The remains of the man, who was reported missing in 2009, were found by members of the public in the Highlands The remains of a man who went missing from London two years ago have been found on a Scottish mountain, police have said. Members of the public made the discovery on Sron Mhic Gille-Mhartainn in the Monadhliath mountains near Laggan in the Highlands on Thursday afternoon. Northern Constabulary were alerted at around 2.20pm the same day. They have identified the man, who was reported missing from London’s Metropolitan Police area in 2009, but will not reveal this information until next of kin have been informed. The remains are said to have been present on the mountain for a long time. A report will be submitted to the procurator fiscal. London Scotland guardian.co.uk
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Daniel Powell, 26, joins more than 500 mourners to pay respects to father, David, last of four miners killed in Welsh pit to be buried A son who survived the Gleision mining tragedy paid his last respects on Friday to his father who died in the accident. Daniel Powell joined more than 500 mourners at the funeral of his father, David, 50, who was one of four miners killed in the Welsh pit. Powell Sr – known as Dai Bull – was the pit maintenance manager and was trapped underground when a torrent of water flooded the tunnels. His 26-year-old son was just metres from him but managed to make a desperate escape to safety. Powell Sr was found dead alongside fellow workers Charles Breslin, 62, Phillip Hill, 45, and Garry Jenkins, 39. His family and friends turned out at St David’s church in his home village of Ystalyfera, near Swansea, to pay tribute to him. His coffin was taken into church with his three sons Daniel, Matthew, 29, and Korie, 12, as pallbearers. His white miner’s helmet was laid on top of the coffin. Neath MP Peter Hain told the congregation: “He was a much loved man and proud miner. He was so proud in fact that his miners helmet and lamp stands on top of his coffin.” Floral tributes in the hearse read “Dad” and “Bampa” – a Welsh nickname for grandad. Mourners were in tears as the hymns Abide with Me, The Old Rugged Cross and Calon Lân were sung. Daniel Powell had worked at the Gleision colliery near Pontardawe in the Swansea valley for a year alongside his father – and was among the three miners to escape. He is one of the last sons in the once-mighty south Wales coalfield to follow the tradition of joining his father underground. Powell helped give rescuers vital information about where the men may be holed up in the flooded mine and then endured an agonising wait for news of his father. After the body was found, the family paid tribute to “proud” miner, a father-of-four who had worked underground most of his life. They said: “He was a wonderful husband, father, grandfather, son and true friend. “Dai was a proud collier, our life and soul. He brought joy and fun to everyone he met.” Police and the Health and Safety Executive have launched an investigation into the tragedy. David Powell’s is the last funeral of the four to have taken place. Wales Mining Coal Energy industry Steven Morris guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Texting is turning out to be a real pain in the neck. Dedicated texters are spending so much time with their heads bent over their cell phones or iPads that it’s causing muscle strain, creating headaches, neck and back pain, and even problems with fingers and wrists, warn doctors who…
Continue reading …Wikipedia shut down its Italian-language version for two days this week to protest a law widely seen as an attempt to spare Silvio Berlusconi embarrassment by muzzling the press and online criticism. The law, currently being debated in Italy’s parliament, would require websites to publish a correction within 48 hours…
Continue reading …Steve Jobs authorized a biography of himself so his kids could “know him,” author Walter Isaacson reveals in Time . “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why, and to understand what I did,” Jobs told Isaacson in their final interview just weeks ago at Jobs’…
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Europe’s refugees cannot escape poor living conditions in Italy because of European law. Harriet Grant investigates John Domokos Harriet Grant Christian Bennett
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Ofqual could be given the power to hand out fines to boards that make mistakes setting exams Exam boards are facing fines from the government’s qualifications regulator after a string of errors in this summer’s GCSE and A-levels. Ministers will on Tuesday propose an immediate change to the law to allow Ofqual to impose a financial penalty – capped at a certain proportion of an exam board’s turnover – if they make mistakes in the future. But the move was questioned by a head teachers’ leader, who said any fines would simply be passed on by the boards to schools, adding to already large exams bills. The boards themselves believe the move, to be introduced in an amendment to the education bill currently in the House of Lords, pre-judges an inquiry by Ofqual into this year’s mistakes, which is due to report by the end of the year. Ofqual launched its investigation in July, after this summer’s GCSE and A-level results season featured at least 10 mistakes, affecting tens of thousands of pupils. One error was a printing mistake by the AQA board, leading to some schools receiving GCSE maths papers, taken by 32,000 pupils, which included questions from a previous version of the exam. In another case, an OCR maths AS level paper with 6,790 candidates featured an impossible question worth 11% of the marks available. Four boards serving schools in England and Northern Ireland apologised for errors. Ofqual already has power to take strong sanctions against them, ultimately it can ban an exam board from setting exams. However, two weeks ago, Nick Gibb, schools minister, wrote to the boards to tell them that Ofqual’s current powers “inhibit swift action and do not serve as an adequate deterrent to problems such as we saw this summer”. He said the government would change the law to give Ofqual the power to hand out fines. The government believes that Ofqual needs additional sanctions because the watchdog’s current power to ban a board from operating is to much of a “nuclear” option, with potential to cause major disruption for pupils and schools. Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Ofqual’s review is not due to publish until December, and it seems strange to pre-empt the findings in this way. “A fine on awarding bodies will simply turn into a fine on schools and colleges, since they pay for all the costs of examinations through exam fees. Institutions are already spending large sums on exam fees, and any further burden would be a perverse consequence. It would be completely counter-productive.” Schools A-levels GCSEs Education policy Warwick Mansell guardian.co.uk
