Jack Straw, the Secretary of State for Justice, was met by protesters from West Oxford campaign as he arrived to give a talk to the Oxford University Labour Club.

The campaigners protested against the opening of new probation centre in the residential area of Oxford on Mill Street. The probation centre plans were announced without consultation with the locals.

The protesters campaigned in the Longwall street outside Magdalen college around 8pm. They aimed to stop Jack Straw as he drove back from dinner with the President of Magdalen.

“[The centre] is supposed to keep up to 500 offenders a week. They come from across a range of offences, including sex offenders,” said Matthew Savage, one of the protesters. “They will be walking up and down the cul-de-sac.”

He expressed his outrage at the fact that the “locals have had no say” in this decision and that “they have had no information from the Thames Valley Police”.

Thames Valley Probation is negotiating a lease for part of Trajan House in West Oxford as plan to centralize services. Existing probation offices in Cowley, Banbury and Abingdon would be closed. If talks are successful, the 100-staff centre will start operating in April 2010.

The centre does not require planning permission, as the scheme does not involve the change of the use of the building.

The protesters were demanding the probation services to have a consultation with the locals before the lease is signed.

Straw spoke to the protestors for about 10 minutes. He explained that he is not in control of probation services, so there is nothing he can do.

However, he said that he “had not realized the intensity of the local feeling” and made a “promise to speak to the relevant people”.

He also took the contact details of the protest group. By the end of the talk, he has had protestors joking along with him. As he was leaving to go into Magdalen, the campaigners gave him a round of applause.

Felicity Wenden, one of the campaigners commented, “We’re pleased that he stopped to talk to us. He didn’t have to. But we still want more transparency and dialogue with us, the people who live there.”

Zoe Hallam, 1st year PPE student present didn’t think that the protesters negatively affected the event. She said, “I don’t think the protesters has affected my experience of the talk. I guess this is the kind of thing you get used to after a while in Oxford.”

She added, “The talk itself was more a political broadcast rather than the talk – he talked about everything that Labour did during his years in parliament. I don’t think I learnt that much from it.”

Straw spoke to an audience consisting of OULC and non-OULC members for 1 hour. He defended Labour’s years in power and stated that in the party’s past there were worse times than recent three weeks. He was convinced that the party will survive and continue to prosper.

Students at Magdalen College have created a String Maze on the college grounds. The game involves racing along ropes with karabiners.

Matthew Shribman, the creator of the Maze said, “I built the maze with the hope of creating the greatest string maze that the world had ever seen.” He intends to challenge Magdalen’s senior dean in the race.

The Maze has had a mixed response from students.

Nathan Rawle, a Magdalen first year said, “It was hilarious. Try doing it army style by crawling under all the strings.” Nick Clinch added, “It’s stringtastic!”

However, another second year commented, “I don’t think does anything to enhance the beauty of Batwillow Meadow, looking as it does like the web of some kind of mid-90s rave spider.”

Oxford’s Vice-chancellor Dr John Hood has rekindled the ongoing debate on the future of funding for students by stating that it costs up to an additional £8,000 a year to educate each student.

After the Vice-chancellor’s interview with a parliamentary committee in March, it was reported in the Daily Telegraph that Oxford may push up fees to £11,000 a year.

This news comes at the time of the release of a government survey, which shows that the direct cost of studying increased by 68% throughout 2005-8. This includes the introduction of top-up fees in 2006.

However, Dr Hood denied Daily Telegraph’s claims strongly. He said, “While I noted to the Select Committee that some increase in tuition fees might be considered desirable, I most certainly did not say that Oxford wished to raise fees to £11,000. A working group is currently discussing what our response to the government’s consultation on the fee cap might be. We do not consider such a sharp increase to be either desirable or a political reality.”

“I explicitly told the committee that I did not want to hypothesise around a figure for fees. I have noted that we estimate the money we receive through fees and HEFCE is £7-8,000 less per student per year than what we estimate it costs, on average, to educate UK and EU undergraduates. This does not equate to my saying that we want to plug that gap entirely through fee increases.”

