is sort of the everything else. Now, where is that line drawn. Statistically, we’ve typically drawn the line where the head represents the inventory of the largest bricks and mortar retailer in that space, whereas the tail represents everything else.”

The long tail refers to a graph, where the horizontal axis shows all the products one can buy. The vertical axis represents popularity, with just a few blockbuster products selling in huge numbers. All the other products taper off and sell in tiny numbers. But on the internet, this taper – or long tail – is much fatter, because shoppers can user search engines to find the niche products that they can not find in big retail stores.

According to Mr Anderson, the internet is the means for small businesses to operate exclusively in the long tail, and sell these products over huge geographical areas.

“Google represents the kind of universal door to these niche products,” he says. “Because they’re unique they tend to show up high in a carefully crafted Google search, and because it’s the internet you can find it anywhere.”

There are other sites who offer a variety of niche shops under one roof to exploit the long tail. US-based Hayneedle is one of them. The firm started out as hammocks.com and is now the umbrella for over 200 speciality stores.

Search analysis has also been used by companies like Demand Media, to track down where demand for information and content lies. But Forward3Ds marriage of the two approaches appears, at the moment, to be unusual.

Inventory is now held in a 22,000 square foot warehouse in Suffolk

Adopting a demand-led business model based on search analysis provides other benefits – cost and speed.

Mike Davis, a senior analyst at Ovum, says that “the normal route for a marketing analysis is lots of people and lots of time.”

He feels that companies will find other unusual uses for search data. “I can see lots of other innovative ideas or applications coming from these search technologies, because we have so much stuff out there in electronic form.”

Mr McNulty agrees. “I think the word that everyone is going to be talking about is metadata, examining the minutiae of your internet behaviour or your purchasing behaviour. And I think that that’s the big trend.

“It’s very difficult to know what you’re going to do with data in advance of it going online, and I think the companies that are going to succeed are the ones that are able to amass lots of data and figure out what to do with it later.”

Despite the fact that Forward 3D’s focus remains technology, they are preparing to launch a further 20 niche stores, expanding into the long tail to offer cat trees, dog beds and pet food.

JustShops, the subsidiary, offers over 4,000 products, with a further 2,000 due to be added. It now makes over 26,000 shipments a year which add up to £3.2m in sales.

Mr McNulty says “it’s our belief that anyone can come up with an idea; turning the idea into something profitable, that’s the hard bit.

“And if you can work through tests in a very quick way that doesn’t cost you a lot of money, ultimately that’s what’s going to deliver the most value for you.”

The key is to fail often but to fail cheaply and to fail quickly.”

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Independent schools have to justify their charitable status

Attorney General Dominic Grieve has asked a tribunal to review the rules on whether private schools can be charities.

Independent schools want a judicial review of the Charity Commission’s rules, after two schools were refused charitable status last year.

Mr Grieve has asked the Charities Tribunal, which covers England and Wales, to clarify the law.

Schools say the “public benefit” they must prove is too narrowly defined.

The loss of charitable status threatens tax benefits for independent schools.

The Independent Schools Council, which represents 1,260 schools across the UK, argues that the Charity Commission puts too much emphasis on the provision of bursaries for poorer students in its definition of public benefit.

The Charities Tribunal operates primarily as an ombudsman in specific disputes between charities and the Commission, which also covers England and Wales.

But for the first time, Mr Grieve has asked it to review the interpretation of the law more generally.

In a document, he has laid out various scenarios – in which fictional schools offer provisions such as teaching support and access to sports facilities for local state schools – for the tribunal judges to consider.

In his letter to the tribunal, Mr Grieve said there was “uncertainty” in the operation of the law.

“The uncertainty is contrary to the interests of charity because it means that the charities concerned do not know whether or not they are operating within or without the terms of their constitutions,” the letter said.

ISC chief executive David Lyscom said the organisation was “delighted” with Mr Grieve’s decision.

“The entire sector continues to be at the whim of the Commission’s prevailing and subjective view as to what public benefit means, and what is ‘sufficient’ for a school to pass the public benefit test,” he said.

He said ISC would also continue its push for a judicial review of the issue.

The Charities Commission said the referral to the tribunal was the “appropriate” way to proceed, and Mr Grieve’s reference covered “substantially the same ground as the judicial review”.

“In preparing all our guidance on public benefit, the Commission was at all times diligent in consulting charities and others affected, and in making clear the process we had followed,” it said.

“We stand by our approach and the legal analysis which underpins it, and we are confident that the Commission has acted reasonably and followed due process,” it added.

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A UN employee is kidnapped in Sudan’s Darfur region, as a major UN delegation arrives in the area.

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Scotland select fit-again Gary Caldwell and chose QPR striker Jamie Mackie to lead the attack against Czech Republic, rather than Kenny Miller.

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Jane Clough’s colleagues tried to save her at Blackpool Victoria Hospital

A former ambulance technician has admitted stabbing a nurse to death in a hospital car park in Lancashire.

Jane Clough, 26, was found with multiple stab wounds outside Blackpool Victoria Hospital on 25 July.

Her ex-boyfriend and father of her baby girl, Jonathan Vass, 30, pleaded guilty to murder at Preston Crown Court.

Ms Clough, of Barrowford, near Nelson, had just finished her shift at the accident and emergency department when she was attacked walking to her car.

She was rushed back into the unit and her colleagues tried to save her but she died shortly afterwards.

Ms Clough had worked as a nurse at the hospital’s A&E department for four years and was described by colleagues as “very caring, compassionate and highly competent”.

Vass, of Conway Drive, Preston, will be sentenced later.

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The African Union says its troops are now in control of more than 40% of the Somali capital, as splits are reported in the main Islamist group.

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