Education secretary Nicky Morgan’s meddling has reached ludicrous levels with the creation of a new Whitehall overlord tasked with tackling slightly bad behaviour All ministers go mad, but some go mad faster than others. A sure sign is a craving to appoint “tsars”.

Ousted president fled from prison in January 2011 after it was stormed and the guards overpowered

Temporary deployment of HMS Bulwark is coming to an end with no agreement to continue as summer exodus of migrants from north Africa reaches its peak

Temporary deployment of HMS Bulwark is coming to an end with no agreement to continue as summer exodus of migrants from north Africa reaches its peak

Despite rivals’ protestations, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush enjoy the support of their own party’s voters. But the other party’s dynasty candidate? Not a chance

For these ‘citizens of the world’, the office can be anything from a beach hut in Brisbane to a Starbucks in Seattle, thanks to the growing prevalence of remote-based work. But roaming the globe from cafe to cafe is not without its challenges

For these ‘citizens of the world’, the office can be anything from a beach hut in Brisbane to a Starbucks in Seattle, thanks to the growing prevalence of remote-based work. But roaming the globe from cafe to cafe is not without its challenges

Farmers in the eastern Burmese state of Shan have begun replacing poppy crops that produce opium with plantations of coffee and rubber, helped by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Women in cycling are tired of complaining about the same issues but sometimes the arguments have to be made: putting women in bikinis by podiums is degrading, outdated and unwelcome in a sport that should be aiming for equality

Mobile company Three leads the way this week with an advert promising to fix things that 'suck' (and we're not talking broken vacuum cleaners). It's followed by a surreal Father's Day commercial for Johnsonville sausages; a moving HSBC film which crams 30 years into a lift; some clever special effects for Honda in the US; a Weetabix advert that's clearly had its Weetabix; and a Pilgrim's Choice cheese commercial depicting an office party with a difference Continue reading

Mobile company Three leads the way this week with an advert promising to fix things that 'suck' (and we're not talking broken vacuum cleaners). It's followed by a surreal Father's Day commercial for Johnsonville sausages; a moving HSBC film which crams 30 years into a lift; some clever special effects for Honda in the US; a Weetabix advert that's clearly had its Weetabix; and a Pilgrim's Choice cheese commercial depicting an office party with a difference Continue reading

Incident at Birmingham hospital one of 130 complaints NHS ombudsman Dame Julie Mellor has taken health service to task for poor care

A dying woman’s children had to listen to their mother’s final hours from behind the curtain of her hospital cubicle without staff explaining what was happening, while she suffered several cardiac arrests.

Co-operative Group makes pledge as it battles rival supermarkets and discounters to grab larger slice of retail sector

The battle among grocers for Britain’s shopping baskets has moved up a gear, with the Co-op ploughing ￡125m into cutting the prices of fresh fruit and vegetables in its 2,800 UK stores.

The move by Co-operative Food – in its attempt to become the UK’s number one convenience retailer – will escalate the price war between the big five supermarkets, in the face of the ongoing threat posed by discounters Aldi and Lidl.

NSPCC calls for more support for victims as charity’s research shows that reports to police have increased by 38% over a year

Police are recording 85 sexual assaults on children each day after an increase of more than a third in reports of abuse and exploitation, new figures have revealed.

A total of 31,238 allegations of sexual offences against children, including rape, assault and grooming offences, were made to forces in England and Wales in 2013/14, research by the NSPCC has found. The figures show an increase of 38% – more than a third – on the previous year.

美国亿万富豪、传奇地产大亨唐纳德·特朗普16日在纽约正式宣布角逐2016年美国总统大选。这位集商人、作家、电视真人秀明星于一身的最新共和党参选人，以生活奢侈和行事高调而著称。他的参选注定将为本届总统大选注入更多话题，也让共和党的党内初选充满变数。

Mayor of London while out riding his bike tells black-cab driver to ‘**** off and die – and not in that order’

Boris Johnson’s relationship with the capital’s black cab trade has became further troubled after the Sun and Daily Mail newspapers released a video showing the mayor of London on his bicycle telling a taxi driver “to **** off and die – and not in that order”.

The exchange in Islington, north London was caught on camera by a passerby.

Study shows ‘maths mastery’ experiment improved children’s scores in English schools after just one year

Schools in England experimenting with east Asian teaching methods have seen an improvement in children’s mathematics skills after just one year, according to a study.

The research, published on Thursday, which represents the first hard evidence that introducing a Singaporean “maths mastery” approach into English classrooms can influence results, found a “relatively small but welcome improvement” in children’s performance.

Report notes numbers of people relying on food banks has doubled in a year and criticises ‘lack of progress’ in helping 23% of Welsh population living in poverty


The Labour-led Welsh government has been severely criticised by an assembly committee for its “lack of progress” in reducing poverty.

Women, children and refugees are among the groups who have been particularly badly affected, according to a damning report published on Thursday.

Scientists tracking the shy heron species’ foghorn-like song have recorded more than 150 males across England and Wales, up from 11 in 1997

The once beleaguered bittern is booming, literally and figuratively, with conservationists hailing the success of a project aimed at bringing the shy member of the heron family back from the brink.

Scientists tracking the bird’s foghorn-like booming song have recorded more then 150 different males across England and Wales – up from just 11 in 1997. Its recovery is attributed to the restoration and management of the sizeable tracts of wet reedbed required for its successful breeding.