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David Simmonds is jailed for life for battering the Chinese-born economics graduate to death in woods near her workplace A 21-year-old man has been jailed for life for the murder of an economics graduate who was battered to death in woodlands near her workplace. David Simmonds, of Heanor, Derbyshire, was told by a judge at Nottingham crown court that he would serve a minimum term of 27 years and 213 days before being considered for release. Simmonds admitted the murder of 25-year-old Jia Ashton, whose body was discovered in Sleetmoor Woods, near Somercotes in Derbyshire, on 13 March, three days after she was last seen leaving her job as a business analyst at chocolate-maker Thorntons. Simmonds originally pleaded not guilty to Chinese-born Ashton’s murder but changed his plea to guilty last week. Simmonds, at 1.88 metres (6ft 2in) and 120kg (19 stone), was nearly three times the weight of Ashton, who stood at 1.5 metres, weighed 41kg and wore size two shoes. He subjected her to a brutal, sustained and violent attack which ended her life when her heart was crushed by his weight on top of her chest and ruptured. The pathologist who examined her body said her injuries were of the type usually only sustained in car accidents or a fall from a great height. Detectives leading the investigation said the attack on Ashton, who was on her way home to the house she shared with her music teacher husband, Matthew, was a chance attack and Simmonds did his best to conceal the murder. He covered her body with twigs and branches and scattered her belongings around Sleetmoor Woods immediately after the murder. Ashton, who graduated from Warwick University with an economics degree, was eventually found by a mountain search and rescue dog. Crime guardian.co.uk
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Four police officers from Juárez, a suburb of the city of Monterrey, are being held pending further investigation Several police officers in northern Mexico allowed a violent drug gang to hold kidnap victims in the local jail while ransom payments were being negotiated, an official has said. Four police officers from Juárez, a suburb of the city of Monterrey, are being held pending further investigation, said Jorge Domene, the security spokesman for Nuevo León state. The scandal came to light this week when state and federal police freed two kidnapping victims from jail cells in Juárez. Investigators believe that the victims were abducted by the extremely violent Zetas cartel and that the officers were working for the Zetas, Domene said. Local police in northern Mexico have often been bribed or threatened into providing drug gangs with information, protecting their activities or detaining members of rival gangs. Domene noted that last weekend, the Nuevo León attorney general’s office detained 73 local policemen from a half dozen communities in the state who confessed to having performed various services for gangs, including spying, acting as lookouts, and carrying out killings and kidnappings. Authorities then conducted background checks on 99 other officers, 21 of whom were fired after refusing to cooperate. Forty-three have passed the checks so far. Local police forces in Mexico are often low-paid and poorly armed. A government report in September said many Mexican police officers still earn $350 a month or less, despite reform efforts aimed at increasing wages and reducing corruption. At another northern Mexico prison, in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, a stash of illicit weapons was found buried in a cell block just two days after authorities discovered a smaller arsenal in a separate block, the attorney general’s office of Chihuahua state said. The most scandalous case of prison corruption came to light in July 2010, when an investigation revealed that guards and officials at a prison in the northern city of Gómez Palacio had freed inmates belonging to a gang, lent them guns and sent them off in official vehicles to carry out drug-related killings, including the massacre of 17 people earlier that year. The guards allowed the inmates to return to their cells after the killings so that they would be safe from reprisals, authorities said at the time. “We have barely been in time to put the brakes on organised crime in the first stages, but in some towns, in some areas of the country, they have infiltrated authorities in a practically symbiotic relationship,” President Felipe Calderon said during a speech to members of the business community on Thursday. Mexico Drugs trade guardian.co.uk
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President vows to defend Zimbabwe from ‘machinations of the imperialists’ Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, has expressed sympathy with autocrats toppled in the Arab spring, blaming their downfall on the “machinations of the imperialists”. Africa’s oldest leader reportedly warned that western powers could also target Zimbabwe. “We must remain prepared to defend our country and sovereignty,” he said. “We have had good relations with those Arab countries in trouble today,” Mugabe, 87, was quoted as saying on New Zimbabwe.com , in a report attributed to Deutsche Press-Agentur. “We have sympathy with them because they did not read warnings that they should have read. That things were changing because of the wishes of their people, and because of machinations of the imperialists.” Addressing senior members of his Zanu-PF party in Harare, Mugabe continued: “The pattern has been the same … Protests against some political measure or system or wanting change. It ends up being a demand for the entire government to go.” The president, in power for 31 years, said Zimbabwe must be sensitive to this year’s events in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya, where western powers pretended “to be following the grievances of the protesters”, but were motivated by hunger for natural resources. Zimbabwe has refused to recognise the National Transitional Council and swiftly expelled the Libyan ambassador to Harare when he defected from Muammar Gaddafi’s fold to the new authority. Despite this year’s turmoil, there has been little sign of an uprising in Zimbabwe. In February, six activists were arrested and charged with treason after holding a meeting and viewing videos from the revolution in Egypt. They are standing trial on lesser charges of threatening to incite public violence but still face a jail sentence of 10 years. Mugabe, resentful of a power-sharing deal with the Movement for Democratic Change, has been pushing for fresh elections next year. But he admitted: “I am sorry we have not been in control of the mechanisms; mechanisms that we thought would lay the road to an election this year in terms of our decision taken at our last conference in Mutare (last December). The constitution-making process has been moving at a tortoise’s pace.” The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is due to arrive in Zimbabwe this weekend and has requested a meeting with the president. Robert Mugabe Zimbabwe Africa Arab and Middle East unrest Libya Middle East Protest Egypt Tunisia Syria David Smith guardian.co.uk
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