Actress and human rights activist Angelina Jolie has urged the international community to make educating Iraqi children a greater priority.”The best way to heal children of conflict from trauma is to have them focus on their future,” Jolie told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York today.

Jolie, who visited Iraq in August, and other humanitarian workers discussed how to help displaced Iraqi children regain some sense of normalcy and stability through education.

The schooling of refugee children is a frequent casualty of violence and political unrest, said Gene Sperling, an economic adviser to former president Bill Clinton who co-chairs the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict with Jolie.

”Every child has a right to education and conflict is not a reason to ignore that,” Jolie said.

The Hollywood actress has visited more than 20 humanitarian hot spots, including Iraq and Sudan’s Darfur region, since becoming a UN goodwill ambassador in 2001.

The Iraq war has produced 4.5 million refugees and internally displaced people. Of those who have fled the country, about 1.5 million are now in neighbouring Syria, while hundreds of thousands have relocated to Jordan and Lebanon.

Speakers at the event recommended building more schools and providing textbooks inside Iraq and urged more support for governments hosting Iraqi refugees.

Syria and Jordan have stretched their limited budgets to educate some Iraqi children, but they need help to accommodate the massive influx of students, said George Rupp, president and chief executive officer of the International Rescue Committee.

REUTERS

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A Taiwanese inventor has created a face-to-face tandem, and is in negotiations with factories to have it mass-produced.

Chen Yugang, the director of a creation centre at Far East University in Tainan city, took a year to build the bike, reports local TV station TVBS.

“On a traditional two-person bicycle, the rider in the rear seat can only see the back of the one in front. So I started wondering how I could get them sitting face-to-face,” he said.

His new bicycle can be ridden face-to-face, conventionally or even back-to-back as the seats rotate and the gears can be set to move the bike in either direction.

“The bicycle is very easy to change. Any person can change the riding mode in around 10 seconds without the help of tools,” says Chen.

“Face-to-face is suitable for a parent and child, or dating couples, while the back-to-back mode gives both riders a good view, and the one at the back can have both hands free to shoot pictures or eat snacks.”

Factories have expressed an interest in the bicycle, and the inventor hopes it will start to appear on streets very soon, reports China News Network.

Chen says he is also seeking to patent his invention in the United States, Germany, Japan, and China.

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Kasey Allan of Clio and David Connell of Beulah are each facing one count of armed robbery, after robbing a Benzie County gas station at gunpoint. But According to local news, police officers said the robbery wasn’t really unexpected.

News reports say that two men showed up at the Honor Shell Gas Station in Benzie just after three o’clock Thursday morning, and robbed the station holding the clerk at gun point. Deputies say “hours before the armed robbery the two gunmen warned the cashier they were coming and gave her a detailed plan of the crime.”

Undersheriff Rory Heckman says, “They were planning on coming back with the weapon and they were going to rob her and wanted her to cooperate in exchange for money.”

They came back two hours later but they were in for a big surprise. After they left the station clerk called the police. Both deputies and troopers were outside the gas station waiting for them to come back.

A minute after they left the building officers stopped them.
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A tiger devoured a mentally ill man who entered the animal’s zoo cage in north-east China, local media reported today.

Zhang Yachun disappeared from his home in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province, on March 24 and five days later police told his parents he had been eaten by a tiger in a nearby zoo, the China news service reported, citing a Harbin newspaper.

“Only two legs and his skull were left,” the report said.

Zhang’s grieving parents said their 37-year-old son suffered mental illness and “especially loved tigers”.
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Half of the air traffic controllers at Sydney airport have called in sick, causing flight delays of up to one hour.

The high absentee rate slowed international and domestic arrivals and departures this afternoon, airlines said.

Qantas and Virgin Blue confirmed flights had been delayed by between 30 and 60 minutes.

A Virgin Blue spokeswoman said a number of its flights had been instructed to remain in holding patterns around the airport as they approached Sydney.

Airservices Australia (ASA), which is in charge of air traffic control, said it had three of its six controllers call in sick for the afternoon shifts.

An ASA spokeswoman said another controller had been called in to fill one of the shifts.

“This afternoon, three of our controllers from this terminal unit called in sick,” the spokeswoman said.

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