“As I said to the Select Committee, any increase in fees at all, however modest, would be desirable only provided we can have cast iron, needs-blind admission assistance through loan schemes, bursaries, and hardship funds.”
However, this denial has not stopped a debate over the future of University funding.

Magdalen JCR questioned Lewis Iwu on funding in their last General Meeting. Iwu admitted that the OUSU position on the issue was currently “quite vague.” He also pointed out that if Oxford wants to remain at the top of the table as a world-class institution, higher costs are something students will have to deal with.

A report published by Universities UK last term warned that students from low-income families would be discouraged if fees rose to £7,000, particularly if they had to take out private loans as well as government student loans.
However, a typical fresher already borrows a total of £6,318 in loans, credit cards and overdrafts in one year, according to a study conducted by the

Institute for Employment Studies and the National Centre for Social Research notes. After taking into account their savings, an average student has a net debt of £3,518 after first year of studying.

An Oxford university spokesperson said, “We have no evidence that the cost of being a student, excluding the cost of fees, has increased significantly.

Obviously students now pay fees of approximately £3,000 compared to approx £1200 and loans can be taken out to cover these fees where no loans were previously available which means student debt will have increased compared to 2005 when no loans for fees were available and fees were approximately £1200.”

Still, the Institute’s report also notes that more than 80% of students consider the long term benefits of higher education outweigh the costs and that they will ultimately earn more as a result. Although 9% fewer students combine work with study, student incomes have increased, as has student support.

For the next academic year, Oxford will charge UK students £3,225 in tuition fees for most courses.

Nevertheless, the £8,000 difference between what a student pays and what it costs to tutor them is difficult to fill. Dr Hood said it is partially being made up by expecting the college staff to work substantially harder than their counterparts in US Universities. They are also provided with less academic and administrative support.

It seems that the rise in degree costs combined with the precarious job prospects is something that worries many students.

One Magdalen JCR committee member commented, “People apply to Oxford often with the hope that a good quality degree will make them employable and lead to a lucrative career. This is not necessarily the case at the moment, and it worries me that in the meantime it is becoming more and more expensive to study.”

The debate is likely to hot up when the government reviews the tuition fees system later this year and whether it will decide to raise the current cap.

Controversy at St Anne’s college has ended after administrators agreed to turn the college’s heaters back on.

At the start of term the college had adopted a policy of turning the heating off in Trinity term, on the grounds that it would be uneccesary in the summer term. However, students criticised the decision not to turn it back on when the weather took a turn for the worse.

One, who asked that her anonymity be preserved, said she wished “to complain in the strongest and most abusive terms possible”.
“I have to wonder just what i pay battels for – battels that i believe are substantially higher than the average – if i cannot control the heating in my own room. Last night I went to bed fully dressed and still could not get to sleep, I was so cold.”

“I have to wonder whether the college authorities care about their students.”

Many students complained that they had not been warned or informed of the college’s decision, and that the lodge was refusing to give out electric heaters, as it had done in earlier terms.

One college resident circulated a petition demanding that the college reverse its decision, which received several dozen signatures. Finally, on Wednesday, the college turned the heating back on.

Bursar Martin Jackson refused to comment on his reasons either for the initial decision to shut off the heating or for the subsequent climbdown.

Students, however, welcomed the move. One, who had been involved in the petitioning campaign and aksed to remain strictly anonymous, said “I am overjoyed. My room was freezing; I was having difficulty sleeping and I couldn’t spend extended amounts of time in it. I feel that college had a somewhat radical reaction to environmental and economic concerns, which was in danger of compromising the welfare of its students. I am pleased that they responded reasonably once they had been made aware of the situation.”

St Anne’s has a recent history of heating woes, with Jackson last year apologising after two successive terms in which boilers broke down in various accomodation blocks.

