Oxford graduate Bo Guagua came out in defence of his father, Chinese politican Bo Xilai, last week. 

His defence follows an announcement by China’s state news agency, Xinhua, reporting an official statement from a party leaders’ meeting.

Xinhua said Mr Bo stood accused of corruption, abuse of power, bribe-taking and even improper relations with women.

Describing his father as “upright in his beliefs and devoted to duty”, this is the first time that Bo Guagua has explicitly mentioned the case since the scandal, which has engulfed both his parents, unfolded.

Following the death of British businessman Neil Heywood in November 2011 and the subsequent conviction of Xilai’s wife, Gu Kailai in August 2012, a series of accusations have surfaced. Mr Bo has not been seen in public since mid-March, shortly after the scandal erupted and it was announced that he was under investigation. He was expelled from his post in the Communist Party in April.

48 hours after Xinhua’s report, Bo Guagua’s statement supporting his father appeared online. It read, “Personally, it is hard for me to believe the allegations that were announced against my father, because they contradict everything I have come to know about him throughout my life.”

In response to accusations of abuses of power he stated, “Although the policies my father enacted are open to debate, the father I know is upright in his beliefs and devoted to duty.” Bo Guaga claims that his father always taught him, “to be my own person and to have concern for causes greater than ourselves. I have tried to follow his advice.”

Since the start of the scandal, media interest in Guagua’s private life has been increasing with depictions of him as both a playboy and socialite. Studying PPE at Balliol from 2006-2010 Guagua gained a 2:1, but rusticated, living in the Randolph Hotel for a significant amount of time during his studies. 

Ryan Widdows, a second year History and Politics student, argued, “Considering Guagua’s alleged playboy lifestyle perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s sticking by his father over the infidelity accusations. Although let’s face it, China isn’t particularly renowned for being judicially and politically just and attempts to disgrace Bo Xilai have to be taken with a pinch of salt.”

Guagua is now living in the USA after leaving Harvard this year. The situation continues to develop with Guagua stating, “I expect the legal process to follow its normal course, and I will await the result.”

As thousands of new students arrive in Oxford, Thames Valley Police have launched a new operation to prevent students becoming the victims of crime. As part of Operation Bachelor students will be given crime awareness packs, plain-clothes police will patrol areas to check security, and there will be crime prevention information available for foreign students.

As thousands of new students arrive in Oxford, Thames Valley Police have launched a new operation to prevent students becoming the victims of crime.

As part of Operation Bachelor students will be given crime awareness packs, plain-clothes police will patrol areas to check security, and there will be crime prevention information available for foreign students.

The launch of the crime awareness packs and police patrols comes after concerns that students new to the city are targeted by thieves. In August a criminal posing as a plain-clothes policeman robbed a student of his phone and money.

The thief claimed to be investigating the theft of a mobile telephone and searched the student’s bag before confiscating his phone. He told the student that he could collect his belongings at the police station later. 

Thames Valley Police Press Officer Adam Fisher told Cherwell, “The universities do a lot of awareness work during Freshers’ Week and have their own crime reduction advisor. From a police point of view any awareness packs are beneficial if they increase the safety understanding of students.” 

Delia Sinclair, city councillor and board member for crime and community safety, praised the operation, saying, “This sounds like a good idea. Anything which helps keep students safe is a positive”.

In a statement OUSU spokesman Sarah Santhosham said, “The Oxford University Student Union has good relations with the police and the Security Services, and they work together on issues relating to student safety.’

‘Operation Bachelor is designed to make students more aware of their personal safety, preventing them from being victims of crime, a threat that is particularly prevalent when students return to Oxford. We welcome these initiatives as a means of ensuring students are informed of ways to increase their safety and do not fall victim to crime while in Oxford.”

Christ Church alumnus Sir John Gurdon has been announced as the joint winner of this year’s Medicine Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.

Christ Church alumnus Sir John Gurdon has been announced as the joint winner of this year’s Medicine Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.

Sir Gurdon described himself as “immensely honoured” to be given the reward and “enormously grateful” for the work of his colleagues. Stem cells contain the genetic information to specialise and become part of any tissue in the body. When these cells mature they lose information they no longer need to express.

Previously, it  was thought that once a stem cell  had matured it had irreversibly lost its genetic information. Sir Gurdon’s discovery showed that this is not the case, as the information from multiple mature cells can be added together to effectively recreate a stem cell.

Julian Savulescu, Professor of Practical Ethics at Oxford claims Gurdon congratulated the winners on what their research would mean for medicine. “Until now, dead or damaged tissue and organs, for example in the brain or heart, have been replaced by scar tissue. This results in loss of function … Regenerative medicine offers the prospect of replacing dead or damaged human parts with new functioning ones.”

