Today's news

Welsh Assembly to abolish tuition fees
Students from Wales will no longer have to pay up-front tuition fees under the Welsh Assembly’s long-term plans. Wales will abandon fees even if Westminster rules out the move in its current review of higher education. (Financial Times)

University fees cut for voluntary work
Hard-up students could earn cuts in their university fees by doing voluntary work. The radical plan will be put to prime minister Tony Blair and chancellor Gordon Brown next month by the influential IPPR think-tank. (Mirror)

First editions put in library sale
A sale of 6,000 books from an Oxford University library was postponed when it was found the collection contained a number of valuable first editions. Some of the books, including a first edition John Stuart Mill, were almost sold for as little as £1. (Independent)

School heads won over by ‘12-year-old in a suit’
David Miliband, the youthful new schools minister, may well have prevented industrial action over teachers’ workloads after impressing the National Association of Head Teachers at its annual meeting. This is despite the minister facing the indignity of being introduced to the conference as “a 12-year-old in a suit”. (Financial Times, Guardian, Times, Independent)

Pupils ‘drop out’ if they leave at 16
David Miliband, the new schools minister, has told head teachers that every child who leaves school at 16 is a “drop out”. The minister said: “We must be one of the few countries in the western world still to have a culture of school-leaving at 16.” (Independent)

Call to teach ethnic languages
Languages such as French and German should be replaced by Asian and African in some of Britain’s multi-ethnic schools, head teachers said yesterday at the National Association of Head Teachers’ annual meeting. (Times, Telegraph)

Trainee surgeons forced to cut losses
A generation of doctors who have dedicated a decade of their careers to becoming surgeons now know they have a slim chance of achieving their goal, according to the Association of Surgeons in Training. Only one in five senior house officers who have passed their exams with the Royal College of Surgeons get the specialist training jobs they need to continue their careers. (Times)

Go-ahead for foreign staff to cut NHS waiting lists
Ministers have conceded that they are unlikely to meet government targets for cutting NHS waiting times without importing teams of foreign doctors and nurses to perform thousands of routine operations on patients in the queue for joint replacements and eye surgery. (Guardian)

Hubble coldly goes where no man has gone before
The Hubble space telescope has captured breathtaking new images of the Universe after astronauts fitted a new on-board refrigerator to a camera that had overheated. (Times, Independent)

Tombs give clue to pharoah’s rule
Tombs believed to be those of Egyptian scribes found by archaeologists this week promise to cast new light on the structure of the government system under the pharaohs. (Times)

Lose your job, lose your wife
Men who lose their jobs often kiss goodbye to their wives. Warwick University researchers, led by Andrew Oswald, interviewed 6,000 couples and found that money troubles often lead to marriage break-up. (Mirror)

Former Welsh principal dies
Gareth Owen, former principal of  the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, has died at the age of 79. Professor Owen led UCW through demanding times after being appointed principal in 1979. (Independent)

Mind over mouse
The power of thought could be harnessed to help paralysis victims. Researchers at New York University have proved that a computer can be controlled solely by thinking. (Mail, Mirror)

Breastfeeding reduces obesity risk for children
Breastfed children have a 30 per cent lower risk of suffering obesity than bottle-fed babies, according to researchers at the University of Glasgow and the Child Health Information Team in Edinburgh. The research is published in The Lancet. (Independent, Mail)

Magma flow ‘led to mass extinctions’
A vast flow of magma that gushed out of the ground 250 million years ago was at least twice as extensive as previously thought, according to researchers at the University of Leicester. The research into Siberian Traps by Marc Reichow and colleagues appears in the journal Science. (Telegraph)

Getty-style renewal for museum of exotica
South London now has its own version of the Getty in Los Angeles with a £13 million extension to the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill. (Times)