Chris Arnot
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/ 25 July 2006

Learning in times of war

Professor Mosa al-Mosawe has lost 34 of his staff since 2003. And when he says “lost”, he doesn’t mean that they have resigned or retired, or simply moved on to pastures new. He means that they have been shot or kidnapped, never to be seen again. “Around 50 students have also gone missing,” he says, speaking on a cellphone from his office in Baghdad University.

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/ 19 April 2006

Mandarin for starters

Brighton College, where the fees are £20 466 a year, has one thing in common with the state-funded Kingsford community school in the East End of London, where more than 50% of students qualify for free school meals. Both are committed to the teaching of Mandarin Chinese. At Kingsford, the subject has been compulsory for all pupils aged 13 and 14 since the school opened in September 2000.

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/ 22 April 2005

Thinking up solutions to Britain’s poor railway system

Can academics succeed where successive governments, a huge nationalised industry and many otherwise successful entrepreneurs have failed, by making the trains run on time? Keith Madelin, professor of civil engineering at Birmingham University in England, briskly dismisses talk of targeted improvements in efficiency. ‘You just can’t do that,” he insists. The director of Rail Research […]