Today's news

Graduates lose out on salaries
Thousands of graduates still earn less than £20,000 a year by the time they are 30, according to researchers from Cardiff, Bath and Essex Universities. Starting salaries stood at £18,000 in 2000 - the average salary across the country is £24,000.
( Daily Mail, Times Higher : Graduates face two-tier jobs market )

China executes campus killer
A university student convicted of killing four of his classmates and stuffing their bodies into a dormitory cupboard has been executed in China's Yunnan province. Ma Jiajue, 22, died in Kunming city immediately after the execution order was issued.
( Times, AFP )

Close view of comet astonishes Nasa
A Nasa spacecraft that flew through the tail of a comet at a point 242 million miles from Earth has discovered that the mass of ice and rock is a body unlike any other in the solar system. The first detailed analysis of pictures taken by the Stardust probe, which passed within 149 miles of comet Wild 2's nucleus on January 2, has revealed that it is a solid, rounded chunk of rock and ice unexpectedly covered with craters, mesas and canyons.
( Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Independent )

Donkey scientists get to bottom of the ass
An international research team led by Albano Beja-Pereira of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble has concluded that the domestic donkey ( Equus asinus ) is descended from Nubian and Somali wild asses rather than from Asian wild populations. Also, the genetic evidence shows that domestication occurred twice. Reporting their results in the journal Science , the researchers say that domestication of the donkey may have been a response by pastoral societies in north-east Africa to the desertification of the Sahara between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago.
( Financial Times )

Timepiece document questions watch origin
A 17th-century document which suggests that the forerunner of the modern wrist watch was invented by English physicist Robert Hooke, and not Dutchman Christiaan Huygens as commonly believed, must not be exported from the UK, the Government has ruled. The draft of a royal warrant for a patent to be issued for the invention of a "watch with springs" indicates that there could be another version of the history of time.
( Independent )

Obituary : John Gwyn Griffiths, writer, classicist and Egyptologist, died on June 15 2004, aged 92. ( Independent )