Balliol students have expressed their sadness at the death of their college tortoise, Matilda.

The tortoise, estimated to be 17 years old, did not wake up from hibernation. It is thought that a prolonged illness and a particularly cold winter contributed to his death.

Balliol JCR President, Iain Large, said, “Such a loss can never be easily borne, but with welfare provisions and Testudinal memorial services at full deployment levels, we believe that we can pull through as a community.”

Matilda was donated to the college in 2006 by Oxford alumnus Chris Skidmore. He also donated Matilda’s sister, Sampras, to Christ Church College at the same time.

The role of tortoise carer is a JCR official position, currently held by Jack Gilbert and Michael Marks. The constitution states that the role of Comrade Tortoise is to care for the tortoise and train him for the inter-collegiate tortoise races.

Marks said, “My fellow Comrade Tortoise, Jack Gilbert, and I are indeed extremely upset about the death of Matilda. He had in fact been ill for quite a long time, hence why Balliol did not participate in last year’s race.”

Both Comrades have come under scrutiny following last Sunday’s JCR meeting which launched an enquiry into the reasons for Matilda’s death.

Iain Large stated that Gilbert and Marks have “not had the most successful time in office, with 100% of the college’s tortoise community dead under their auspices.” He added, however, they may still be redeemed if they can find a replacement tortoise.

The JCR have added to their Standard Policy that the student body will “endeavour to replace Matilda with a new, not-ill, race-winning, tortoise, as soon as possible.”

The JCR has also ruled that the Comrades Tortoise will have to run the tortoise race if a replacement tortoise cannot be found in time. The Comrades Tortoise will be forced to eat an entire lettuce before starting in order to combat the natural advantage of a human over a tortoise in a race.

The College Hall has also resolved to serve only lettuce for an entire day in a move that Large states is a “sign of respect”. He added, “Slow but steady she may have been, but in the race to our hearts, Matilda was the clear winner.”

Michael Webb, a first year Balliol student, stated that Matilda was a “wonderful, warm and compassionate tortoise” that Balliol “loved and will mourn as a friend.”

Oxford archaeologists are to begin work on recovering the remains of the Australian and British soldiers who fell in the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916.

The mass grave at Pheasant Wood was discovered in May 2007 by archaeologists form the University of Glasgow. It is believed that German soldiers buried up to 400 men on this site, which thought to be the largest modern mass grave not related to genocide.

A major operation to disinter the bodies and individually bury them will commence this Monday.

Oxford Archaeology has been drafted in to carry out the excavation and recovery work by the Commonwealth War Graves Committee, an independent, internationally funded organization established in 1917 by Royal Charter to mark and maintain the graves and official memorials of the Commonwealth Service personnel who died in either of the World Wars.

The first step of the task involves identifying the bodies using DNA techniques. It was common practice amongst many of the German soldiers to remove the dog tags of fallen soldiers, and so the identity of many of the bodies is unknown.

Families who suspect that they might have relatives buried at Fromelles are being asked to come forward to aid the process.

The soldiers will then be buried in individual graves in a new war cemetery nearby. It is hoped that the entire process will be completed in no longer than 6 months. A commemorative ceremony is expected to take place in July 2010.
The attack at Fromelles was an unsuccessful attempt to divert German attention away from the Somme. The advance over difficult ground in clear view of the enemy sent thousands of British and Australian soldiers to their deaths within hours.

The majority of bodies were recovered but the whereabouts of several hundred bodies was a mystery, up until the discovery of the site at Pheasant Wood.
Oxford Archaeology is a multi-national team consisting mostly of archaeologists, radiologists and anthropologists from the University of Oxford. Robert Neil and Alison Anderson are the chief coordinators of the project, experts in body identification who were also involved with the mortuary after the July 2007 London bombings.

The Australian and British governments will equally share the costs of the recovery work and DNA testing. The chief objective of the project is to “ensure that these servicemen are buried with the dignity and honour that their sacrifice deserves.”