It was in Oxford’s Department of Zoology in 1972 that Sir Gurdon first developed his hypothesis. He replaced the cell nucleus of a frog egg cell with the nucleus from a mature intestinal cell. The modified egg still developed into a healthy tadpole, showing that all the necessary genetic information was still there in the intestinal cell. 

Though Gurdon’s initial discovery took place at Oxford, he subsequently moved to Cambridge where he became a Professor and Master of Magdalene College. The Gurdon Institute in Cambridge was renamed in 2004 in honour of his work.

Gurdon’s scientific success was not always so widely acknowledged. He has framed a school report from when he was at Eton, aged 15, in which his master describes his scientific ambitions as, “quite ridiculous”, warning that “any time spent on it would be a total waste.”

Oxford’s only lapdancing club has closed after a decision to strip it of its licence by the local council. The closure follows claims that the club created a “hostile atmosphere.”

Oxford’s only lapdancing club has closed after a decision to strip it of its licence by the local council. The closure follows claims by locals residents that the club created a “hostile atmosphere.”

The Lodge Gentlemen’s Club, located by the Ice Rink on Oxpens Road, was last year forced to move from its former location on St Ebbes Street.

Previously, the club had been located only 50 yards from St Ebbes Church in Pennyfarthing Place, and there had been a sustained campaign to have the venue closed down.

The council’s latest decision  was met with a promise from Al Thompson, the club’s owner, to fight the city council all the way to the High Court if necessary.

“They granted us a licence a year ago and now they’ve suddenly decided to change their minds, leaving a lot of people out of a job and wrecking a perfectly viable business” he told the Oxford Mail, claiming that up to 50 women worked in the club.

However, a representative of the local council pointed to the 23 letters of complaint against the renewal of the club’s licence. Sub-Licensing Committee Chairman Van Coulter said, “We heard that the existence of the club has given rise to problems in the area. There was one lady, for example, who gave testimony about comments made to her, which I am too much of a gentleman to repeat.”

He continued, “We have evidence that the existence of the club has created a hostile atmosphere, and we decided to give weight to that.”

Al Thompson refuted the accusations as “hearsay” before questioning why the police had been absent from the licence renewal meeting, a point on which Thames Valley Police has declined to comment.

Should his appeal fail Mr Thompson intends to reopen The Lodge as a nightclub.The news has drawn mixed reactions from the student community, with several students endorsing the council’s decision. One second year PPEist said of strip clubs, “Personally I don’t see the point of them at all”, adding, “It’s the council’s job to take into account the views of people living in the area – it’s their right.”

Midori Takenaka, a second year lawyer at Corpus Christi College, echoed these sentiments, saying, “I feel that the whole industry of ‘strip clubs’ is derogatory to women. The case should be thrown out of the High Court, if only to send a message to the public that using women as sexual objects is unacceptable in this day and age.”

Yet not all students were so concerned. Tom Heaps, a second year historian, although emphasising the fact that he does not condone the sex industry, said of the owner’s threat to take the case to the High Court, “I fully respect the owner’s decision to defend his livelihood.” 

One second year medic expressed ambivalence at the news, arguing, “I don’t really mind it being closed: they were better in Bangkok.”

Students around Oxford have created a poetry anthology for Oxfam as part of their drive to instigate creative campaigning and fundraising.

The anthology is themed around Oxfam’s current flagship campaign ‘GROW’, which promotes food justice. Rosie Ball, Vice-President of Oxford Students’ Oxfam Group (OSOG), explained, “This anthology is a selection of poems submitted around the theme GROW: growing inside, growing outside, growing around the sides, growing into yourself, growing into your clothes, buying a shirt that’s too big for you and learning how to fit in.”

The theme was interpreted very broadly by 12 poets from different colleges. Phil Coales, President of OSOG told Cherwell, “it opened really strongly with poems by Tyra Lagerberg, Roly Bagnall and Adam Heardman.’

The launch event of the GROW anthology was held on February 25th where featured poets read their work alongside Caroline Bird, former President of Oxford University Poetry Society, who now has three collections published by Carcanet, has twice been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was made Olympic poet this year. 

This is not the first fundraising project that the Oxford group has embarked upon, in May of this year, OSOG initiated the distribution of hashtagged bananas around Oxford’s landmarks as part of Oxfam’s new Control Arms Campaign. 

Phil Coales said, “In the anthology’s introduction we spoke about the varying different arms of the campaign: resisting land grabs, climate change and food price spikes and promoting sustainable, small-scale farming.“

‘As a poet myself (one of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year in 2009), I think engaging the poetic imagination can convey the meaning of something in a way which even the most concise leaflet or description given at a Freshers’ Fair stall cannot do.”

Bagnall commented, “The anthology seemed like a chance to see what sort of poetry students were writing around the university, and whether it was any good.”