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Howie Roberts, the club’s president, said: “He was a nice lad, quiet and unassuming but also tough. Lots of love from your Baby Bear and Tinkerbell.”Also killed was Llywelyn Evans, 20, from Llandudno, north Wales, who was taking part in the assault by 29 Commando Royal Artillery on the Al-Faw peninsula.The town’s rugby team, where the Lance Corporal was a regular, cancelled its match this weekend as a mark of respect. The note, pinned to a picture of the boy and his mother, read: “For my Daddy I love you loads so does Mummy We will miss you always God bless you. The father of a three-year-old boy is among 14 Britons to be killed in the war against Iraq so far. Friends of Nelson Mandela will launch a fundraising campaign today to pay for a statue of the anti-apartheid leader to be erected in Trafalgar Square.

“We are going to have much more precise specification of the franchise proposition.”* The impact of strikes by train guards planned for this Friday, the following Monday and 17 April will vary widely between operators, according to the Association of Train Operating Companies.. “The SRA itself seems to be running out of control, spending increasing amounts of taxpayers’ money.”Howard Johnston, author of the analysis, said: “The sell-off was forced on the network by a Conservative government going out of office which wanted to rush it through. “The Government really ought to come clean and say whether we are returning to a state-run railway,” he said. The infrastructure assets of Railtrack have been taken over by the publicly backed Network Rail and the SRA took charge of major improvements to the system last year.Don Foster, Liberal Democrat Transport spokesman, said the “botched-up privatisation” was continuing to fail.

But massive unplanned extra backing is also being paid to Virgin West Coast, Virgin CrossCountry, ScotRail, Central Trains, Connex South Eastern and Anglia Railways.Some industry insiders believe the network is privatised in name only. Half of Britain’s train operators are being bailed out by massive and unforeseen handouts by taxpayers, according to new analysis on the state of the rail industry. As David Simpson, senior marketing admissions manager for the full-time MBA at London Business School, says: “Having a female dean helps”. “A balanced cohort results in more collaboration and co-operation, with everyone getting more out of the programme.”One way of attracting more female students has been the setting up of scholarships specifically aimed at women.

Similar approaches have been taken at LBS and Cranfield, though the latter recently dropped them as women did not necessarily like being singled out in this way.In this as in other fields, schools are reluctant to take the positive discrimination route, but schools are also going to a lot of trouble to market themselves to women, both in the UK and overseas, including in countries where there might not be a tradition of women going into business.But, of course, even at a time when many MBA students, especially women, are using the experience and learning to set up their own businesses rather than seek powerful positions in corporations, one of the greatest spurs is having successful role models. Then the school’s director of MBA programmes and now director of all postgraduate courses, he says such a shift in the gender balance has changed the atmosphere and dynamics of the MBA group for the better. This is partly a response to pressure for change in the way that public companies are run. The recent review of corporate governance by former City banker Derek Higgs has called for a widening of the group from which non-executive directors are drawn.At Leeds University Business School, the male:female ratio has declined from 80:20 in 1998 to 52:48 last year – the result of an attempt to increase the proportion of female students initiated by John Hillard. After all, while women make up about a third of managerial positions, they are largely confined to the lower ranks – just 4 per cent of executive directors and 1 per cent of the chairs of UK-listed companies are women.However, there are signs that business schools are not content to hide behind the argument that the number of female business school students just reflects the number of women in business.