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/ 11 April 2005

Marooned on baboon logic

I remember hanging around in my white American friend Paul’s house in Lusaka when we were about 12 years old and listening to a well-worn vinyl that had Bill Cosby or somebody’s voice bubbling out of it in a live recording from a stand-up show he was doing somewhere in the US of A. One scene springs to mind …

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/ 11 April 2005

Inside OBE: Teachers must take charge

In the previous edition of the Teacher, I introduced a different way of thinking about "the basics" in education. They are the basics not of learning skills, but of the conditions that make learning happen, and they apply directly — and even urgently — to the daily work of teachers. To introduce these “real” basics, I established four things.

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/ 11 April 2005

Blair warns of ‘nasty right-wing campaign’

The British political establishment last week embarked on its four-yearly quest for the support of 44-million voters in the 2005 general election in a mood of barely concealed anxiety about what the campaign may hold. Speaking in Downing Street, Prime Minister Tony Blair said: ”It is a big choice, a fundamental choice and there is a lot at stake.” Labour have pledged to ”fight for every seat and every vote.”

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/ 11 April 2005

Talabani elected as Iraqi president

The two-month political deadlock over the make-up of Iraq’s new leadership ended with the election of the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as president on Wednesday. More than nine weeks after the January 30 elections, the Iraqi Parliament voted in Talabani — a veteran of the Kurds’ Saddam-era struggles for independence — and paved the way for a new government in Baghdad.

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/ 11 April 2005

Scientists amazed by crocodiles in Sahara

Crocodiles living in the Sahara sounds like fiction, but Spanish scientists are investigating such a group in southern Mauritania. The reptiles are regarded as the last remains of the abundant crocodile population that roamed the Sahara before it dried up about 9 000 years ago. The group of a few dozen crocodiles subsists at a pond near the Senegalese border.

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/ 11 April 2005

Brown’s EU election boost

United Kingdom Finance Minister Gordon Brown’s stewardship of the British economy last week won glowing tributes from the European Commission. The commission’s upbeat assessment came in a week when Prime Minister Tony Blair called a May 5 general election that will be dominated by Conservative opposition charges that the government’s spending policies are out of control.