Bryan will be here shortly, in the meantime here’s what happened when Argentina met Uruguay:

Sergio Agüero’s superb diving header gave Argentina a 1-0 victory over River Plate rivals Uruguay at the Copa América on Tuesday.

Agüero met a 56th-minute cross from his Manchester City team mate Pablo Zabaleta and buried an unstoppable effort past Uruguayan goalkeeper Fernando Muslera at his front post.

• England 2-1 Colombia
• Karen Carney and Fara Williams from the penalty spot get England goals
• Lady Andrade scores late Colombia consolation
England survived a dramatic finale as goals from Karen Carney and Fara Williams ensured victory over Colombia and a place in the last 16 of the Women’s World Cup.

A 2-1 win at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium was enough to see Mark Sampson’s side into the next stage but France’s 5-0 win over Mexico ensured it would not be as Group F winners.

• Five-times world champion says the risk is not worth taking
• Stephen Lee’s 12-year ban has scared a lot of players, he adds
Ronnie O’Sullivan, the five-times world snooker champion, has said he was offered money to throw a match but declined.

Speaking on The Clare Balding Show, which will air on BT Sport and BBC Two this week, O’Sullivan claimed other players did accept bribes in the past but said he believed the problem had been eradicated after Stephen Lee was banned for match-fixing.

The benevolent firm introduced new work hours for summer interns after Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern died from seizure induced by all-nighters

Go home before midnight, and don’t come back before 7am. Goldman Sachs - one of Wall Street’s toughest firms - has told interns they have got to work hard, but not too hard.

• Defender suffered injury in training-ground collision with Jack Butland
• Gareth Southgate confident squad can cope against Portugal and Sweden
FC Slovacko’s modest Mestsky Stadion, tucked away behind a park in the small eastern Czech town of Uherske Hradiste, is not the most auspicious of venues from which to start a bid to win a first continental title in 31 years but it is where England’s Under-21 side will do just that against Portugal on Thursday night.

It is a serene setting but the first turbulence in an otherwise perfect preparation for the European Championship came on Wednesday with the news that John Stones had suffered a suspected concussion in training. The FA’s concussion protocols, which require at least a six-day rest for suspected victims, mean he will miss the opening fixture and England’s game against Sweden on Sunday.

At least two people airlifted to hospital with life-threatening injuries after incident during British and Indian joint training exercise

Up to 20 military personnel have been injured in a crash involving three troop carriers on Salisbury plain, which resulted in at least two people being airlifted to hospital with life-threatening injuries.

British and Indian troops, who were carrying out a joint training exercise in the area at the time, were believed to have been among those hurt.

• Farah pulled out of Birmingham Grand Prix after allegations against his coach
• Alberto Salazar has denied doping claims against him
Mo Farah has announced he will return to the track for the first time since the doping allegations against his coach at the Monaco Diamond League meeting on 17 July.

The double Olympic champion pulled out of the Sainsbury’s Birmingham Grand Prix earlier this month, stating he was “physically and emotionally drained” in the wake of allegations made by the BBC’s Panorama programme against his coach Alberto Salazar and training partner Galen Rupp.

Data Mining, the automatic extraction of implicit and potentially useful information from data, is increasingly used in commercial, scientific and other application areas. Principles of Data Mining explains and explores the principal techniques of Data Mining: for classification, association rule mining and clustering. Each topic is clearly explained and illustrated by detailed worked examples, with a focus on algorithms rather than mathematical formalism. It is written for readers without a strong background in mathematics or statistics, and any formulae used are explained in detail. This second edition has been expanded to include additional chapters on using frequent pattern trees for Association Rule Mining, comparing classifiers, ensemble classification and dealing with very large volumes of data. Principles of Data Mining aims to help general readers develop the necessary understanding of what is inside the ‘black box’ so they can use commercial data mining packages discriminatingly, as well as enabling advanced readers or academic researchers to understand or contribute to future technical advances in the field. Suitable as a textbook to support courses at undergraduate or postgraduate levels in a wide range of subjects including Computer Science, Business Studies, Marketing, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics and Forensic Science.

Estimating the location and scale parameters is common in statistics, using, for instance, the well-known sample mean and standard deviation. However, inference can be contaminated by the presence of outliers if modeling is done with light-tailed distributions such as the normal distribution. In this paper, we study robustness to outliers in location–scale parameter models using both the Bayesian and frequentist approaches. We find sufficient conditions (e.g., on tail behavior of the model) to obtain whole robustness to outliers, in the sense that the impact of the outliers gradually decreases to nothing as the conflict grows infinitely. To this end, we introduce the family of log-Pareto-tailed symmetric distributions that belongs to the larger family of log-regularly varying distributions.

The interference model has been widely used and studied in block experiments where the treatment for a particular plot has effects on its neighbor plots. In this paper, we study optimal circular designs for the proportional interference model, in which the neighbor effects of a treatment are proportional to its direct effect. Kiefer’s equivalence theorems for estimating both the direct and total treatment effects are developed with respect to the criteria of A, D, E and T. Parallel studies are carried out for the undirectional model, where the neighbor effects do not depend on whether they are from the left or right. Moreover, the connection between optimal designs for the directional and undiretional models is built. Importantly, one can easily develop a computer program for finding optimal designs based on these theorems.