Today's news

Professor recounts blast trauma
A research professor of sociology at Brunel University spoke publicly yesterday for the first time since a photograph of his heavily blood-stained face, taken shortly after the Edgware Road bomb, was published. John Tulloch, 63, who is making a good recovery, said: "It has been a roller coaster. I don't remember hearing any noise or blast. But I could see a strange nasty yellow light and then it all went black. He paid tribute to an off-duty RAF officer - "a ministering angel" - who jumped through the window of the Circle Line train shortly after the explosion and started talking to him to help him remain conscious.
The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail

50% higher education target doomed, says thinktank
The Government has no chance of reaching its target of 50 per cent of young people entering higher education by 2010, a respected thinktank reveals today. Gloomier projections for the number of students - especially boys - taking A-levels mean that the participation rate in England for 18 to 30-year-olds will remain around the present 43 per cent, where it has been stuck for three years, said the Higher Education Policy Institute. In Scotland, about 50 per cent of school leavers already go on to higher education.
The Guardian, The Times Higher Education Supplement (July 15)

EU students to help meet university shortfall
The Government will miss its target of getting half of all young people to go to university but the shortfall will be made up by students from other European Union countries, according to a report yesterday. By 2010 there is likely to be 65,000 full-time undergraduates from the rest of Europe, equivalent to six medium-size universities, according to the Higher Education Policy Institute. Last year's enlargement of the Union and the abolition of up-front fees next year have combined to make the UK an attractive destination for students, it says.
The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian

Queueing up to sign graduates
The job market for graduates has improved over the past 18 months. Universities report greater numbers of employers visiting campuses and promoting graduate programmes. A report this week by the Association of Graduate Recruiters, confirms this mood. The AGR Graduate Recruitment Survey 2005 by High Fliers Research, which studied more than 200 graduate employers, shows that vacancies for university-leavers hoping to start work this autumn are up by 11 per cent compared with a year ago.
The Times

Stem Cell raises £6m from AIM flotation
Stem Cell Sciences will list on the Alternative Investment Market next week after raising just over £6 million, giving the Edinburgh University spin-out a market capitalisation of £21 million. The firm focuses on the use of stem cells in research, drug discovery and cell therapy. Chief executive Peter Mountford said it had been a long journey to the AIM listing, but he was looking forward to ringing the stock market bell on 18 July. "We felt we could raise money in an efficient way by listing on AIM and investors can have comfort that we do have revenue flows and great potential.
The Scotsman

Fuel tank fault halts the space voyage of Discovery
America's embattled space programme suffered a fresh setback last night when the first shuttle mission in two and a half years was cancelled after last-minute checks revealed a fault in the fuel tank. Discovery was due to take off yesterday from Cape Canaveral on a 12-day mission to restore pride and confidence in America's space programme, after two earlier shuttle flights ended in disaster. But with little more than two hours to go before take-off, Nasa's launch commentator, George Diller, announced: "We will not be able to fly today."
The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, New Scientist, The Financial Times, The Evening Standard

The triple sunset that should not exist
Meet the impossible planet. This world nestles inside a system containing three stars that, according to current theories, should have denied it the chance to develop. But Maciej Konacki, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, has been surveying complicated star systems to prove these theories wrong. Konacki's planet is in the triple-star system known as HD 188753, which lies about 149 light years from Earth, in the Cygnus constellation. The star at the centre of the system is very much like our own Sun. Its planet, which is at least 14 per cent larger than Jupiter, orbits the star once every 80 hours or so, at a distance of about 8 million kilometres, a twentieth of the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Nature, The Guardian

Letter
Reaction to the recent Hefce report on "strategic subjects"
The Independent