Yorkshire seek Asian starlets: The week that was February 28 to March 6, 2005

Chairman Robin Smith and operations director Geoff Cope attended a conference which aimed to improve the club’s relationship with the Bradford Asian community, where there was huge enthusiasm for cricket yet only two Asian players had come through to play for the county team. Mr Cope said: “We have got to get closer to this community, and I think at this moment in time they are wary of us.”

People under 25 were urged to get mumps jabs after a large rise in cases in Hull and the East Riding this week.So far in the year 20 cases had been reported, compared to just five in the same period in 2004. Around 10 per cent of those affected could be left with lasting health problems, with young people aged between 13 and 24 most at risk.

Most people in this age group had no protection against mumps, as they were too old to receive two doses of the MMR – measles, mumps and rubella – vaccine when it was launched. Across the country, the year-on-year rise in mumps cases was tenfold.

Bad behaviour was a problem in one in 10 secondary schools, with no improvement over an eight-year period, according to newly published research by schools watchdog Ofsted.

Of the schools in the study, 20 per cent reported gang culture as widespread, and drugs were reported as a “daily challenge”.

Some primary schools as well as secondary schools said that up to half of pupils showed challenging behaviour. However, the incidence of pupils carrying weapons was still relatively low.

Chief Inspector of Schools David Bell said it was worrying that poor behaviour was not being reduced. He said the badly behaved minority caused “nuisance and distress”, and disrupted the learning of others.

In foreign news, the Syrian authorities reported that they had captured the half-brother of Saddam Hussein and handed him over to Iraq in an apparent goodwill gesture.

Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan was captured in Hasakah near the Iraqi border. He was suspected of financing insurgents in post-Saddam Iraq. Officials did not specify when he was detained, except that his capture followed the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut.

He was handed over along with 29 other members of Saddam’s collapsed Ba’ath Party, whose Syrian branch had been in power in Damascus since 1963.

A Yorkshire-born author beloved by millions for Swallows and Amazons, his tales of the escapades of youngsters let loose in a sailing boat, was revealed to have been a spy after secret files were made public.

Arthur Ransome, whose birthplace was Ash Grove, Headingley, was a British secret agent who may even have been a double agent for the Russians.

Documents released by the National Archives at Kew detailed how Ransome was first sent to Russia by a national newspaper to cover the Eastern Front during the First World War. While there he passed important information about the Bolshevik regime to intelligence service MI6.

But there were suspicions amongst fellow British agents that his true loyalties lay with the Communist regime.

The journalist-cum-spy was already well-known for his friendship with revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin and for his second marriage to Leon Trotsky’s former secretary.